Nicolas Winding Refn hasn’t directed a movie since The Neon Demon eight years ago, but he’s finally preparing a new project.
Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn hasn’t directed a movie since The Neon Demon was released eight years ago, but that’s all about to change. Variety reports that Refn is preparing to shoot his next movie in Tokyo next year, which will be in English and Japanese.
Despite once claiming that “cinema is dead,” Refn believes it’s the right time to return. “It’s a really interesting time to make movies because it’s such a chaotic situation,” he said. “So going back and making a theatrical feature film again is almost like — not starting over — but with all the changes in our societies in the last five years and technology changes, it almost seems like the right thing to do for me.“
There aren’t many details about Refn’s new movie, but he did promise that it “will have a lot of glitter and [a] lot of sex and violence.” The director added that “Feature film is still the mother of all mediums,” and he’s excited to “re-experience that process” after his feature film hiatus. “I think it’s hard for me to escape my self-indulgent identity in creativity,” he said. “So there will always be me in it.“
Although this project will be Refn’s first new movie in nearly a decade, he hasn’t been sitting idle. He directed and co-wrote Too Old to Die Young, a ten-episode series for Prime Video which stars Miles Teller as “a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, finds himself in an underworld filled with working-class hit men, Yakuza soldiers, cartel assassins sent from Mexico, Russian mafia captains and gangs of teenage killers.“
He also returned to his native Denmark for Copenhagen Cowboy, his first Danish-language project since Pusher 3. The Netflix series follows an “enigmatic young heroine, Miu. After a lifetime of servitude and on the verge of a new beginning, she traverses the ominous landscape of Copenhagen’s criminal netherworld. Searching for justice and enacting vengeance, she encounters her nemesis, Rakel, as they embark on an odyssey through the natural and the supernatural. The past ultimately transforms and defines their future, as the two women discover they are not alone, they are many.“