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G21 INTERVIEWS: NICHOLAS WINDING REFN - BRAD BALFOUR talks with the Danish filmmaker about the conclusion to his gritty and challenging "Pusher" series of films.
New York, NY, USA - For director Nicholas Winding Refn, making the "Pusher" trilogy (from 1996's "Pusher," then "Pusher II" and "Pusher III") became almost an addiction that sapped both his money, time and energy. But now that these three films about a set of Danish drug dealers is done and getting distributed internationally, a weight has lifted from his shoulders.
As this chapter in his life closes, these films reveal a director who takes his three interlocking simple stories and, through a gritty indie noir lens, has cast a spotlight on and underworld that is rarely told in such a hard hitting and unglamorous way. Though Rehn has made other films - his 2003 release "Fear-X" starred John Turturro and was written with the late author Hubert Selby Jr. ("Requiem for a Dream") - this set of taut dark films proves that Refn is a European director to keep an eye on.
G21: When you see your own movies, do you feel dirtied by them?
NWR: I don't feel dirty because I have always felt that my films do the exact opposite of glamorizing the underworld, especially in "Pusher III" where I especially went out of my way to show the nihilistic side, and the real sadness of it all.
G21: What is so fascinating about drug addicts and pushers?
NWR: Well nothing whatsoever. I don't know anything about them. I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs. However, I am interested in people under extreme pressure. I think that makes for very good drama. I don't make documentaries, I make fiction, so my goal is find the most effective scenario for that.
Secondly, I try to make my films not about crime, but about people in a criminal environment which is a big difference. That's why there's so much of a focus on the characters' vulnerabilities in the films, rather than the dangerous side of them, which is manufactured, resold and repackaged as a glorified way for people to live too often, and is very false.
G21: So the films could be seen as the perfect anti-drug statements?
NWR: They're not so much of an anti-drug statement - because I don't have the right to moralize on how people live - but I think that they would be good for some people. I know that in some countries, especially where they have young people in jail, they show them these films, and they talk about the characters, and why they end up like this, and why they react like that. That's sometimes very good for people who have, or have had their chances [pass by], and ended up talking about a third person.
G21: What were the tonal shifts and evolution of the three films with the eight years between "Pusher" and Pusher II?"
NWR: When I made the first one, I was 24 and a film school dropout in Denmark. I was a genre film fan, and I grew up in New York in Times Square. It really began out of a love for genre film.
It's almost like I'm coming full circle. However, halfway through shooting - I shoot all my films in chronological order - I realized I wasn't interested in this kind of world. I was interested in the character's descent, like in "Killing of a Chinese Bookie," or "Public Enemy" movies that are about the mean streets.
When I made "II" and "III," I was a lot more aware of the focus on the social aspect rather than the idea of crime at the beginning of the film. On the other hand, the movies are called "Pusher," so the characters' are obviously doing something bad.
G21: You dedicated "Pusher II" to writer Hubert Selby Jr. and made "Fear X," with him as your screenwriter. How did you get introduced to Selby, and why did you feel such a connection to him?
NWR: I'm learning disabled, dyslexic, and I have trouble reading, so I don't read a lot of books. I wish I could, but I read very slowly.
The book that has made the biggest impression on me is "Last Exit to Brooklyn." I remember thinking, "Wow, this is the greatest thing ever written," and when I made my first American film, I was very lucky to work with some very good people, like (composer) Brian Eno, and John Turturro, and of course, Hubert Selby - who I wanted to write a script with. I had this story about a security guard whose wife was murdered. That's the story that I brought with me when I met Mr. Selby in Los Angeles. At that point, he hadn't been rediscovered, so a lot of people thought that he was dead, but he was very much alive.
I asked him if he wanted to work on my story, and he spent a couple of days thinking about it, and he agreed. We thought it was going to take us a couple of months, but it took us two years. At that time, he was a very important person in my life. I miss him every day.
G21: Are there other writers that are an influence, and would you use them as well?
NWR: I love reading J.G. Ballard's books. I like things that have social issues blended within a genre. I like films or arts that are rooted in reality, but set in a genre environment. Ballard is one of my favorite reads at the moment.
I think that I like things that are very fetish-minded. I like things that are very extreme. I think when I compare "Last Exit to Brooklyn," to my "Pusher" films, they are very much inspired by his writing that book. The feeling of desperation specifically is very much taken from "Last Exit to Brooklyn."
People ask, "Why do you make these films about lowlifes? Desperation is on all levels of the social ladder."
I say, "Yes, but when people are struggling to survive, that desperation is extremely universal, and that vulnerability is extremely accessible."
G21: Your family was in the film industry [father, Anders, is a director]. Has it been a struggle for you to survive, or be appreciated, given that you didn't finish film school and went on your own?
NWR: In Denmark, it was a big issue. I was the only person in Denmark that ever dropped out of film school [yet became a working director]. They still talk about it. Growing up in New York was very good for me because I very much believe that your destiny lies in your hands. Socialism doesn't teach you that. However, socialism is good in the sense that it makes you aware of the people that surround you, and the importance of a working society. I guess it's a combination of both good and bad.
Of course, growing up in an environment where film was very much a part of everybody's life, probably made it more natural for me to go in that direction. At the same time, being dyslexic and colorblind, and unable to work with clay, film was the only artistic medium I could touch.
G21: How did you cast the two actors that play Tonny and Frank; they have this wonderful chemistry in the first film, and some of your cast were former convicts.
NWR: When I made the first film, I was lucky that there was a new generation of actors in Denmark who were more interested in film acting than theatrical acting, which is the great tradition of Scandinavia. That was good, but the problem was that a lot of actors in Denmark can be very boring to look at. That's bad. It was difficult for me to cast a film like this because I wanted faces.
I'm in a visual medium. I need something that looks interesting. I was lucky to get Kim Bodnia and Mads Mikkelsen who were both trained actors, but with the rest of the films I just went around the streets "street-casting," or whatever you want to call it, and took people that I found. This is again a kind of tradition that Paul Morrissey and John Cassavetes were creators of back in the '60s.
When it came to "Pusher II" and "Pusher III" eight years later, I had become very interested in reality television as a concept. I thought it was a very interesting dramatic evolution of how to tell stories. I wanted to make, in a sense, a reality film, but I make fiction so I decided to cast a lot of real or active convicts as the characters around these main actors.
G21: Were the characters developed as you envisioned them and then you found appropriate people for them or was it more of a fluid process where you created characters with these actors in mind?
NWR: It was a process where I wrote the characters, and it was in the casting that I really fleshed them out. When you work with people that have no interest in acting, you have to work on their terms. You have to look at what they can bring to the table, and work with that, and help that blossom.
G21: They don't seem uncomfortable at all - acting could be their occupation.
NWR: A lot of people in that world spend a lot of time acting (laughs). In that way, it has a great tradition. A lot of people have done what I have done, and with great results. It can be very inspiring, but it can also be very difficult.
G21: With some sociopaths you wonder why they didn't pursued acting, since a lot of actors seem like sociopaths.
NWR: And you understand why they wanted to pursue acting.
G21: You have to say "How did these guys become such lowlifes?" You leave hints as to why, or how they could've gone the other way. hey, you might've rehabilitated a criminal or two.
NWR: They were definitely a mix. I know that some of these films have been used in other countries in prisons as an example, and then they hold a discussion afterwards because the films are very much rooted in the sins of the father. A lot of these characters don?t choose their lives. They're born into it - but how do you break that chain? "Pusher II" is very much about that, and how do you break the chain? That's probably why of the three films, "II" has a happy ending, I would presume.
G21: How much was scripted and how much was improvised?
NWR: Having gone to acting school originally in New York at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts - which I hated, and was kicked out of after a year - I learned that actors worked best with material that already works. In those terms, I write the script with specific directions and dialogue. I shoot in chronological order which suddenly gives a whole new life to the actors because you no longer have to discuss or analyze, you basically just have to react, and all the other possibilities are limited because whatever they do is truthful.
G21: The characters seem both real but also archetypal, almost like a comic book in a sense.
NWR: Each character along the way represents an emotion. The films are very much character-driven so you can say that each character, built around the main actors, are visions of one emotion, which fleshes them out as very complete.
G21: After Frank disappears at the end of the first film, how did you change your approach to telling the story about Tonny and Milo?
NWR: It came out of a scenario where I owed $1 million. That was difficult because I have a family, so I was desperate. There was a small documentary about me and my bank where I was trying to shoot at the same time and begging them basically not to let my rent go through.
After "Pusher," I made more experimental films - "Bleeder" and then "Fear X," which I was very happy with. With all my films I had great challenges, but it was also very important for me to experiment with the form. But, it left me with a million dollars of debt, and I was forced to do something very quickly, so I went back to my original "Pusher" because I needed something that I could very quickly finance.
I produce my own films but the people that finance the films said to me, "Well, why don't you do a new 'Pusher'?"
I thought, "Over my dead body! I'm going to be doing another black-and-white movie," but it got me thinking. I said, "Wait a minute. What if I made not just one, but two more films so that it would be a trilogy." I think that that came from my interest in television in the last 10 years because television has really boomed creatively. I said, "If I take 'Pusher' as a conceptual approach like on TV environment, I could tell episodic stories from then on. Of course, having gotten older, and having had children, those things naturally popped up.
G21: In doing that, did it change your filmmaking style? Are you going to approach your next film differently as a result?
NWR: It made me aware and cemented my belief that film is a commercial commodity, and you must not ignore that. "Pusher" and "Bleeder" were small Danish films financed by the government which were very easy to make because I could basically do whatever I wanted.
In doing "Fear X," my ambitions of making an American film with a larger budget really showed me by the hard way that film was a commodity and was about money.
Going back to the "Pusher" films, I tried to get the best of both worlds. It cemented my belief that survival in this industry is dependent on making this commercial commodity with your artistic integrity. Those two elements go together. There's a fine line from one to the other that you must not cross, but rather stick with in the middle.
G21: Does working with an American actor like John Turturro and the Danish actors in "Pusher" illustrate the difference between film as a commodity and film as art?
NWR: That's a very, very interesting question. I never really thought about that. I think working sometimes with inexperienced people makes it easier to lead, and it is easier for people to give themselves. When you work with people, the more experience they have, the more discussion comes up. That's both good and bad, but working with people on the "Pusher" films was very easy. We just went out and did it.
G21: You chose an actor [Deborah Kara Unger] for "Fear X"that had been in an important [David] Cronenberg film, and Turturro, an actor that had been in an important Coen Brothers' films. Does that reflect some of your influences?
NWR: Not consciously. "Fear X" was an experience for me in terms of casting, and learning how to cast in Hollywood. In Denmark, we usually call the actor, and they say "yes" or "no," and that means "yes" or "no." With the lead for "Fear X," I went through four or five actors who said "yes" at various stages. That was a morbid experience. I was very happy to work with John Turturro; he brought so much material to that film that I credit him as really creating the character of Harry.
G21: Are there some unexpected or subconscious influences or references that pop up like that Frederick Wiseman documentary about the psychiatric institute, "Titicut Follies?"
NWR: Documentary-wise, there was a film called "One Year in a Life of Crime," made in [1989], where a documentary filmmaker followed three thieves in Brooklyn. I remember seeing that when I was very young, and when I made "Pusher" that was in the back of my mind.
Of course, "Killing of a Chinese Bookie," "Battle of Algiers," and "French Connection," were the films I stole from technically to solve how to shoot certain scenes, but I really wanted to make a fictitious film like "One Year in a Life of Crime."
G21: Are you going to make another Hollywood production, considering your experience with Hollywood?
NWR: I produce my own films so I guess I wouldn't do that because I want to control them. That's very important to me. I'll do my next film out of my own production unit, but I'll do an English-language film with a higher budget called "Valhalla Rising," about the Vikings discovering America.
G21: That'll definitely have a bigger budget.
NWR: Not really. It really came out of doing the "Pusher" films, and I thought, "How can I do a film about the 1700s and make it feel like it was made yesterday?"
G21: That's an interesting way to approach it. There's a similarity between the streets of Denmark and the Vikings in their own way.
NWR: I suppose so, but I wanted to make a film about my experiences of discovering America when I was eight.
G21: Will you ever come back here [to New York City] to live?
NWR: I'll probably come back here to live. I don't know if I will. Independence is a great, great pleasure, and I really worship that in the sense of being my own boss, but we've been approached by one of a big American television studios of America to do "Pusher" as a television series. I do my meetings in Hollywood, and eventually I'd like to do something, but I like to own what I do.
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