“They are all archetypes by design”: the unlikely fairy tale origins of Ryan Gosling movie ‘Drive’
Even though it was based on a novel, so the pre-existing source material was right there to be transplanted to the screen, Nicolas Winding Refn opted to look to a more unexpected source of inspiration when crafting Ryan Gosling thriller Drive.
Hossein Amini may have penned the screenplay for the noir-infused thriller, but the director was integral in the process, putting his ideas across to create a stark, startling, and uncompromising tale that didn’t skimp on the violence and brutality.
The bright lights of Los Angeles, a stunt driver moonlighting as a wheelman, an effortless sense of cool, heads being stomped into mush, and an eclectic soundtrack hand-picked to complement the dreamlike imagery don’t have anything in common with fantastical fairy tales, or so it would seem.
Gosling’s unnamed and enigmatic protagonist finds his hardened exterior beginning to thaw when he grows increasingly close with Carey Mulligan’s neighbour Irene and her young son Benicio. When her husband is released from prison, he ropes the driver into a lucrative heist that inevitably goes wrong.
Having done his best to keep everyone around him at arm’s length, Gosling is then forced to put everything on the line to protect Irene and the boy from the vicious criminals seeking to make them collateral damage after the planned robbery doesn’t reap the desired rewards.
With LA-set crime stories featuring lashings of action and heavy doses of intrigue having been a staple of cinema for decades, Refn opted to look elsewhere for inspiration. Although she was the exact opposite of Drive’s intended target audience, he found the perfect bout of inspiration when reading his own kid a bedtime story.
“The whole structure of the film came from Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” he admitted to Filmmaker Magazine. “I had been reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales to my daughter the year before. On this movie, I began to think, ‘Well, what if this is like a Grimms’ Fairy Tale?’. I couldn’t have made the film I wanted to make if I didn’t have this story to make it with, the whole idea of these characters in LA being these archetypes.”
Continuing in that vein, Refn applied that to every single principal player in the narrative because “they are all archetypes by design.” Heading further down that road, the filmmaker saw Irene as “the innocent girl who stumbles into the woods,” with Gosling’s driver “the knight in shining armour who comes to save her.”
Rather disparagingly, though, “Ron Perlman is the midget with the sword” as the unscrupulous Izzy Paolozzi. Refn couldn’t imagine it any other way, either, with the director acknowledging how “the idea of making a fairy tale in Los Angeles is what really made me want to make this movie.” It’s hardly obvious, but Drive wouldn’t exist in its current form – possibly at all – if it wasn’t for the influence of the brothers Grimm.
