The remarkable Nicolas Wending Refn navigated this interview exactly the way he navigates the subject matter of his films, by getting to the heart of things quickly and sometimes shockingly. I've seldom interviewed anyone who was simultaneously so self-exposed, humble and smart. This lengthy conversation took place during the junket for his new film Drive which was nominated for this years Palme d'Or at Cannes. Refn himself won the festivals Best Director prize. 

INT: Did you go into this project feeling pressure to step up your game ior make changes for the mainstream US market?

REFN : I didn't feel the pressure because it was a very inexpensive movie. You know, "Oh my God this has to make X amount at the box office." That wasn't there. But I didn't make it knowing that I would be in this chair talking with you, that it would end up being released on 2,000 prints across the US. The campaign alone at this point is almost triple what the movie cost to make [laughs]. What I'm used to is making the movie, hoping it will get picked up, being grateful for every screen we get, having to travel with it and sell it, talk your heart out, etc. I've promoted all my movies that way because that was the only way they would get promoted. Now, besides talking to you and audiences, which is what I'm the most comfortable with, I have this whole machine behind me that just rolls out. TV campaign, billboards....I never had an inkling I was making a movie that would end up with that machine behind it. God works in mysterious ways. 

INT: Isn't sort of terrifying having to deal with all this input right now? 

REFN: No. If anything I'm enjoying it immensely. Film is getting so hard to distribute the way I've done in the past. I'm in a whole new arena that I've only ever read about. To be here with a movie of my own that I'm so happy with is extremely satisfying. 

INT: What can you tell the audience about the development of the Driver character? How did you and Ryan Gosling go about developing him?

REFN: Well the novel had a substantial backstory for him which we could always go back to as we had discussions. But I left any direct references to that out of the film because, ultimately, I felt that the character would be more interesting if we presented him as an enigma. The novel did help us a lot because Ryan and I knew why the character was the way he was etc. I'm a firm believer that a director needs a leading man. Look at Hitchcock's most interesting films. Jimmy Stewart was the perfect channel for Hitch. Likewise when Lee Marvin wanted to do Point Blank (1967) he flew John Boorman in rather than go with another director. They needed each other. That was the sort of dynamic we had. I wanted Ryan, I knew he was the one. 

INT: When you first meet him, Driver seems almost like a machine. he's so methodical it doesn't seem as if anything else there except the task at hand. Then when we do get emotions they came in short intense bursts. His violence seems especially sudden. But so does his lighter more human side. He himself seems caught in the middle. 

REFN:  Well, someone did once describe me as half The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and the other half is It's A Wonderful Life (1946). 

INT: You should be careful. If a Hollywood executive hears that they might greenlight your soul. 

REFN: If anyone is listening "I can do that!" Oh I'm going to get in trouble. 

INT: Both of those films are about the American Dream, both are about disenfranchisement of the average person. All your characters do seem disenfranchised in important ways. They're angry, but they're desperate to operate out of some philosophy. They want to know how to live. They're frustrated with the world.

REFN: They will not be controlled because the world they live in clearly isn't worthy of it. They strive for something, but they don't know what it is. Then they get there and realize what it is, this is who they are. Then they can make decisions about what to do next. Their journey makes them. If they could define it in their minds they could just go to a shrink. But they have to take their journey. 

INT: But we pick up your characters in such extreme contexts.

REFN: Pusher Trilogy is very much about people caught in a criminal environment that is spiraling out of control. Each protagonist comes to a place where they have to take a moral stand. That moral stand then ends with a consequence. You cannot live life without consequence. Whatever you do has a consequence. Violence is no different in real life or fiction.  

INT: Yet violence is never the ultimate solution in your work, which is often very, very violent. 

REFN: Violence only works if there is a consequence. It can't be violence for violence' sake because that simply isn't compelling by itself, it is pornography. This can be dangerous because it leaves people the option of disengaging from what violence is. Violence ceases to have any meaning. It's a bit like when people become addicted to pornography. It can erode their sense of empathy. Always, there is a consequence. 

INT: Even in Bronson? 

REFN: Especially Bronson. The film is about a man who tries to use rage to become something better, something different. He starts as Michael Peterson who always wanted to be famous. He doesn't know why he wants that, he just does. He had a good upbringing, but this undefinable thing within himself slowly begins to direct his life. When he lands in jail he realizes he now has an arena, a stage. Violence becomes his pencil to write this new version of himself. But of course he also realizes that it will destroy him. His genius is in swapping it around so that the pencil becomes his violence leaving him free to become this character of Charlie Bronson. He is reborn in an important sense. The consequence is his choosing of the prison as his arena, this limited his choices but in an odd way may have saved him as well as giving him an opportunity to explore this need he had. Why did he choose this? With Peterson there was always the sense that he believed he would be in a box no matter what he chose. 

INT: And in Valhalla Rising?

REFN: Valhalla Rising offers a similar arc. A man has a  primal instinct towards violence which requires that he be treated as an animal. Violence is how he survives in a violent world. He transcends that by using the tools he finds in the cage. This makes him into a warrior. He then becomes a god in the sense that a man without words is seen as having meaning. Then that god becomes man in the sense that he sacrifices himself because it is what he was always meant to do. 

INT: In many ways you've told a similar story in Drive.

REFN: Drive is about man who is half man, half machine and unable to live in the in-between. He's either on or off. He cannot reconcile the hero he wants to be with the human being that he is except in self sacrifice. When the girl he meets requires the machine, he is the machine when she needs the hero he becomes that. 

The consequence of his past gives him a context for transformation, to become a superhero. In effect he is a myth. But he makes a conscious choice to embrace that role, that state of being. Remember the end of Point Blank where Lee Marvin draws back into the shadows. That's what the hero always has to be willing to do. Driver says, "If I can't have you, then I will protect you, I will die for you." You can't be that and also be someone who turns back. You must choose and your choice is for the good of others. . This is what makes him a true hero, a superhero. Which is what we hopefully strive for. They have to draw back, to be willing to be mythology. Shane took off, John Wayne and all the other heros rode the horse off into the sunset. 

INT: It's fascinating to hear the hero described in these terms because ultimately our need for heroes is the same thing as our need for faith. We have to believe someone embraces that role for us or we cannot embrace it for ourselves. In Christianity for instance we have the belief that mythology became history through a hero. God, became man, and sacrificed himself which opens the door for us to take on that role however imperfectly and reflect that ultimate truth back into the world. 

REFN: They have to draw back, or die or suffer to be willing to be mythology. Shane took off, John Wayne and all the other heros rode the horse off into the sunset. In Valhalla Rising the pagan says "We will win the war because they only have one God and we have many."  Of course what happened is that with Christianity came order, a universal sense of history, science, the understanding that life is lived for others, the Golden Rule etc. Of course all this predates Christianity but it is ultimately universal. Almost all peoples everywhere embrace it. Broadly taken the ten commandments, more or less, rule the world. It is so primal that once mythology became history, in the sense you speak of, the world inevitably embraced aspects of it. Not everyone subscribes to same religion but mostly the same truths. 

In my films I hope you see this journey from aspiring to mythology to understanding the myth as real. Bronson leaves with a tormented man in a prison. Valhalla Rising picks up on a man in a prison who escapes and becomes more fully human and Driver picks up with a man who uses his free will to make choices that render him into a superhero. 

INT: Your films also all speak to the love we have as a culture for film itself, for the way it tells us things. 

REFN: Oh, I am a fetish person. I make exactly the kinds of movies I want to watch myself. I pay a lot of attention to structure and story but I stay away from analyzing it. I never question my fetish, I simply try to visualize because I'm not the greatest filmmaker in the world. I do think that of the kind of films I make I'm the best. I can only make what I can make. I'm lucky to be surrounded by people who understand that and let me make my films the way I need to. 

INT: Logan's Run?

REFN: We have indeed started writing the script for Logan's Run. But before we make it I'm making another movie with Ryan Gosling called Only God Forgives. It takes place in Bangkok and concerns a Thai police Lt. who has come to believe he's God and a gangster who is looking for a religion to believe in. 

INT: As are all your characters?

REFN: Faith is the most essential part of our existence. Religion varies from belief system to belief system. But those systems are simply the mechanics of faith. Faith is directed by them but faith itself is what carries soul. The soul must be carried, without faith there can be no living. I believe this even more now that I have kids. The place my art will occupy in the world matters because that world does not just belong to me. 

INT: So in very real sense it has always been about a journey from darkness to light for you. 

REFN: My art may take place in the darkness but that is unavoidable for me.I realized after I made the first Pusher film that I was making movies about crime not because I was fascinated with crime but because I was fascinated with the crucible that criminal environments are. People are people wherever they go, wherever they are and we all struggle to become something more. 

INT: But isn't faith itself part of that darkness at times?  

REFN: Faith all over the world has been hijacked. The problem is there is always some guy who willing to take advantage of it. It is the easiest thing to take advantage of because it speaks to peoples deepest inner desires. Things that they may not even be aware of themselves. And we live in a world that constantly distracts us from recognizing those desires. We would rather have television than our conscience. Reality TV constantly showcases the most insane behaviors, and yet where is the remorse? The consequences? You don't see that. In fictional TV you often do. But then again it is so much easier to watch people go through things in TV than do the hard work of living ourselves. The Sopranos, The Wire....we need to mirror ourselves. We may not be drug pushers or gangsters but those labels only describe the situations those characters are in. Ultimately we are fascinated with them because they are human beings. This is why art will never die....because we never tire of looking at ourselves and each other yet it gives us a break from real life.