22 Years Ago, This Obscure Thriller Almost Ended Nicolas Winding Refn’s Career!

Themes of violence and masculinity, often portrayed as a self-destructive impulse; the loneliness of taciturn heroes; obsession; inevitable fate; and a criminal underworld depicted as almost mythological. Over his 30-year career, Nicolas Winding Refn’s filmmaking has evolved from raw realism to a highly stylized form characterized by neon lights, silences, slow-motion, and electronic music, where each frame is a graphic composition. Influenced by Kenneth Anger, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and genre cinema, Refn’s aesthetic has made him as much a figure of admiration as controversy.

“Pusher,” An Explosive Beginning

His debut film, “Pusher,” made a strong impact. Shot in Copenhagen on a shoestring budget with handheld cameras, it chronicles a week in the life of a small-time drug dealer caught in a debt spiral. It also introduced Mads Mikkelsen in his first cinematic role, setting the stage for a stellar career.

Three years later, he released “Bleeder,” a portrayal of a video store clerk obsessed with movies and surrounded by violence. In 2003, he ventured into English-language films with “Inside Job,” a thriller starring John Turturro. The film was a commercial disaster, putting his production company in dire straits and forcing him to make “Pusher II” and “Pusher 3” consecutively to settle his debts. Yet, he managed to create two darker and more ambitious sequels.

“It was a very difficult, very self-destructive period in my life”

Years later, even after his acclaimed “Bronson” had introduced the phenomenal Tom Hardy to a broader audience, the wounds from the failure of his first English-language film remained fresh. Refn opened up about this period in a 2010 interview with Screenarchy:

“It was a very tough, very self-destructive, dark, and nihilistic period in my life. It was a film I had been trying to make for a long time, and by the time I got the five weeks I needed to shoot it, I was just fed up. I wasn’t happy with some of the casting choices I had been forced to make. I think it’s a flawed film, but maybe it’s those flaws that make it interesting in retrospect.

This film was a crucial turning point in my career. I went bankrupt after making it and had a lot of debts, so it was definitely a pivotal moment because I went back to make the Pusher trilogy and became a better filmmaker. And I made Bronson.”

“It was a bad film, too expensive, that lost a lot of money”

In 2013, speaking to ThePlaylist at the Marrakech International Film Festival, Refn elaborated further on his earlier comments. He explained that the failure of the film taught him a valuable lesson about the nature of budgets in the film industry.

“It taught me not to forget the value of my own film, its market value. That film was not… I lost everything, and it was a very valuable lesson because we live in a world where money is essential, but thanks to the digital revolution, accessibility has completely changed: you can now do things very cheaply, you can shoot a film with an iPhone.

But if you want to work on a specific project, you still need funding: you can have all the creativity you want, but if you make a film that costs $100 million, you need to make a certain type of film that must bring in $400 million. That means you can’t compromise on your artistic approach, but it’s commonly understood that such films need to have a broader appeal; there’s a form of self-censorship, because it’s now considered an investment.

However, if you make a film that costs $2.5 million, the stakes aren’t as high, so you’re not subject to the same creative constraints. I prefer the creative process and the freedom it offers, but it means I have to make films that aren’t too expensive.

The more you invest, the greater the responsibility to make it profitable. The ABCs of cinema are A: make great films and make lots of money, which we all aspire to. B: make a great film that doesn’t lose money—you can have a whole career like that… Or you make a terrible film that makes a lot of money, but without the thrill of creativity. But you can also have a whole career like that.

And finally, you can make a bad film that loses money, but you can only afford to do that once. That’s the ABC of survival in the film industry; that’s how you can determine where you want to stand on this scale… Inside Job was a film that didn’t work financially or creatively; it was a bad film, too expensive, that lost a lot of money.”