Courtney Howard // Film Critic
It’s been 10 years since filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn last made a feature film – and thank goodness he’s returned to the medium, supercharged with the neon-lit, giallo-inspired psychological thriller HER PRIVATE HELL. After a brief detour exploring long-form storytelling with streaming series like TOO OLD TO DIE YOUNG and COPENHAGEN COWBOY, the Danish writer-director is back in exhilarating form.
Refn’s latest blends gorgeous visuals and an operatic soundscape to create an arresting artistic expression. He captures a captivating story about an actress Elle (Sophie Thatcher), her director father (Dougray Scott), his new wife/ Elle’s stepmother/ former lover (Havana Rose Liu) and a mythical father figure from long ago, Private K (Charles Melton), whose endless search for his lost daughter leads them all into contact with a ruthless killer, The Leatherman.
At the film’s recent press day, I spoke with Refn about his story’s disarming resonance, threading his parental worries into his films’ fabrics and how he lured a legendary icon out of semi-retirement.
At the NEON DEMON press conference, you had told me you made that film for your daughters to warn them about the bad men in the world. HER PRIVATE HELL felt like an extension of that style of fatherly warning. Did you feel like you still had more of that facet of fatherhood left to tell?
“In a way. I also wanted to explore my own demons when it comes to be a father and the difficulties it is having daughters and being a parent, but seeing it through the lens of a young girl, which is Sophie Thatcher, whose father’s always leaving and doing the worst of the worst by marrying her lover and therefore she now loses both. She imagines the perfect father – the father we always want to be for our children, but will never live up to. So in our fantasy, I like to call it “Dadsploitation” – the idea of the father becoming the perfect iconography that’s purely imaginative. And what do they do? They sacrifice themselves for their children, especially their daughters, the purity of innocence. So all those emotions were floating around.”
I don’t wanna bring the room down but stick with me: my dad died the same day as I saw your film, so the aspect of a daughter being the hero of her own story resonated with me. Was that the genesis for the idea of this story?
“The first genesis was I had an idea for Private K, going to Hell to bring back his daughter. And obviously that was very much my own situation, having died and then come back. I remember when I knew that I was going to die and hopefully come back, maybe I wouldn’t, I had made my peace with my wife and my eldest daughter, but I knew my youngest wasn’t ready for me to go, so I had to come back for her. I had to crawl out of Hell to come back to her. K was kind of a creation of that.
And then I had another idea of a young woman coming to a city that didn’t exist. But because of the father theme of Private K, it glowed in over the young girls’ story and now there was 3 girls and now the Leatherman, this glam monster, that I had in my memory became the kind of focal point, because he, himself, was the curse of the grieving father who searches for his daughter until he forgets what he’s looking for. So you can clearly see [laughs] ONLY GOD FORGIVES, which is a mother and son related. This was a real demon of my own constraints. It’s a complex theme as a parent.”
Switching gears a little bit:How did you get Pino Donaggio to come out of retirement to create this absolutely beautiful score?
“It was the only movie I started without knowing what kind of music I was going to be needing. During production, there were so many genres. I used a lot of idea, or inspirational, music. But near the end of production, I came to this realization that I wanted to make was an opera, because it was all becoming operatic. Certainly the themes were operatic. The stillness. The visuals. The way of telling the story. The simplicity. The complexity. Whatever you wanna call it.
Now, I needed to find a composer who knew opera and film music. So where do you go? You go to Italy. Everyone had died that I was an admirer of, except Pino, even though he was kind of in a semi-retirement situation. I approached him, and didn’t speak a word of English, and I said, ‘Listen, I want you to write an opera. But write it like a requiem because most likely you’re gonna die soon.’ And he found that very funny. He said, ‘Okay. I’ll do it. I started my career with Nicolas Roeg and I’ll die with Nicolas Refn.’ I found that funny. So then we became friends over dinner and he decided to make the movie. I said, ‘Just so you know. You’re gonna be the one that’s going to tie the movie together. Your music, like an opera, is going to be the fundamental bloodstream that’ll run through the film and tie it together like a bow with pink glitter on it.’ He said, ‘Okay. Okay. Okay.’ He did it through a translator then he went off and did it – and it was amazing.
One of the most memorable experiences I had while making the film, in Rome with Pino and his team, after we had mixed the music and recorded in Bulgaria. We went out afterward to celebrate and Pino got a little too much wine and he started singing like Elvis and imitating him. I was like, ‘That’s so cool.’”
HER PRIVATE HELL opens in theaters on July 24.
