Indiewire reported on a recent interview he gave in which Refn, ostensibly there to promote his new show opening January 5, 2023, wasn’t shy about sharing his opinion on the current state of Hollywood filmmaking and if he felt he’d be able to make a movie like Drive these days. His answer was pretty damning for an industry he saw as “falling apart desperately.”
Refn having an opinion about Hollywood that isn’t exactly pretty shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s seen Drive, an angry Los Angeles set noir, but even more so his Elle Fanning vehicle, The Neon Demon. The movie is a weird little horror fable about the dark side of Tinseltown that slots nicely alongside something like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and is all about the cannibalistic nature of a town that builds itself on the backs of others. So when someone like Refn says that Hollywood as he sees it—a place he finds both seductive and intoxicating—is “falling apart desperately,” it’s not something to take lightly.
In a year that’s seen a box office slowdown with a Thanksgiving season, typically a time for big family movie-going, down 10% over last year, what Refn is saying isn’t for the faint of hearted when it comes to wanting big box office returns. The director says that the system is collapsing because the studios are doing it to themselves—that is, turning more and more insular and offering directors a chance to be part of a big franchise machine, or fend for themselves and have to raise their own finances: “For cinema to survive, we need to go back and make films again. There also needs to be an ecosystem that reflects the opportunities.” It’s the type of sentiment a lot of people dismiss as being old-fashioned, the idea of making independent stories with heart, but Refn also thinks something that will help push studios that way again is the independence streaming affords to big directors (such as Rian Johnson and his recent Glass Onion deal at Netflix).
It’s why Refn also thinks making a Drive today would be hard to do: “Of course, I just think it would be very difficult to finance, because the ecosystem is in such freefall. But absolutely I think you could make any film with a heart nowadays. In a way, it will probably be good for the system. It will probably be something that moves things forward again.” When asked if he’d ever think of joining something like an ongoing cinematic universe like Disney is doing with Marvel, the answer was the director talking about how much he cherished his freedom. The Copenhagen Cowboy auteur shut the door on that topic with this thought: “If you don’t have the power of control at the end of the day or the ability to manipulate into your favor, it is committee. You have to spend your entire day struggling to get a compromise across, then what example am I to my own kids?”
Copenhagen Cowboy is set to release January 5, 2023.
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Source: Indiewire
