“A good director is not an expert in anything in particular. A good director just knows a little bit about everything.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I was very affected as a foreigner coming from Copenhagen, which is the safest, most liberal town in the entire galaxy. I was like an alien stranded in a strange land for the first time in the U.S.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Writing is fantasizing about what your film will be like. Shooting is reality. And the post-production is recovering the idea you had.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“To me, the darkest film ever made and the film, to me, that’s the darkest picture in the human humanity’s soul is ‘Pretty Woman.’”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I believe silence is the greatest sound of all.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“When I was 12 or 13, I started going to the cinema myself.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“For me, the greatest pleasure is when you make something, and everyone argues about it.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Polarizing is the greatest achievement in any art form, even in cinema.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I moved to New York when I was eight years old, in 1978. I grew up in Manhattan. I couldn’t speak any English, and I had dyslexia, so it took me many years before I could read.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“My mother and stepfather were documentary filmmakers and, of course, had a very healthy Scandinavian mentality. When it came to cinema, my mother was very obsessed with the French New Wave. That was her generation.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I wanted to be famous. I guess I thought acting would make me famous.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m glamour. I’m vulgarity. I’m scandal. I’m gossip. I’m the future. I’m the counter culture. I’m commercial reality. I’m artistic singularity.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I know how terrifying L.A. can be, because I’ve been there as a failure. After ‘Drive,’ it was the most marvellous place in the universe.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I believe in free education, free healthcare. But I do not believe in equality.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“America has no one to catch you when you fall. That makes you want to achieve. It is healthy for the soul. But all that is valued is success.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Beauty is like a new class system. The world is so obsessed with beauty; it has been for the last 2,000 years. It’s the one stock that’s never gone down, the one stock that’s never gone out of fashion.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I like extremes.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The greatest artists were in a situation where they had to pay their bills. That’s a very convenient way to get very creative very fast.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I think the Internet is the greatest invention since women.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m not a guy’s guy. I always loved girl things. I loved dolls. I loved dressing up and much more.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“For me, it’s all about having the performers feel confident in their movements and surroundings. And then I’ll figure out how to photograph it afterward.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“There are wonderful artists who deal in the fashion world only, and you see by their creations that they are changing our understanding of sexuality and freedom and gender-bending.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The most creative phase of a film is in shooting, because structure is the defining element of that phase.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m a huge admirer of Keanu. I think he’s absolutely extraordinary.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I think that every man has a 16-year-old girl inside of him.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m not a political filmmaker.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“We live in a time where it’s very much in vogue, constant search for pure utopian equality, and which, on one level, is quite amusingly silly but also on another probably very important.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“When I was 20 years old, my uncle was an arthouse distributor, and he would take me to Cannes every year to work as a film scout.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I started making films purely based on what I would like to see.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I always approach every film I make as if it was going to be the last. So if I’m going to go out, I’m going out with a bang.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I always, as a firm rule, make my movies based on how inexpensively I can make them because that means the more freedom I’m going to have.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Oh, I love L.A. It’s not so much about Hollywood. I love everything in L.A.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“’Bronson’ was like, ‘I’ll do a movie about my own life.’ And it became like an experiment.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Whenever I make a movie, I always try to figure out what kind of music it would be.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m not the greatest filmmaker. There are a lot of better filmmakers than me.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Coming to Hollywood, you always hear the horror stories, but I had good people around me who maybe didn’t understand what I was doing but always protected me.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m dyslexic, which means I have trouble reading and writing. So images really speak to me.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The first thing I do when I go to people’s houses is look at their television, turn it on.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I like all kinds of film.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Every film that you make has to have a scene that is the heart that blood flows through in every other scene. That scene doesn’t always have to be in the beginning of the film. But it can also be at the end, or in the middle, and that can sometimes make the film more effective.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The ‘Neon Demon’ is very much designed to be like a YouTube movie. It’s designed to be chopped up. You can cut it up into seven or eight pieces and they’re, like, vignettes.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’ve always felt that I was from the future because the future is really not about what you make but what you stand for.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“My world is just one big chaos!”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I think ‘Videodrome’ was an absolute philosophical masterpiece.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Art has the power to influence and to make you react to something that you normally wouldn’t concern, worry, or even think about or wouldn’t want to talk about.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m calculated in other things, but not in what I make.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“People react to ‘Drive’ in a way that is very primal.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Creativity is about taking what is the norm and expanding it and continuing to expand it and expand it and expand it and expand it.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Filmmaking is like any kind of art form. You have to try to figure it out, and you’re going to do that by trying.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“L.A. films are hard to define compared to New York films because New York films are their own subgenre, in a way. L.A. is more transparent.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I would love to make a kids’ movie. But they are very hard to make.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I would love to make a romantic comedy.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Filmmaking is not about what we see – it’s a very misconceived notion; it’s about what we don’t see.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“All my films represent my own needs and wants.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’d love to do a yakuza movie.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The best way to move forward – to bury the past. That doesn’t mean you forget it.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I started buying films a couple of years ago. The first film-maker I began to obsessively collect was Andy Milligan. He was a New York frustrated artist.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Television is dead. And television will not be reborn. It will not come back.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“People need to express themselves. The more you do that, the better a person you become.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“People have called me everything. Every word in the dictionary I’ve been called at one point or another.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Denmark is like a Sylvanian world, but one thing it breeds is malady. The malady is generally in good taste. Opinions are correct. That is the chief enemy of creativity.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The only thing that would really make my mother angry would be if I liked horror movies or violence or Ronald Reagan. And very violent films were a way for me to rebel. You have to rebel against your parents.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“You cannot go through life without cause and effect.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m a huge John Hughes fan, and I grew up in the ’80s, when his films came out. So, my introduction to what you’d call ‘cinema love,’ that illusion of love, was ‘Sixteen Candles’ and Molly Ringwald.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’ve always worked a lot with silence in my films. It forces the audience to concentrate on what they’re seeing, because silence is pure emotions. It has no logic; it goes straight to the heart.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I base everything on my instinctual approach. There’s something very satisfying in that creativity, and it’s a bit like an infant drawing.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Creativity is about a reaction.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I think you have to be so indulgent in creativity in that, if you’re happy, it’s successful. If it’s then financially successful, which is different parameters, then you’re also happy.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I thought it would be interesting to try something in Hollywood after a movie like ‘Valhalla Rising,’ which I was really pleased with, personally.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“For ‘Drive,’ we needed the songs to dictate emotions and really bring you into the mind of The Driver; he’s a unique and complicated guy, so the music itself had to be unique and complicated.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“My writing has always been more out of the need to write a movie rather than me being a good writer.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I think that art is an act of violence, and the more emotionally engaged you are in a piece of art, the more violent it feels.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m not a walking encyclopedia. I’m not one of those types that knows every single film ever made or can recite every dialog.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“There will always be a theatrical experience because there will always be cinemas no matter what. It’s like there will always be theaters to have stage plays in.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I love watching the superhero movies, and I would love to make one. But in a way, ‘Drive’ is probably the greatest superhero movie ever made.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“My films are like Christmas: you can’t wait to open it.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“With ‘Only God Forgives,’ what’s great about that movie is it just freaked so many people out.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“As long as your movies don’t lose money, you’ll always be able to make them.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“It’s hard to always challenge yourself, coming up with new ways to make your life difficult, so when you make something, it becomes more interesting.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I love to be on location. I love to be in other parts of the world. I love to be where I’m reminded about real, you know, emotions. I love to touch things and design things, and I think that, for the actor, it certainly – it certainly helps their performance.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m not a knowledgeable comic fanatic, as a lot of other people are.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Art thrives on obstacles. The bigger the obstacle, the better the drama.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I very much love Los Angeles, and I love working here. I find it very inspiring and very creative, and some of the best crews are in Los Angeles.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I find beauty very frightening because it’s such an all consuming subject in our society.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I think that, again, filmmaking is the director’s medium in the end, and the best thing a producer can do is stay out of the way and support the director one hundred percent.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“L.A. is, on one hand, very mysterious; it’s very modern. It’s a mysterious place – it’s a haunting place – and everything in our culture around the world of entertainment leads back to Hollywood.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The more we become civilized, the more we simultaneously understand our need to be virtuous and our need to understand our experiences on a subconscious level.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Art is very much about making your weaknesses your strength.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“If an actor or actress is recognizable, that changes our perception of them. Sometimes you can play against type, or you can just repeat what they’ve already done. It can be an obstacle; it’s a very fine line.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“A lot of the surreal filmmakers, like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or countless other underground filmmakers… Their sense of explosive images have always dominated their films. It’s a way to shock the senses, to make them open themselves.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I love to look at beauty.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“We’re premiering ‘The Neon Demon’ in Cannes, which is the representation of ‘The Neon Demon,’ which is all about glamour and vulgarity.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“’Valhalla Rising’ is a fusion of my upbringing, basically: everything I grew up loving and wanted to make a film of.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I like to take things as they come.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“The greater the darkness, the better the drama.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Good and bad are not really relevant to me.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I’m a very funny man, so funny comes natural. And if you want to create horror, you need to be funny or campy.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I believe that the constant possibility of failure or possibility of decision-making feeds your creativity.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“Hollywood is Hollywood. It’ll never change, although it does go through its own transformations. I think that there’s this obsessiveness with making money, which has gotten out of proportion.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
“I don’t really make films in Denmark. ‘Bronson’ was shot in Rottingham, ‘Valhalla Rising’ was made in Glasgow, and ‘Drive’ was made in Hollywood.”
― Nicolas Winding Refn
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