If he hadn't become a director of slickly stylized, blood-splattered crime thrillers, Nicolas Winding Refn might have been a toy designer. It was just a childhood fantasy, he says, but he still enjoys hanging out in toy stores looking for rare finds to add to his collection.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the word "fairy tale" keeps popping up whenever the director describes his latest film, "Drive," his first venture in filmmaking outside of Denmark.
"A few years ago, I started reading Grimm's fairy tales to my eldest daughter," says Mr. Refn, who lives in Copenhagen. "I started thinking about making a movie using the same very specific complex structure, an archetype with violence and a happy ending."
In the film, neon-lit L.A. is indeed a great big freeway where giddy high-speed car chases and murderous deeds abound (all to the tune of a throbbing pop soundtrack), but there's also a poetic flip side.
Call it an existential quest fueled by slow-burning unrequited love. The solitary, silent hero (Ryan Gosling)—a stunt driver by day who moonlights as a hired getaway man for heists—falls for his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan), a pretty young mother who seems to melt his unflinching tough-guy reserve—that is, until her ex-con boyfriend shows up. Other unsavory characters make brief appearances (Christina Hendricks as a moll) but they don't last long.
The film came about, Mr. Refn says, under the same circumstances as two of his favorite Hollywood classics, "Bullit" and "Point Blank," where the actor reads a book and gets directorial approval from the studio to pick the director. "Steve McQueen chose Peter Yates, Lee Marvin wanted John Boorman, and when Ryan Gosling read the novel 'Drive' by James Sallis, he came to me."
At 41 years old, Mr. Refn has a schoolboyish air, neatly dressed in a white shirt, khakis and black glasses. He speaks in a monotone with a slightly nasal twang, and rarely smiles.
"Our first meeting was basically a blind date," Mr. Refn recalls. "I was very sick with the flu and emotionally unstable from the strong cold medicine I'd taken. Ryan picked me up in his car—I don't drive—and we rode around L.A.
"On the way home, the song 'Can't fight this feeling anymore' by [REO] Speedwagon came on the radio. Something grabbed me, I started to cry. Then I turned to Ryan and said: 'I've got it! we're going to make a movie about a man who drives a car listening to pop music.'"
Ryan Gosling (who will also star in Mr. Refn's next Bangkok-set thriller, "Only God Forgives") says that the biggest challenge in "Drive" was internalizing his role, which required very little dialogue.
"In a way, it is such a relief to forget everything you know," Mr. Gosling says. "If I was feeling the pressure to tell the story, Nick would come up and hug me until I stopped resisting the hug. Then he'd look at me and say, 'go with God', and I would just relax."
Born in Copenhagen, Mr. Refn moved to New York with his mother and stepfather when he was 8, then briefly returned to his native turf as a teenager to complete his gymnasium (high school).
"After that, I went back to New York and spent a year at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, hated it, and got kicked out," he says. "I'm a film-school dropout. I hate all schools, or anything that tries to control me."
His first break came when he was 24. After returning to Copenhagen, where he enrolled in the Danish Film School, then quit, Mr. Refn was offered money to write and direct his first feature film, "Pusher" (1996).
"Nicolas just appeared one day, from out of the blue, wanting to do this gangster movie," says Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen. His longtime collaboration with Mr. Refn dates back to his star role as a low-life antihero in the "Pusher Trilogy" (1996-2005), followed by "Bleeder" (1999) and "Valhalla Rising" (2009).
"He was wearing those big glasses of his and short pants, and I'm thinking, what does this guy know about the tough inner-city drug life? He had no experience in real life but was very willing to listen to us. At first, I had my doubts, but changed my mind immediately. Nicolas was so radical and new—he was doing something never seen before in Danish film, with the energy of a Martin Scorsese movie."
What Mr. Mikkelsen most admires, he says, is the skillful blend of raw emotion with epic nastiness. "The characters who are not terribly loveable, but you still end up caring about them. Nicolas also has a way of being funny at the most violent moments."
Mr. Gosling says he hasn't really made up his mind whether "Drive" is actually meant to be funny. "All of Nick's films seem to provoke the strangest responses," Mr. Gosling says. "In 'Valhalla Rising,' the beginning is so intense and serious but then, halfway through the movie, the lead character suddenly cuts open his friend's stomach and starts pulling out his intestines. At which point, the whole audience burst out laughing."
As an autodidact, the director has his particular idiosyncrasies: He always films chronologically, and has no qualms about the fact that he is color-blind ("I can't see mid-colors, so the only color I can really relate to is red"), which would explain all that crimson hemoglobin.
Would the director link his own quirky sense of comedy to his Danish roots?
"Well, I think there's a very dark sarcasm rooted in Danish humor, which can be misinterpreted," he says. "Maybe the problem lies with the Danish mentality—we're desperately trying to be international but we haven't quite learned how yet."
Once pegged as the "wild child of Denmark," Mr. Refn has moved on. "Now that I'm older and I have a family, that takes up more of my time. You just want to make your movies.
"I had a first-class, ace, number-one Hollywood experience," he says. "I thought that working in L.A. would be like walking in a minefield, waiting for people to come out with their knives. Fortunately, I was able to make the film exactly the way I wanted to, with no final cut."
He pauses, then thinks out loud. "Would I do it again? We'll see."
