Nicolas Winding Refn: “If you mass produce nothingness why would anyone care?”

IBC

The Danish auteur is back with a new movie, a prominent role in a computer game and the same confrontational attitude to formulaic art

The second time I met Nicolas Winding Refn I reminded him of the interview I’d written 28 years previously that quoted him saying “Fuck film school.”

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“Yeah, that was my attitude,” recalls the 54-year-old Danish director of cult films Pusher, Drive, and Only God Forgives. “I would have said something like that. Now I’m older and therefore I look at things in a different way.”

His language may have mellowed but his desire to provoke has not. Long critical of mass-produced entertainment, Refn stepped up his attack on the industry speaking with IBC365 at a sports and video gaming conference in Riyadh.

“Cinema, TV and, to an extent gaming, are stagnating,” he argues. “People are repeating what they see and what they play therefore nothing ever really changes. It’s just content to be consumed. If you mass produce nothingness why would anyone care? Young people are smart. They'll see through it. Don't think you can monetise nothingness because in the long term you disappear. You're erased.”

Although Refn directed two sequels to his 1996 crime drama Pusher in 2004 and 2005, his choice of project has been eclectic.

“The thing that never changes is authenticity,” he insists. “As long as you cling to that there will always be an audience. I mean, I've survived 30 years on being who I am.”

In the decade since his last feature release, 2016’s art horror The Neon Demon, Refn has made noir thriller Copenhagen Cowboy which ran for one season on Netflix and crime drama series Too Old to Die Young for Amazon.

Arguably his most leftfield move was as the creative force behind a CBBC adaptation of Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five for which a second season is due next year.

Targeting a Cannes Film Festival premiere, 2026 marks Refn’s return to features. Her Private Hell was shot in Tokyo and on Copenhagen sound stages, stars Dougray Scott, Sophie Thatcher and Kristine Froseth and is a suitably on brand mix of “glitter, sex, and violence”.

In the meantime, he is helping to promote the video game Death Stranding 2: On The Beach in which he ‘plays’ the character Heartman. For this, his body and face was scanned and animated in collaboration with the game’s Japanese creator Hideo Kojima. Prior to meeting each other in London in 2014, Refn’s only exposure to video games was Pacman and Super Mario but they bonded over a shared antipathy for formula.

“We’re rebels,” Refn says. “We are disruptors because we believe that you can make money but you can also do good. We want to challenge the system to figure out what it can become rather than what it is. There are ways to break the ceiling and buck the conventional trend of the industry of just repeat, repeat and repeat.”

Their relationship is curious since neither speaks the other’s native tongue. “We communicate through music and images and through emotions rather than words,” Refn says. “I guess that's kept the relationship fresh because you will never get tired of each other saying the same things. My connection with Hideo is as one artist to another artist who has a different medium to mine, to understand his challenges and what he does that can inspire me.”

Kojima’s creations, which also include Metal Gear, are considered among the most cinematic games ever made. His work often draws from directors like Guillermo Del Toro and George Miller, both of whom are present in the Death Stranding universe.

It's perhaps surprising that Refn is not involved in the feature adaptation of Death Stranding which is being produced by A24. “I have too much respect for Hideo’s universe than to insert myself into it,” he explains. “That is my friend’s painting and I shouldn't be a part of it.”

But then Refn also thinks there’s a considerable divergence between cinema and games.

“Their convergence is an illusion. People think they can take IP from here and make money over there but the creative, the technology and the philosophical components are distances apart. My desire is to control the narrative which is very different from gaming where the consumer controls the story.”

For instance, games are “very mechanical” in how they depict human behaviour. “The philosophical dilemma is to figure out how [film and games] become more integrated. How can you cry in a game the same way you would cry in a movie?”

He believes cinema to be the “crown jewel of everything” but laments “if there's no one around to watch it then you don't have a lot of opportunities.”

At the same time, he thinks filmmaking technology is standing still. “Film and TV is essentially just a close-up of a person’s face. Nothing new is being invented. Gaming technology, however, is driving innovation.”

He continues, “What I'm really excited about is not gaming today, but gaming in ten years’ time because that's when things really start to get interesting. AI will allow thousands more young people to create their own games and because of that everything will change. Something is coming over the horizon. We just don't know what it is yet.”

The ability to originate a story in one media and transfer it to another certainly appeals. Trans-media storytelling wasn't possible in the analogue era.

“The idea that films were made for a cathedral [cinema] that we would all collectively experience is vanishing,” he says. “Screens have taken over. So, when you create you have to consider that people will see it either on a stadium sized screen or on an iPhone. It has to be effective to work on either. That's fascinating because it opens up possibilities of making something that transcends TV and transcends music, literature, gaming, fashion and social media. The future of narrative is going to be an idea that can be multiple things, like a Russian doll.”

AI “creates nothing new”

He tried “unsuccessfully” to use ChatGPT in making Her Private Hell, “but every time it gave me an answer, I didn't like it. So obviously, that was no use. I haven't been in a situation where AI was relevant yet in terms of film.”

He may experiment with AI for use in VFX shots on the movie but also thinks the tech is “more prediction than reality.”

“AI will very quickly stagnate if it just repeats what it's told,” he adds. “If it doesn't create anything new then it's just a tool.”

Refn is open about his colour blindness and the impact this has on the look of his work. The imagery intentionally has a lot of contrast so he can see it at the same as it delivers a striking aesthetic. Heavy use of neon filters radiates his work such as a signature red used in Pusher and Neon Demon. He is not worried that these visuals might be plagiarised by being fed into a Generative AI engine.

Creative control

“Creativity has no rights or no control. We all share and we all steal each other's ideas from the past into the future. Remember that creativity is unadulterated capitalism. It's unregulated, purely based on demand. If there's a demand, there's creativity. If there's no demand, then creativity becomes the sole experience of the creator, but a creator needs an audience to exist. It's like oxygen.”

It’s worth noting that he declined, in 2014, an invitation to direct Daniel Craig as Bond in Spectre.

“I believe a creator needs to be control in all aspects including financially,” he says. “If you're making a huge IP for a big studio or a Mattel there is enormous personal upside waiting for you but what do you give up?”

“Creative control is pretty meaningless if you're spending U$200 million because then it's a different beast that has to be accommodated. Where money and creativity clash, money becomes a restriction. Games struggled with this too. Their expense makes it very difficult to be experimentally progressive. One benefit of AI is to lower the technical cost and that may then open more interesting types of story because suddenly you're not burdened by these massive investments.”

On Her Private Hell he says he had total creative control.

“I caught the tail end of the Golden Age of streaming and in a way when I decided to go back to cinema it was like when a band gets back together to record an album in your cousin’s basement and you do it in two days.”

It is shot digitally, as have all his films since Valhalla Rising (2009). “When people were discussing film versus digital I found the comparisons dumb,” he says. “It's two different sets of paints. I happened to fall in love with the digital image very early on as a new form of canvas, maybe because I like the artificialness of it. Even though I enjoy analogue there was something in digital that I found very intriguing. Using digital cameras was my way of converging digitalisation with an analogue approach because I still like actors and I still like sets and cameras. I still like things that are human, that I can touch.”

Returning to his main theme he commends streamers for “pumping more money into the system than anyone else” but condemns them for a business model based purely on what an algorithm deems successful.

“They look at creativity as pure commerce and I find that very frightening because I don't believe that anyone needs more content. We need experience. We need something that challenges the mind. If we all keep floating in the same pond we will never be challenged.

“I believe the younger generation crave authenticity and originality. They crave to be inspired. If you mass produce nothingness no-one will care but if you create with your heart people care a lot.”

“To be a creator you always have to strive for something new and better and continue to explode the boundaries of the medium. My enjoyment is still waking up every morning and saying, ‘What would I like to do today?’”

 

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