N.icolas Winding Refn and his father, Anders, are the chalk and cheese of Danish cinema; bound by blood, separated by the films. Here they sit side by side in their tiny Zoom windows, each calling from their home in Copenhagen. “But we are not close at all,” Nicolas explains as an introduction. “He’s in the suburbs and I’m in town.” Physically, spiritually, the two poles are apart.
I know the work of Refn Jr. for years. He is the upstart talent behind Drive, The Neon Demon and the Pusher trilogy. It is seductive, irritating, almost endlessly perceptible. But I’m less familiar with 76-year-old Anders, who has taken a quieter course as a once-director and prolific film editor; the kind of safe hands that clean up others’ mess. At one point he explains that he made his debut film Copper in 1976. “My first film was about a police officer. Nicolas’ first film was about a criminal. He chuckles at the comparison. “So we are like two sides of the same coin.”
Today the old guard seems to have come out on top for once. Anders Refn’s latest film, Into the Darkness, is a fleshy, richly structured historical piece, a film that views the Nazi occupation of Denmark through the prism of the collapse of a bourgeois family. It is the first part of a story he has wanted to tell for years, an antidote to all false, selfish accounts of heroic resistance. Occupied Denmark, he explains, was known as the “Whipped Cream Front”. It was sweet and reclining, a soft post for German troops, the Nazi equivalent of a cheerful work. “Collaboration has been a taboo subject in our country for so many years,” he says. “But I think the public is finally ready.”
Nicolas, for his part, wants to support the film and defend his father. But he is the world’s worst publicist, a film critic in disguise. When I ask what he thought of Into the Darkness, he says it is a successful film on an important subject. He says it’s a successful piece of storytelling. Of course, it’s not the kind of movie he’d ever dream of making himself. “Basically, I think my dad and I disagree on the purpose of cinema,” he says. “He comes from a more classical tradition. For him it is a story, a story. For me it is more of an act of expression. “
I just finished Refn Jr. asked for his candid opinion of his father’s work. It is only fair that we turn the tables. Take a movie like The Neon Demon, Nicolas’ dark fairy tale about the modeling world in Los Angeles. It’s stylish, sugar-matted, and toxic to the core. But I wonder what else Anders made of it.
Otherwise it looks defeated. “What did I think of it?” he says. “Eh …”
“My dad thinks The Neon Demon is inconsistent,” says Nicolas. He thinks it lacks a conventional narrative. He doesn’t like anything supernatural. He doesn’t like anything that doesn’t reflect the 1960s political dogmatic attitude to science.
“No”, Anders protests. “No.” But it is all he can do to get a word in short.
I think they love each other. I think they lock the antlers for fun or out of habit. The problem is, Anders is a kid of post-war European arthouse cinema, while his son grew up on a diet of American grindhouse and horror movies. Nicolas explains that his parents separated 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,” says Anders.
“Yes, half.” Nicolas snorts. “He just thinks it’s the meanest shit.”
I ask if they can come up with a happy movie memory and Anders remembers the time he took the teenage Nicolas to Ingmar Bergman’s Summer With Monika. ‘He said,’ Oh no, I don’t want to see this old black and white film. He loved movies like Star Wars and Ghostbusters. And he sat with his head down while the movie was rolling. And I felt bad because I thought I had been too pushy. So I said, “Okay, Nicolas, do you want to go?” And he looked up at me with tears in his eyes because he was so moved by the movie. “
Now it is the younger man’s turn to protest. “This is of course not true at all. It’s all romanticizing my father. Yes, I saw Summer With Monika at Cinematek in Copenhagen. And yes, it is fine. It is a very successful film. But I certainly don’t remember the way he does it. I can’t imagine anyone – let alone me – crying at a Bergman movie. He pauses. “Maybe cry to get out.”
Anders points out that for a while he and his son followed a similar pattern. Both men scored a hit with their debut film, did well with their second, and crashed and burned with their third. In Nicolas’s case, the movie in question was Fear X, an existential American thriller that stuck at the box office and left him $ 1 million in debt. As for Anders, he’s still stung by the collapse of his cherished 1985 circus melodrama, The Flying Devils. He remembers Bergman had a print of the film sent to his home on the Baltic island of Fårö, looked at the whole thing twice, and wrote a really nice letter.
“Bergman,” Nicolas mockingly.
“Well, it was a good movie,” says his father. “It should have done better than it did.”
Looking back, Nicolas feels that Fear X may have made him. “You have to make one big mistake to understand the meaning of true creative success,” he says. “Complete failure, in my case, was 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 have been something else. “It was very painful,” he says. And it made me so picky about the movies I did afterwards. Because you have to do everything you can to know that you may not succeed. He laughs happily. “Besides, making a movie costs me a marriage every time.”
Today, Anders is perhaps 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, he says, that has made him a more radical filmmaker. On the set of Into the Darkness, for example, he noticed that he was loosening up a bit: he photographed with two handheld cameras and caught the action on the run. 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 at different times in different places: Edenic Scandinavia; jaundice 80s New York. In any case, he is jealous of the innocence of Anders’ early years, at the beginning of the French New Wave. “I can fully understand the passion of the time. Because cinema was life. The innovative art form. The ultimate art form. Pure and moralistic. It could change the world. No one will ever see such a film again. “
Slowly, reluctantly, the two seem to be moving towards common ground. Nicolas sighs. “We have very different backgrounds,” he says. “We have a fundamental difference in our approach to cinema. But in the end, I probably learned more from my dad than any other filmmaker. He taught me about the subliminal power of the editing process. The importance of getting into a scene late and leaving early. The importance of maintaining your focus so that an audience never gets bored. I don’t show my father my work anymore these days. But I always keep his advice in mind. “
They clashed on the topic of Summer With Monika. They will always disagree about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I wonder if there is one movie in the world that they both unequivocally love.
“Of course”, says Nicolas, without missing a beat. “The Leopard, by Visconti.”
Otherwise falls in, hard on the heels of his son. The Seven Samurai, by Kurosawa. The Godfather, by Coppola. Everything by Buñuel. “
Hostilities are over. Harmony has been restored. Once the cinemas reopen, they may want to consider another father-son trip.
• Into the Darkness will be released on demand on March 5th