If there is a shared trait among provocateurs, it is a hatred of agreement. Dissent is their lifeblood. Consensus, their scourge. If the Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn were to receive universal praise for any film of his, well, he would practically combust. “I would go into crisis,” says Refn, from across a large conference room table one afternoon in London. “I would stop making movies. It’s the same thing as everyone not liking it: what is interesting about that?”
At 55, Refn has done many things – pushing the envelope in on-screen necrophilia, for one – but something he has never done is make a film that is unanimously liked. He came close in 2011 with his Ryan Gosling vehicle Drive, for which he won Best Director at Cannes. But even that had its detractors. “Is this the most overrated crap ever?” read one online forum post at the time, which may well have been started by Refn himself, a director by trade, pot-stirrer by nature. His other films – Bronson (2008), a painterly portrait of the infamous prisoner starring Tom Hardy; Only God Forgives (2013), a twisted mother-and-son tale with Gosling and Kristen Scott Thomas; and The Neon Demon (2016), about a group of sadistic models led by Elle Fanning – were more divisive still.
