Nicolas Winding Refn’s Rising Star

"Pusher" director Nicolas Winding Refn on a career as harrowing as his Viking epic "Valhalla Rising."

“Fear X” seems to have completely baffled audiences, especially the ending. Do you want to explain it?

The idea of “Fear X” was to make a mystery that started off with one solution, and ended with a thousand solutions. Usually, films go the other way — they start with many possible solutions and then close in on one. “Fear X” is about a man who travels into his own mind to find a killer, but it turns out that that killer actually exists in the world, and he’s able to track him down through his dreams.

Then he’s caught in this strange conspiracy of these cops who work as an exterminating group. One of them killed John Turturro’s wife; he’s plagued by guilt, and he enters his imaginary world. We don’t really know if it’s all a dream or not. So, when Turturro goes into the elevator after he’s shot and he travels upwards to meet him again, there’s this black void into which he disappears.

He wakes up in a hospital, and they say there’s no body, there was never any evidence of violence, and ask him how he got that gunshot. He sees the police beating somebody out of frame, which indicates that there is somebody who knows something. And he drives away. The ending was meant to give a sense that there are many possibilities. He can’t find one and he has to move on.

What do you think of it now?

There are some scenes that I’m very happy with, but as an overall film, it doesn’t really work. It’s like a half-movie. But I did everything on that movie. I was very lucky to work with Hubert Selby, Jr., who I still miss every day. And Brian Eno was great. I’d been working on that movie for so long that when I finally got to make it, I was tired of it. I didn’t want to make it anymore.

That film’s failure forced you to basically restart your career.

I was headed in a self-destructive way. But I was only 29 years old — I could start over. I went back and completed the “Pusher” trilogy. I made the other two the way I wanted to make the first one. With “Pusher,” I was just so lucky: I got a movie made, that was it. There are things in it I’m very happy about, but there are other things, too, that I’m not so crazy about. As Ingmar Bergman said, “It takes three movies to make one movie.”

I needed that experience to figure out what to do right. So I kept myself from repeating the mistake of “Fear X” on “Valhalla Rising.” I was working on “Valhalla” for over a year when “Bronson” came along, so I was able to shoot that and wipe my brain of anything related to “Valhalla.” I was then able to see “Valhalla” with fresh eyes. The two films influenced each other; “Valhalla Rising” became almost like a painting that Charlie Bronson would have done at the end of “Bronson.”

In a way, “Pusher 2,” “Pusher 3,” and “Bronson” redid that initial trajectory of your career, from a low-budget vérité aesthetic to a more composed, classical style.

Yeah, I redid my cycle again, but did away with all the nihilism. “Bronson” was a film very much about transformation. It reflects what my life was when I made my first three films to what it became afterward. Bronson starts off as a man who knew he was made for something, but didn’t know what it was. “I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, I didn’t have a lot of options.”

When his art teacher introduces him to art, he realizes he can combine art and violence into one thing. When I had my first child, I owed so much money, and I had to ask myself, do I just want to become an obscure filmmaker, or do I want to want it?

What’s that great line from the movie? “You just pissed on a gypsy…”

“You just pissed on a gypsy in the middle of fucking nowhere. You’re not the hottest ticket in town, darling.” Exactly. And luckily for me, I was able to reinvent myself.

Your films are notorious for scenes of intense and extreme violence. Have you ever had any experiences with violence in your own life?

No, no, no. I’m the guy who’s always afraid, always paranoid. I’m not a violent person in any way. That was Harrison Ford’s concern.

I was going to do this film called “Dying of the Light” that Paul Schrader had written. We had $20 million, but Harrison had to meet me, because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t some shaved-head fascist racist degenerate. We had a great meeting, but the film fell apart anyway, in true Hollywood fashion.

You’re about to make another film in Hollywood, though, called “Drive,” with Ryan Gosling. I haven’t read the novel it’s based on, but I saw a small segment from it, which was: “I drive. That’s what I do. That’s all I do.” That sounds very much like one of your characters.

It’s so close to my sensibility, and I’ve got a lot of support to make the film I want to make, but it’s still been a huge issue to compromise and say, “Okay, I’m leaving my controlled little world.” But maybe it’s good, especially after “Valhalla Rising,” which is a film where I gave it all I got. I said, “I’d be okay with it if this turned out to be the last movie I ever made.”

So trying to work within a system will be very interesting, I think. If I don’t like it, I can just leave. I have a film that I’m doing right after called “Only God Forgives,” a kind of Western I’m going to shoot in Bangkok. So in a way I’m playing a kind of roulette, but I have a way out.

“Valhalla Rising” will open in limited release and be available on VOD on July 26th.

[Additional photos: "Gambler," 2005; "Bronson," Magnolia Pictures, 2009; "Pusher," Magnolia Pictures, 1996]

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