Aicolas Winding Refn and his father, Anders, are the crayons and cheeses of Danish cinema; bound by blood, separated by the films. Here they are, sitting side by side in their small Zoom windows, each tuning in from their homes in Copenhagen. “But we are not close at all,” Nicolas explains in the introduction. “He’s in the suburbs and I’m in the city.” Physically, mentally, the two poles are apart.
I’ve known Refn Jr.’s work for years. He is the emerging talent behind Drive, The Neon Demon and the Pusher trilogy. He is deceptive, disturbing, almost endlessly watchable. But I am less familiar with the 76-year-old Anders, who followed a calmer course as a director and prolific film editor; the kind of safe pair of hands that clears up the mess others make. At one point, he explained that he had already recorded his debut, Copper, in 1976. ‘My first film is about a policeman. Nicolas’ first film is about a criminal. He laughs at the comparison. “So we are like two sides of the same coin.”
Today it looks like the old guard is coming out on top. Anders Refn’s latest film, Into the Darkness, is a meaty moment with a rich texture, a film that looks at the Nazi occupation of Denmark through the prism of the collapse of a civilian family. This is the first part of a story he wants to tell for years, an antidote to all the sly, self-serving reports of heroic resistance. He occupied Denmark, the occupied Denmark was known as the ‘whipped cream front’. It was sweet and on the back, a great message for German troops, the Nazi equivalent of a real cheerfulness. “Cooperation has been a taboo subject in our country for so many years,” he says. “But I think the public is finally ready to confront it.”
Nicolas, in turn, wants to support the film and strive for his father. But he’s the world’s worst publicist, a disguised film critic. When I ask what he thought of Into the Darkness, he says it’s a capable film on an important subject. He says it’s a successful piece of storytelling. Of course, this is not the kind of movie he would ever dream of making himself. “I think my father and I do not agree on the purpose of cinema,” he says. ‘He comes from a more classical tradition. For him, it’s a story, a story. To me, it’s rather an act of expression. ”
I just asked Refn Jr. for his unadorned opinion on his father’s work. It’s just fair that we turn the tables. Take a movie like The Neon Demon, Nicolas’ dark tale about the Los Angeles model. It is stylish, sugar-matte and toxic down to its core. But I wonder what Anders did all along.
Otherwise look like reports. “What did I think of it?” he says. ‘Um …’
“My father thinks the Neon Demon is inconsistent,” says Nicolas. ‘He feels it lacks a conventional story. He does not like something supernatural. He does not like anything that does not reflect the political dogmatic attitude towards science. ‘
“No,” Anders protested. “No.” But that’s all he can do to get a word in the sidelines.
I think they love each other. I think they lock up antlers for fun or out of habit. The problem is that Anders is a child of the European cinema after the war, while his son was raised in a diet of American grinding and horror films. Nicolas explains that his parents were apart when he was little. After that, he lived in New York with his mother and stepfather. He says: “My life changed when I saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I don ‘t think my dad ever saw that movie. ”
“Half of it,” says Anders.
“Yes, half of it.” Nicolas snores. “He thinks it’s just the dirtiest trash can.”
I ask if they can think of a happy movie memory and Anders remembers the time when he took the teenager Nicolas to see the summer with Monika from Ingmar Bergman. “He said, ‘Oh no, I do not want to see this old black-and-white movie. ‘He likes movies like Star Wars and Ghostbusters. And he sits with his head down while the film rolls. And I felt bad because I thought I was being too intrusive. So I said, ‘OK, Nicolas, do you want to go?’ And he looked up at me with tears in his eyes because he was so touched by the movie. ”
Now it’s the younger man’s turn to protest. “It simply came to our notice then. This is all that romanticizes my dad. Yes, I saw Summer With Monika at the Cinematek in Copenhagen. And yes, that’s good. This is a very capable film. But I certainly can not remember it as he does. I can not imagine anyone – let alone me – crying from a Bergman movie. He pauses. “Maybe I’m crying to get out.”
Otherwise, he and his son’s careers have followed a similar pattern for some time. Both men scored a hit with their debut film, did OK with their second, and crashed and burned with their third. In the case of Nicolas, the film in question was Fear X, an existential American thriller that ran into the box office tank and owed it $ 1 million. As for Anders, he is still stung by the collapse of his beloved 1985 circus melodrama The Flying Devils. He remembers that Bergman had a copy of the film sent to his home on the island of Fårö in the East, looked at the whole matter twice and wrote a very nice letter.
“Bergman,” Nicolas mocked.
“Well, it was a good movie,” said his father. “It should have done better than it did.”
Looking back, Nicolas feels that Fear X made it possible for him. “You have to make one big mistake to understand the meaning of true creative success,” he says. ‘Complete failure was, in my case, the only way to free myself from the prison of a more conventional career. It gave me clarity about who I was and what I wanted to do. ”
Anders’ experience seems to be slightly different. “It hurt a lot,” he says. ‘And it made me so picky about what movies I did after that. Because you have to realize everything to know that you might not succeed. He laughs joyfully. “Making a movie also costs me a marriage every time.”
Anders is nowadays best known as Lars von Trier’s right hand man. He edited Breaking the Waves and Antichrist. He was the assistant director of Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac. It is a collaboration that, according to him, has made a more radical producer. On the set of Into the Darkness, for example, he relaxed – shot with two handheld cameras and fled the action. Assuming the pandemic can be brought under control, he plans to start filming the second episode in May.
As Nicolas sees it, he and his father were simply born and raised in different places: Edenic Scandinavia; jaundiced 80s New York. If he envies anything, he envies the innocence of the early years of Anders, all with the advent of the French New Wave. “I can fully understand the passion of that era. Because cinema was life. The innovative art form. The ultimate art form. Pure and moralistic. It can change the world. No one will ever experience such movies again. ”
Slowly, slowly, the two seem to be moving in the direction of the common ground. Nicolas sug. “We come from a lot of different backgrounds,” he says. ‘We have a significant difference in our approach to theater. But at the end of the day, I probably learned more from my father than from any other filmmaker. He taught me about the subliminal power of the editing process. The importance of getting into a scene late and getting out early. The importance of keeping your focus, and never letting audience get bored. I stopped showing my work my work these days. But I always keep his advice in my mind. ”
They quarreled over the topic of Summer With Monika. They will not always agree on the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I wonder if there is one movie in the world that they both love unequivocally.
“Of course,” Nicolas said, without missing a beat. “The Leopard, by Visconti.”
Else strikes, hard on his son’s heels. “The Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. The Godfather, by Coppola. Anything by Buñuel. ”
Hostilities are over. Harmony is restored. Once the cinemas reopen, they may want to consider another father-and-son trip.
• Into the Darkness will be released on request on March 5