The only movie Nicolas Winding Refn wishes he had made
With a career spanning nearly 30 years and a filmography boasting ten movies, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn has slowly refined a specific style and filmmaking voice that has secured his status now as a bonafide auteur of modern cinema. After emerging on the scene, aged only 24, with 1996’s drug-underworld thriller Pusher, Refn began contributing regularly to the film world with hit-after-hit.
His English language debut was Bronson, the 2008 Stanley Kubrick-influenced biopic about the UK’s most notorious criminal. The project took elements from Andrew Dominik’s similar Chopper and expanded upon them in the most surreal, cinematically bold and visually engaging ways possible. It also helped establish actor Tom Hardy as something other than that villain from Star Trek: Nemesis.
However, it wasn’t until 2011’s Drive that Refn would achieve the global stardom and international punk director style that he’s known for today, collaborating with screenwriter Hossein Amini and actor Ryan Gosling to create what may well have been the 21st century’s first ‘arthouse action thriller’. With a glacial pace, vividly expressive lighting and cinematography, a stony and emotionless performance from Gosling and a pulsating and iconic soundtrack by Cliff Martinez, Drive was more than just a theatrical hit – it was practically a cultural phenomenon.
So, with a legacy as potent as his, when a director like Refn cites another movie by another director as one that he would have liked to have called his own, you know that it’s worth paying attention to. When Drive was released in 2011, the Danish filmmaker was invited to talk with Criterion, where he picked ten of his favourite movies of all time. During this list, which included classics like The Sweet Smell of Sucess alongside more obscure numbers like Tokyo Drifter, the director picked one as “the only film I’ve ever wished that I had made”.
The movie in question? Paul Morrissey’s 1973 horror parody, Flesh for Frankenstein. Nothing short of a circus of pure degradation, wallowing in semi-satirical sex and violence, including sexual violence itself, this ‘erotic’ spin on the classic Frankenstein tale features the titular doctor and his sexually charged mission to create a perfect master race of Serbian superhumans – utilising, in traditional fashion, the dismembered components of various corpses.
Featuring multiple dismemberments, recurring and explicit scenes of sex in various forms, as well as an abysmal moment in which Dr Frankenstein satisfies himself by using an open wound in the body of the female ‘creation’, Flesh for Frankenstein was understandably panned upon release. Known for his previous association with iconic American artist Andy Warhol, director Morrissey’s film was initially released as Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein and was screened in select 3D showings.
The film has since gone on to achieve cult status, but it isn’t easy to know whether Refn’s choice is genuine or not. Known for his deadpan style of humour and purposefully antagonising behaviour, famously angering William Friedkin for suggesting Only God Forgives was a masterpiece, it’s not unbelievable to think this is another case of the director trolling. Perhaps we’ll never know.
