Nicolas Winding Refn was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1970. At the age of 10 he moved to New York with his parents, who both worked in the film industry. After graduating from high school, Refn attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, but found the environment difficult to cope with and was soon expelled. Back in Denmark he was accepted by the Danish Film School but he never took up his place, having decided to drop out prior to the start of the first term. After seeing a short film by Refn on cable TV, a Danish film producer offered him 3.2 million Danish kroner to adapt his short into a feature. At the age of 24, Refn was writing and directing his gritty and uncompromising feature film debut Pusher about a drug dealer in over his head. Pusher became a cult hit and won Refn widespread critical acclaim.
Refn explored the seedy underbelly of Copenhagen further with Bleeder – a stylized and grim tale exploring the relationship between two friends living on the city’s margins. Bleeder premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival and proved a big domestic hit. Fear X, Refn’s third feature and his first in English, is a complex, evocative drama starring John Turturro as a man searching for his wife’s killer. Co-written by renowned novelist Hubert Selby Jr and with a musical score by Brian Eno, Fear X received positive reviews but was a commercial failure. Refn returned to the mean streets of Copenhagen with Pusher II: With Blood on My Hands and Pusher III: I’m the Angel of Death, completing the renowned Pusher trilogy and consolidating his critical status.
Refn was next approached to write and direct Bronson, a violent and surreal film about one of England’s most notorious criminals. Featuring a remarkable performance from Tom Hardy, Bronson combines theatrical tradition and British pop cinema of the 1960s to make a movie about a man who creates his own mythology. After the success of Bronson, Refn co-wrote and directed Valhalla Rising – a bleak and relentless film set in the middle ages about a silent, one-eyed prisoner who escapes from his captors and falls into the company of a group of Christian Vikings preparing to embark on a crusade. Uncertain whether One-Eye is a visitor from heaven or hell, they take him with them on their ship across the sea.
Returning to Hollywood, Refn next directed the hugely successful Drive in 2011 – a retro genre movie based on a James Sallis novel starring Ryan Gosling as a stunt-car driver who moonlights as a getaway driver.
Ryan Gosling’s portrayal of “The Driver” rewrote the book on what it meant to be heroic, but it did so with style. In fact, as the website highsnobiety argues: “the fashion choices for Gosling’s character had relevance both to the film itself and even predicted several sartorial trends that would follow in the years following the film’s release.”
Drive‘s iconic scorpion jacket was a hit thanks to the shared tastes of director, Nicolas Winding Refn, and titular star, Ryan Gosling.
Ryan had been really inspired by these 1950s Korean souvenir jackets,” said Drive costume designer, Erin Benach. “He had bought one on his own and was wearing it around. So we started to think, wow, that might be really cool. But the style and shape of them was definitely very fifties and slouchy. We felt like Driver was really buttoned-up, clean and streamlined and we didn’t want there to be much billowiness to him. So we built it piece by piece. We knew the collar had to be able to pop up, we wanted the knit around the wrists and waist to be 100 percent wool as opposed to stretchy nylon. We wanted every element to be perfect. We went through 15 or 20 iterations until we got it right. Which was down to the wire — about an hour before shooting!”
When asked about the significance of the scorpion imagery, director Nicolas Winding Refn said, “I wanted him to wear a white satin jacket so he would be visible at night. It also gave him a sense of armor. I said, ‘I would like a white or silver satin jacket.’ When you work with great actors, one of the most important things for them to build a character is to know what they wear. So Ryan found a jacket that he would feel comfortable wearing. I liked the jacket, it was an old military jacket. It wasn’t in satin, so we had to get it custom-made. But the old ones had these symbols on them, American symbols, like an eagle. And I thought it would be cool if he had an animal symbol on his. I was showing the costume designer Scorpio Rising, because we were talking about the clothes people would wear at the garage – I wanted it to be very fetish. Ryan was there, working on his car, because he was building a car to understand the DNA of the motor. Scorpio Rising starts with the famous scorpion coming into frame, and Ryan and I were looking at each other, going, ‘it’s a scorpion.’ So we constructed a huge scorpion on his back. So when we had to do some ADR for the scene on the roof, Ryan said, ‘Why don’t I tell the story of the scorpion and the frog?'”
For more on the role of fashion in Drive see here: https://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/09/15/ryan-gosling-drive-movie-look/
