Nicolas Winding Refn on Her Private Hell: “My Fire Had Been Reignited”

After a brush with death during heart surgery, the Drive and Only God Forgives director made his first feature in a decade – he discusses the creative rebirth that’s inspired his most divisive film to date

Interviewing Nicolas Winding Refn isn’t too dissimilar from watching one of his films. Like his characters, he speaks at a leisurely pace. He peppers his conversation with phrases more akin to movie dialogue than everyday speech (“I like to objectify”, “I wanted to make a movie because I didn’t know what a movie was now”). And like his films, the 55-year-old’s answers are sometimes profound, sometimes pretentious, but always entertaining.

We’re speaking ahead of the release of Her Private Hell, Refn’s first film proper since 2016’s Neon Demon. He hasn’t exactly been idle in the intervening years. During the decade-long gap, he’s made two TV series (Too Old to Die Young and Copenhagen Cowboy), launched the streaming platform byNWR and created an immersive art installation for Prada. Oh, and in 2023, he “died” for over 20 minutes on the operating table during heart surgery.

He describes this health scare as a blessing. “Before I died, I’d already died artistically,” he tells me, “meaning my creative flame had just vanished. When I was brought back to life, I realised my fire had been reignited in the same way as if I was 24. And I was ready to go, man.” Coming back from the brink gave him the feeling of starting from scratch. “I had no reason to be obligated to do anything other than follow my instincts.”

Those instincts take him to strange and wonderful places in Her Private Hell, which takes place across two seemingly different milieux. In one, Sophie Thatcher plays Elle, a morose movie star with a complex relationship with her neglectful father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott) and her best friend, stepmother and possibly ex-lover, Dominique (Havana Rose Liu). The other concerns Charles Melton’s Private K, an American GI stalking the streets of Tokyo, searching for his missing daughter. Both stories are linked by the Leather Man, a malevolent spirit in a leather gimp suit who appears to have walked in from a Dario Argento movie. As you can probably surmise from the above plot description, daddy issues abound.

“I wanted to create a triangle of fathers,” Refn explains. “There’s the father leaving, Johnny Thunders; and the father who can’t let go, the Leather Man. Both are extremes of badness, because you have to let your children go – you don’t want to leave them, but you need to leave them. And in that process, Elle comes up with the perfect father, Charles Melton’s Private K.” Refn is a father of two daughters himself. Can we assume these father figures are some sort of self-portrait? “Of course, they’re all me,” he admits, “because every father struggles with this.”

Refn is a one-of-a-kind filmmaker, but at the same time he’s constantly evoking cinema history. One moment Her Private Hell resembles a Hollywood melodrama, the next it’s a low-budget 60s sci-fi, the next a brutal yakuza flick. “I was conscious of wanting to make a film that would remind me of what it was like watching television when I was eight,” he says of his pick’n’mix approach to genre and tone. What he enjoyed most as a boy was channel surfing. “It’s like dopamine. Moment-to-moment I’d encounter emotions that were not necessarily connected, but after a certain amount of time I’d build a narrative through my clicking.” The way he describes it, it was like his early form of filmmaking. “I was in control from above, of things that were already made. That was what I desired here: a film that had an amalgam of everything that I desired in one. I couldn’t make one movie. I wanted to make five movies.”

Another way in which Her Private Hell resembles Old Hollywood is the intensity with which Refn captures his actors’ faces. “The close-up is the most inexpensive way of succeeding because the audience connects with your actors first and foremost,” he says. “So casting is something that I prioritise a lot, to make sure that I have interesting faces.”

The most difficult role to nail down was Elle. Refn says his casting team saw more than 1,000 actresses for the part, but once he clapped eyes on Thatcher, he knew he’d found his lead. “[Sophie]’s audition was amazing,” he recalls, “but it wasn’t about her audition. Once I saw her, I knew she was Elle. There was something about her demeanour, her abilities, her range, her skin. She looked like a porcelain doll, and in a way, this film was my own private dollhouse.” As for Melton’s casting, Refn’s youngest daughter, Lizzielou, deserves credit. “Lizzielou and I have a deal where if she is to watch some of my movie choices, I have to watch some of hers. So we watched Riverdale together, which I enjoyed immensely. And I just kept on seeing Charles Melton, and I was like, ‘This guy’s a movie star; he needs to be in my movie.’”

At one point in Her Private Hell, Johnny Thunders remarks that making a movie is “like going to war”. Refn seems to agree. “It’s definitely like war,” he says, “but it’s a war of love.” His fans will be happy to hear they won’t have to wait another decade for his next battle. “I’m making a new movie next year because I’ve got limited time. I’ve got to get things going.” That film, he reveals, is his long-in-the-works remake of Maniac Cop. That scuzzy Eighties slasher sounds perfect for the neon-drenched NWR treatment.

Her Private Hell is out now in UK cinemas.