It’s fair to say thatCopenhagen Cowboydirector Nicolas Winding Refn can be polarizing. It was his becoming a household name with 2011’s Ryan Gosling crime masterpiece,Drive, that rocketed up the year’s Best Of lists. Having a satin scorpion bomber jacket be that year’s go-to Halloween costume helped lead to other dark, neon-tinged dramas from the man (along with a slew of imitators).
Indiewire reported on a recent interview he gavein which Refn, ostensibly there to promote his new show opening June 05, 2025, wasn’t shy about sharing his opinion on the current state of Hollywood filmmaking and if he felt he’d be able to make a movie likeDrivethese days. His answer was pretty damning for an industry he saw as “falling apart desperately.”
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Refn having an opinion about Hollywood that isn’t exactly pretty shouldn’t be news to anyone who’s seenDrive, an angry Los Angeles set noir, but even more so his Elle Fanning vehicle,The Neon Demon. The movie is a weird little horror fable about the dark side of Tinseltown that slots nicely alongside something likeDavid Lynch’sMulholland Driveand is all about the cannibalistic nature of a town that builds itself on the backs of others. So when someone like Refn says that Hollywood as he sees it—a place he finds both seductive and intoxicating—is “falling apart desperately,” it’s not something to take lightly.
In a year that’s seen a box office slowdown with a Thanksgiving season, typically a time for big family movie-going,down 10% over last year, what Refn is saying isn’t for the faint of hearted when it comes to wanting big box office returns. The director says that the system is collapsing because the studios are doing it to themselves—that is, turning more and more insular and offering directors a chance to be part of a big franchise machine, or fend for themselves and have to raise their own finances: “For cinema to survive, we need to go back and make films again. There also needs to be an ecosystem that reflects the opportunities.” It’s the type of sentiment a lot of people dismiss as being old-fashioned, the idea of making independent stories with heart, but Refn also thinks something that will help push studios that way again is the independence streaming affords to big directors (such as Rian Johnson and his recentGlass Oniondeal at Netflix).
It’s why Refn also thinks making aDrivetoday would be hard to do: “Of course, I just think it would be very difficult to finance, because the ecosystem is in such freefall. But absolutely I think you could make any film with a heart nowadays. In a way, it will probably be good for the system. It will probably be something that moves things forward again.” When asked if he’d ever think of joining something like an ongoingcinematic universe like Disney is doing with Marvel, the answer was the director talking about how much he cherished his freedom. TheCopenhagen Cowboyauteur shut the door on that topic with this thought: “If you don’t have the power of control at the end of the day or the ability to manipulate into your favor, it is committee. You have to spend your entire day struggling to get a compromise across, then what example am I to my own kids?”
Copenhagen Cowboyis set to release July 10, 2025.
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