Nicolas Winding Refn, director of movies such as Drive, Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, is a fascinating and provocative figure; in person he is very seductive in a somehow alarming way, like a cross between Bret Easton Ellis and Count Dracula. He is always interesting, and he has plenty in development, including an Amazon TV series called Too Old to Die Young, starring Miles Teller, about samurai criminals in LA. But when I meet Refn at the Lumière film festival in Lyon, he is actually around to talk about another project: his new website byNWR.com, which is shortly to launch in the UK.
It is a streaming site, or – to use the words he prefers – “an unadulterated cultural expressway for the arts. It’s there to inspire the youth!” It will feature a restored classic movie each month, curated by a guest editor, who will create original content themed around the film – essays, video, photos, music – and it will be free, supported by Refn’s partners Mubi and the Harvard Film Archive and evidently bankrolled to a great extent by Refn himself.
Refn announces his intentions with much deadpan provocation and gnomic iconoclasm. “Cinema is dead,” he intones. “I have come to Lyon to declare film to be dead. And now it’s resurrected. Film clings on to our feet as we move forward. The best way to move forward to bury the past. That doesn’t mean you forget it. The Institut Lumière [in Lyon, dedicated to the cinema pioneers, the Lumière brothers] is like a cathedral. It’s where you read the first testament. You study scriptures to get to the second testament. If you look at Instagram or Twitter or all these things that my children use – they’re all for free! What on earth are we thinking? That it doesn’t mean anything for cinema?”
Refn will sometimes declaim something droll or outrageous and then pause, in the way Elvis might hold a pose in mid-hip-swivel, waiting for screams of fan delight or rage from churchgoing moralists. But all Refn’s fans (I am one) understand that his theorising is part of a great auteur tradition. Truffaut talked about the cinema of tomorrow being like a confessional, diary or act of love; Godard can declare cinema to be dead while producing a great curation: Histoire(s) Du Cinéma. And the great literary historian George Steiner was always declaring things to be dead – tragedy, the German language – while showing a passionate interest in their lively existence right now.
Refn is a part of this subversive tradition. He is a tall, elegant, wand-like figure, dressed in black, accessorised with glasses and an aesthete’s scarf. He reminded me oddly of Victor Mature as tough-yet-sensitive Doc Holliday in John Ford’s western My Darling Clementine: medical man, poker player, gunfighter, lover of Shakespeare. Before our meeting I watched the first movie that will premiere on his site: the 1961 cult film Night Tide by experimentalist director Curtis Harrington, starring Dennis Hopper as a sailor on shore leave in Los Angeles who falls in love with a mermaid. With its downbeat locations and loose narrative swing, it’s a fascinating prehistory of the American new wave, of horror, of B-movies and beach movies.
Curtis Harrington is a film-maker that Refn began to “collect” the way an art connoisseur might buy up contemporary art. “I started buying films a couple of years ago. The first film-maker I began to obsessively collect was Andy Milligan. He was a New York frustrated artist. Made films in the 60s and 70s. What he didn’t know, he made up for in personality.”
Refn collaborated with the BFI in restoring Milligan’s Nightbirds (1970); then he bought the rights to Night Tide and then the entire inventory of Something Weird Video in the US when its founder Mike Vraney died in 2014. Soon he had a collection of nearly 200 titles, and enough material to form the basis of his site.
So how does he feel about the row over Netflix in Cannes, when the festival had to bring in a rule that companies such as Netflix and Amazon had to guarantee a big-screen release? “I can’t relate to that any more,” he says dismissively. “That discussion is so 2000. Here we are in the second day of Year Zero. The only thing to know is that the cinema screen and the phone are co-existent. One is not better than the other. They are co-existent.”
He adds: “The internet is ruled by three words: individualism, unapologetic, polarisation. That’s very worrying in terms of news. It gave us Trump. In terms of art, though, it’s the best thing that ever happened. People will always go to the cinema. But the cinema industry is financed by certain films whose sole purpose is to maximise profit as fast as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what has changed history most in the last 20 years? A video camera and a telephone. One of the key things of the digital revolution is that sharing is a new definition of culture. People need to express themselves. The more you do that, the better a person you become.”
And does he think that there will be a blurring of boundaries between cinema and long-form television? Refn shrugs: “Television is dead. And television will not be reborn. It will not come back. What has surfaced instead is the digital platform of entertainment. Cinema will come back with different meaning. But television … is dead.”
It occurs to me only after our conversation is over to wonder what exactly this means for his TV project, Too Old to Die Young. Surely TV can be reborn with new meanings on a digital platform of entertainment? Maybe that is Old Testament thinking. These questions are ripe for discussion on Refn’s cultural expressway.