Nicolas Winding Refn: violent art

Unforgettably violent, unforgettably hypnotising: we just can’t get Only God Forgives out of our head. Audiences at Cannes booed this sublime, existential gangster tragedy, but Nicolas Winding Refn defended his film, saying: “Art is an act of violence.”

Nicolas Winding Refn is as talkative as his anti-heroes are silent. In Only God Forgives, the Danish director goes even further than in Pusher and Drive. After the enormous success of Drive, he was offered dozens of American projects, but Refn decided to make a deal with the French. Gaumont and Wild Bunch gave him a small budget, but almost total freedom to make two films. “I came up with a fight movie in Thailand. I thought it was an easy sell. They bought it, I started writing the script. But it was a difficult period. I was in an existentialist phase, full of troubles. I was permanently angry and didn’t know how to channel it. If someone has answers to life’s existential problems then it must be God. So I challenged Him. For my financiers, however, I naturally had to come up with a more linear story. That’s when I came up with this mother character who devours everything. It became more of a mother and son story. The key to unfold this was the character who believes he’s God.”

Muhammad Ali’s punching bag
It was only in Thailand that everything fell into place. “In Thailand, I found the film I wanted to make: a film about mysticism and reality. When she was born, my daughter had the ability to see ghosts. She would wake up in our apartment every night, screaming and pointing at the wall. I told my production manager I believed there was a ghost in our house. In Europe I would’ve been crucified for this. But half an hour later, the production manager came back with a shaman who exorcised the room. Mysticism, spirituality, and reality mean something completely different in Asia.”

Ryan Gosling plays an American in Bangkok whose mother has flown in to pressure him to avenge his murdered brother. The fact that his brother deserved it is completely irrelevant. We wager you have never seen such a grotesque and demonic mother as Kristin Scott Thomas’s character before.
“The idea was to tell the story of a man plunged into a journey without knowing where or when it will ever end,” explains Refn. “He is chained to his mother, and in order to free himself from her, he has to pass through a form of violence. Julian doesn’t say much but the language of silence is the most poetic of all. Images and sounds touch our emotions more than dialogue ever can, so we used movement and space to describe the character.”
Naturally, the director was questioned about the extreme, stylised violence during the press conference at Cannes. Gouged out eyes, hands, and arms separated from their bodies by one swing of the sword, or the star Ryan Gosling’s cute little face being treated like Muhammad Ali’s punching bag. Refn admits to making films “like a pornographer”. “It’s about what arouses me. Art is an act of violence. It is about penetration, about speaking to our subconscious and our moods at different levels. I don’t consider myself a very violent man…but I certainly have a fetish for violent emotions and images and I just can’t explain where it comes from. But I do believe it’s a way to exorcise various things. Let’s not forget that humans were created very violent: our body parts are created for violence, it is our instinctual need to survive. Over the years, we stopped needing violence to survive, but we still have an urge from when we were born – which itself can be an act of violence.”

> READ THE FILM REVIEW

Only God Forgives ●●●
UK, FR, 2013, dir.: Nicolas Winding Refn, act.: Ryan Gosling, Kristin Scott Thomas, Yayaying Rhatha Phongam, 90 min.