«I feel this world is losing empathy», interview with Nicolas Winding Refn The Danish director and screenwriter tells us about "Her Private Hell"

For Nicolas Winding Refn, his Her Private Hell represents the closing of a circle. Hyperstimulated by today's transmediality, the Danish director and screenwriter feels it is time to devote himself to a franchise that he hopes to develop across as many formats as possible: film, television, comics, and video games. And so the film starring Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, and Havana Rose Liu is more of a farewell to what he has done up until now, before throwing himself body and soul into his larger project. It will all begin with a remake of Maniac Cop, the 1988 cult film by William Lustig, the rights to which Refn has held for eighteen years and which Mubi will finance while giving the artist its full support.

Before turning his attention to transmediality, however, the filmmaker is accompanying Her Private Hell on tour in cinemas, alongside the re-release of his Drive fifteen years on — a film that has never felt like a cage to him; he is happy to have created something that holds value and meaning for people: «Would you ever ask the Beatles if they had wished they hadn't written Hey Jude?» Bringing people together is also what he strives to do with this work, which unfolds across multiple narrative layers and levels of meaning, united by the fear of a man who harms young women and a series of conflicts between fathers and daughters that the film seeks to lay bare.

«I have two daughters, and this film was my way of contributing to the world I hope to leave them,» Refn explains. «The character of Private K, played by Charles Melton, would do anything to find his daughter again, even walk through hell. It's the death-exploitation genre, which often focuses on men who would readily harm others in order to save the people they love, in an almost biblical way. It's a trope that many fathers find themselves reflecting on, and it is closely tied to the society we live in.»

For Nicolas Winding Refn, it was also something of a rebalancing of Yin and Yang, given that his 2013 film Only God Forgives is, by contrast, a film about a mother. But while one must look to the collective in order to tell stories with universal themes, if he were to identify a common drama of our times, he would find it in the lack of equality among people.

«Now more than ever we sense a certain disconnect,» the filmmaker elaborates. «Part of the cause lies in a highly technologized society that inevitably creates confusion. One is almost led to ask: am I real, or am I an avatar? We need to be able to identify what the human elements are, so as to keep them in mind. But I believe in the goodness of people, and that good will always prevail.»

One might not expect such serenity from a director who has never shied away from bringing even the most raw and extreme violence to the screen: «That's because violence is all around us. Sometimes I feel sad because I sense that this world is losing empathy. That's why I made Her Private Hell like an installation, as if you were watching through a pane of glass at what is happening, or could happen, to people.» A hybridization, between cinema and the visual arts, in which Refn is increasingly immersed; it is also for this reason that the film was shot entirely on interior sets, in order to construct the unreal reality the filmmaker envisioned, with the actors and their characters used almost as if they were statues.

A complex process, which was coupled with the lengthy casting search that led to Sophie Thatcher: «She has porcelain skin — she looks almost like an alien,» the director says, and with the work on the score by Pino Donaggio, whose credits include numerous collaborations with Brian De Palma and Dario Argento: «I think of Her Private Hell as an opera, which is why I decided to look to Italy for the score — I needed someone who understood that art. Pino has made so many films that I don't think anything frightens him anymore.»

Fueling Refn's creative drive for Her Private Hell was also what one might call a divine intervention — an experience that led the filmmaker to come to terms with the meaning of faith and having a purpose in the world: «When they told me I might die, I thought that was fine, because I didn't have much left to say as an artist,» he recalls, referring to the surgery he underwent in 2023 following a cardiac hemorrhage he discovered by chance.

«But luck saved me. Not talent — just luck. When you find yourself in a situation like that, it's only natural that you establish some kind of connection with faith. And after I came back to life, I understood that I would continue my mission, which is cinema.»

It is also for this reason that Nicolas Winding Refn refuses to grow old «I want to stay young forever. I refuse to become an adult, and even if it's now hard to pretend I'm not a certain age, I will keep on resisting growing up.» His tastes are certainly very youthful and current: «What did I enjoy this year? Obsession. I watched it with my daughter. Actually, I should say — I liked it precisely because she liked it.»

And so, as Her Private Hell arrives in our cinemas, we wait to discover the new transmedia future of Nicolas Winding Refn: «Go to Hollywood? Why not. I love it, just as I love Los Angeles, even though it's a machine that grinds up dreams and constantly makes you ask yourself what you're willing to sacrifice to achieve them. For instance, I could never give up my creative freedom. I don't want to be controlled. So I love Hollywood, but that doesn't mean Hollywood loves me.»