After all these years of professional career, which includes his public appearances and his statements to the press, there is no doubt that Nicolas Winding Refn is one of the most unusual filmmakers on the current scene —and with “peculiar” I don’t mean exclusively his authorial seal and the formal and tonal aspects of his works—.
The person in charge of titles such as ‘Valhalla Rising’, ‘Drive’ or the recent Netflix series ‘Copenhagen Cowboy’ once again flaunted his personality during a recent interview with Vulture in which he confessed that the people of Amazon Prime Video decided to “bury” their previous cathodic production: the absorbing ‘Too old to die young’.
Shine bright like a diamond
As explained by the Dane, the bosses of the streaming platform decided minimize production impact for fear of giving a bad image.
“They took all my advertising money from me because they were afraid the show would hurt Amazon’s image. They told me that directly. They were so shocked. I was like, ‘What’s so shocking?’ to make you look bad.’ And I said, ‘But I don’t think anyone is going to notice you.'”
Refn has not limited himself to explaining the anecdote, but has opted for be more frontal in his attack on Hollywood without losing the opportunity to throw a few flowers to himself.
“Some parts of Hollywood are so self-centered that they believe they are at the center of the universe. The rule of fear is very dangerous. Amazon released the series, but they said, ‘We’re going to bury you.’ And they did. Mind you, you can’t bury a diamond”.
However, the production of ‘Too old to die young’ seems to have been a somewhat peculiar experience. According to its protagonist Miles Teller in an interview with IndieWire, the director blended in with Donald Trump during filminggiving away caps to the team that read “Making TV Great Again” and sending Trumpian emails to Amazon executives.
“Nic kind of lost his mind around episode 7. I was literally writing an email every Friday to the CEOs of Amazon like I was Donald Trump. He was telling them, ‘I’m the best director anyone’s ever worked with. His skills are getting better thanks to my directing. It’s going great, you’re going to love it. It’s going to be something big, the biggest series on Amazon.'”
In the background, eccentricities like that are the ones that differentiate a author of a normal filmmaker. Or not.