©Courtesy of Dario Argento:Panico
Provocative Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has revealed that he’s preparing to make his next film in Tokyo, his first since The Neon Demon, which debuted in 2016. Refn told a Variety interviewer that the new movie will be a bilingual one, to be shot in English and Japanese.
Refn is currently at the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere of his short Beauty Is not a Sin, which he made for the MV Agusta motorcycle brand. Also being screened there is his very first film, Pusher, which me made in 1996.
Though he offered no details about the plot or casting for the Tokyo film, he said it’s based on an original story with “a lot of glitter and lot of sex and violence.” The controversial director also suggested that the proposed film will include themes and characters found in his earlier features Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon. Refn had declared several years ago that “cinema is dead” but now believes that filmmaking is an act of defiance. He was quoted as saying: “It’s a really interesting time to make movies because it’s such a chaotic situation. So going back and making a theatrical feature film again is almost like — not starting over — but with all the changes in our societies in the last five years and technology changes, it almost seems like the right thing to do for me.”
Refn also stated that he working on two other projects, one of which is connected to gaming, which he called the “only art form that continues to evolve with possibilities creatively.” He speculated as to what the world would look like if the Lumière brothers had invented computer games before they’d invented film.
Refn described the presidential election in the United States this November as the “season finale” for the world’s greatest reality show. “When all the politicians have fucked up the world and created so much war and inequality that is destroying humanity” he added, “the artist’s function is to come in and try to make it just a little more tolerable in the world.”
Though the Tokyo film will be Refn’s first new feature since 2016, he was the director and co-writer of a ten-episode series for Prime Video titled Too Old to Die Young. It starred Miles Teller as a police officer challenged by hit men, Yakuza gangsters, cartel assassins, and teenage gangs. He also created Copenhagen Cowboy, a Netflix series about about Miu, a heroine fighting crime and violence in the Danish criminal underworld.