In 24 hours, nearly a week after release, I would have seen DRIVE. My thoughts will follow, but here’s a series of interviews from the cast of the movie, namely Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan, as well as the film’s visionary director, Nicolas Winding Refn. These interviews, while not conducted by me personally are an excellent read. So can’t wait to see this film tomorrow night; I already know that I’m going to love the shit out of it…
Ryan Gosling
Ryan Gosling rose to fame with the 2001 Sundance hit The Believer, which told the searing story of a violent, anti-semitic neo-Nazi thug who hides a shocking secret from his friends: he is Jewish. The film established Gosling as a fearless and meticulous actor ready to embrace the most difficult projects, although his starring role in the acclaimed 2004 tragi-drama The Notebook revealed his softer side. Though that film was a modest mainstream hit, Gosling has since chosen to concentrate on smaller, more character-based movies, most notably Half Nelson (2006), which brought him an Academy Award nomination as an urban schoolteacher with serious drug and alcohol issues.
After Lars And The Real Girl (2007), a bittersweet comedy in which he played a lonely man who has a relationship with an inflatable doll, Gosling gave what was arguably the keynote performance of his career to date in Derek Cianfrance’s extraordinary Blue Valentine, which charted the crumbling marriage of a young blue-collar couple. In the violent, electronic-music scored retro thriller Drive – directed by Danish-born Nicolas Winding Refn – Gosling plays a nameless drifter who works as a stuntman by day and moonlights as a getaway driver by night. The driver keeps himself to himself, until his love for his pretty neighbour Irene (Carey Mulligan) and her young son leads him to abandon his usual caution and recklessly put his life on the line…
When did you first meet Nicolas Winding Refn?
I met him in a restaurant and he ignored me for two hours.
Was that because he was ill?
Yeah, but I only found that out later. And I had really emphasised to everyone, to Marc Platt, the producer of Drive, that this was the guy. Even though I hadn’t met him, it didn’t matter. I knew he was the one that had to make this film, so I set up a meeting with Nicky.
What happened when you met?
It goes like this. We meet in a restaurant and he acts bored and disinterested. He just makes noises, y’know, like, ‘Ummm…’ ‘Umm…’ And that is not an answer. (Laughs) He doesn’t eat anything, he doesn’t drink anything, he doesn’t wanna talk, he just wants to go home. So I say, “I’ll take you home.” Which was gonna be another hour and a half out of my day. I’m thinking, How could this be? How can I have been so wrong when I was sure I was so sure I was so right?! It’s quiet in the car, so I turn up the radio to kill the silence. Suddenly REO Speedwagon comes on – Can’t Fight This Feeling. Nicolas… I hear him crying. I look over, he’s crying. And he’s singing: ‘I can’t fight this feeling any more…’ He’s banging his knees. And he looks at me and says, “This is it! This is the movie! It’s about a man who drives around listening to pop music at night because it’s the only way he can feel.” And so the movie became about driving. Not about stunts. Not about crashes. It became about the spell that being in a car puts you in. You start somewhere, and then you get to your destination and you don’t remember how you got there.
A lot of people might be expecting car chases and spectacular crashes in a film called Drive, but that’s not necessarily the case here…
Yeah, there’s all kinds of different forms of driving. But more than anything, it’s just being in the car. My favourite part of the movie is that sound you hear as the cars are going by.
The film has the feel of a certain era, specifically the ’80s…
We watched a lot of movies together. (Pause) The beauty of Nic is that he wants the film to mirror the experience of making the film. He never wants it to stop, he never wants to go home and he never wants it to end. So you shoot all day, you go to his place, the editing room’s in the house, and you cut all night. And when Matt wants to go home, you get in the car, you take a drive, listen to some music, maybe watch a movie… Everything just feeds each other, until eventually, I think, the film is the essence of what the experience of making it was like. But as regards the era, we talked a lot about John Hughes, and how much we wished that Pretty In Pink was violent. Because if it was violent it would be everything. It would have it all. (Laughs) Seeing what we’ve made, it makes sense now. But at the time we really didn’t know.
What’s your level of tolerance for violence? For example, the scene in the lift is very explicit, where you stamp on the guy’s head until it explodes…
Well, I loved Irreversible, and Nic and I talked a lot about the violence in that. To the point where we called Gaspar Noe to ask him how he did his head-smashing scene in that. But I didn’t really ever watch a lot of violent films. I’ve started now – I realise that I like blood. But Nicolas, the first thing he ever said to me is, “Violence is art.”
Did he ever ask you what his favourite movie is? His is The Texas Chain Saw Massacre…
Oh yeah, he used to watch it while he was eating breakfast, getting ready for school in the morning. His mother was very worried.
Did the level of violence ever make you nervous?
No, it felt like it had to be… (Pause) It just felt right – I felt like it had to be that violent. Also, when I was trying to decide who should direct the film, I went to see Valhalla Rising in the theatre. It’s a very serious film, it’s poetry, it’s an art film. It’s very intense and it’s very heavy. Then, halfway through the movie, the lead character is fighting, and he starts pulling out some guy’s intestines. And everybody in the audience started laughing. They were hitting each other, turning round in their seats, they were covering their eyes – they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Because Nic had brought them to life. Everyone was so relieved, because they figured that if something was art, it could also be entertainment.
What was the reaction like to Drive when it premiered in Cannes?
People started cheering. They started cheering halfway through the movie.
Was there a particular moment?
As soon as the driver comes out covered in blood in the hotel room they just started cheering, after he smacks Christina Hendricks on the bed. And after that, they started clapping to the beat of the music. They seemed so relieved that they were allowed to enjoy themselves.
How good are your driving skills? Did you learn to do everything the character does?
Well, Nic said I could pick the car, and it could be any car I wanted. I didn’t know anything about cars, so I picked a 73 Chevy Malibu – it cost $2,000 from a junkyard. And I rebuilt it. I did everything on the car except the transmission. This guy called Pedro did the transmission, even though I asked him not to. The last thing was the transmission; it was a very emotional day for me, because I was finishing the car. And Pedro fucked with me and did it the night before! He knew it would hurt me but he did it anyway! I was going to take it out but I didn’t have time because the movie needed the car. So I can’t say I did everything on it.
What about the stunt driving?
I did stunt-driving classes with Darrin Prescott. That was the best time ever. You show up at a church parking lot that’s abandoned and there’s a brand new Camara and a brand-new Mustang sitting there. And you get in your car and you drive it until it won’t drive any more – till it’s smoking or it’s on fire. Then you get out and a tow-truck takes it away. The first thing I learned how to do is a 90, which is where you drive as fast as you can towards a target, and then at a certain point you get lock-up, which is where the rear wheels lock up and the car starts like to slide, like it’s on ice. Then you drag the wheel 90 degrees and the car goes sideways until the passenger window lines up with your target and you stop. So I started with a pylon and then, about an hour into training, Darrin gets out of his car and says, “OK, now me! Now me!” And he goes and stands in the middle of the car park and I drive as fast as I can towards him. I get lock on, I pull my rear wheels, and when I come to a stop the passenger door is resting right up against his leg. And once that happened, I gained his trust. Although I didn’t really have an option. The driving part was just so much fun. So addictive. And such a a bad habit to get into, because you can’t //do// it anywhere!
Was that research helpful to getting into character? It’s a very different film to, say, Blue Valentine, which was much more dialogue-based…
I talked so much in Blue Valentine. Now, I love Blue Valentine, I loved //making// Blue Valentine, it was a big deal in my life, the experience of that. But there was so much talking. And then I did so much talking while I was promoting it. I was tired of talking. So I said to Nic, ‘I need to take out all my lines.’
So it was your idea to make the character so quiet?
Well, I think it was maybe Nic’s plan all along. But what we both found while we were having such a great time working together is that we were having a lot of the same ideas at the same time. So we took out a lot of the dialogue, and it was such a relief to basically have to trust Nic that he was going to tell the story and I didn’t have to. All I had to do was drive.
Did you ever listen to the electronic music that you use in the movie?
Me, Nic and Matt Newman, who edited Drive, we were all listening the same stuff at that time. I was listening to a lot of Johnny Jewel, Mirage, The Chromatics and Glass Candy. Matt and Nic were listening a lot to FM Attack and Kavinsky, so we were all in that world when the film started. We really knew that that was the sound of the movie, which helped.
What’s your approach to work? You haven’t made all that many movies – do you prefer to take your time?
I used to, but then I made a lot of movies recently. I guess I hit 30! (Laughs) I did a comedy with Steve Carell called Crazy Stupid Love, and I just did The Ides Of March, with George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti, Jeffrey Wright – lots of great actors. Then I’m going to do A Place Behind The Pines, which is with Derek Cianfrance, who did Blue Valentine, and that’s a movie about a bank robbery… And after that I’m going to do a gangster picture called The Gangster Squad, in which Sean Penn plays Mickey Cohen.
What’s important to you when you’re choosing roles? You seem to alternate auteur movies with genre movies…
Well, I think after making Drive, I realise they’re not mutually exclusive. So I’m interested in exploring that idea right now.
Have you already started working with Derek Cianfrance? His process takes a long time…
It does, but this movie is different. Pines is gonna be a very different film.
Do you like a lot of rehearsal? Is preparation important to you?
It is, it just depends on the film. For instance, I don’t know how much preparation actually makes its way – in obvious ways – into a film. I mean, someone else could have built a 73 Chevy Malibu and you’d never know the difference. My character never has to talk about cars or do anything underneath a car, so it doesn’t really matter. But it felt important to me. Who knows why, but it was to me. And with every character you have to find a way. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes you can’t really find the thing you need. But it’s important to me.
Does that explain the toothpick that the Driver has in his mouth all the way through the movie?
It was an amalgamation of things. He felt like a guy who’d seen too many movies and done stunts for all these action heroes. And in reality, he’s the hero, he’s the one doing the stunts. So he’s a product of all the movies he’s seen.
Do you think directors are scared of you? Or have a preconception of you as a serious actor?
I do think… (Pause) I have encountered that. But I think that’s why I’m interested in working with some of the same people now, like working with Derek and working with Nic. We get each other. It’s hard when you don’t know a director. You might like their work, but you spend half the movie just trying to develop a dialogue with them, and you lose a lot of opportunities to make something great because there’s a miscommunication between you, or something’s off. I’d be happy just to make movies with Nic and Derek.
Have you thought of directing yourself?
Yeah.
What appeals to you? Is it a frustration that comes from being an actor that you’re not in control? I’m thinking here, for example of Brad Pitt’s role in Tree Of Life, which is very much secondary to the director’s filmmaking style…
It’s interesting… (Pause) Did you ever listen to the commentary on Days Of Heaven from Richard Gere? He says in the commentary… Don’t quote me on this, but it’s something to the effect that he was disappointed for a lot of years because he felt that some of the best work he’d ever done was in that film, but it all ended up on the cutting-room floor, and it was so frustrating to him because no one was ever gonna see it. But he also said it was the best film he’d ever made and he was proud to be in it. So he was wrestling with that for a long time.
Will you be working with Nicolas again? Is Logan’s Run happening?
Yeah, we’re working on it. It’s like the reverse of Drive. He has a vision for it. I don’t know, I’d never seen the film when he first mentioned it, but we were talking about some of the ideas and… I don’t know how it’s gonna work out, I really don’t, because it’s still so early in the process. (Laughs) But it will be interesting to see him working with a big studio! But before Logans Run gets going we’re working on Only God Forgives in Bangkok with Kristen Scott Thomas, which I’m excited about.
Carey Mulligan
London-born English actress Carey Mulligan came to international prominence on the back of her Academy Award-nominated turn in Lone Scherfig’s An Education, a role for which she earned Best Actress awards from the National Board of Review, the British Independent Film Awards and BAFTA. She recently starred in Mark Romanek’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, with Keira Knightley and Andrew Garfield, and also in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps, playing the daughter of Michael Douglas’s iconic character. She also starred as Kitty in Jane Austen’s Price and Prejudice. Additional films include Public Enemies, The Greatest, Brothers, and When Did You Last See Your Father. In Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson, Valhalla Rising), she plays Irene, a woman whose life is coloured by two different relationships with two different men…
Your character, Irene, must’ve been interesting to play; Irene displays a genuine love of two different men. There’s a dichotomy there — they’re both appealing…
That’s is what we loved about Oscar [Isaac, who plays her husband, Standard] because it could have been about a guy who came out of prison and wasn’t particularly likable and it would have made a much more obvious choice for her to go with Driver [Ryan Gosling’s character]. It was in the script but Oscar has a real innocence, so when you see him come out of prison you know he was a really good father and really wanted to make things better; he was a good guy and he was attractive. It wasn’t like the ugly dude comes out of prison covered in tattoos and then you compare him to Ryan Gosling.
Why do Irene and Driver connect?
The thing with Irene and Driver was a kind of a communion. They both have these very lonely existences, he especially, and she is just struggling along and they found each other kind of peaceful. There is something not real about it. I think maybe they both know that. It is a sort of fairytale what they had. Then it is over and she is back to real life. I think it was different in that sense. She is slightly taken out of herself and I don’t know that they could function like that forever. One of my favourite scenes is driving down the river basin; it is all a bit heightened and the reality is slightly different. It is two different worlds really. Oscar and Standard, his character, are from the real world, and Ryan/Driver seem like they’re from this slightly fairytale land.
And she doesn’t make the conventional Hollywood decision…
I like that she doesn’t choose him. She chooses her husband. She doesn’t run off with him. She is not bent by his will and she does not want money. She just wants her family and wants to protect her family. So I liked her. So it was an easy choice but also the script with Oscar coming in playing that character made it a different question. Like you said with Ryan and Oscar’s characters being inherently good people with bad sides to them it is interesting. That is what Nick does. That’s what I loved about Bronson. And then knowing that Ryan was attached and being able to act with him. I knew that being in a room with him was going to be exciting. And also in terms of the character I wanted to see if I could pull off playing a mother because I have always played younger. I am 26 now and playing my own age is always difficult. I have always been a couple of years below.
You’re a big fan on Nicolas Winding Refn, the director. Which of his movies first lured you in?
I have since watched the Pusher trilogy but it was mainly Bronson. Then last summer I watched Valhalla Rising, which I thought was amazing. I just loved Bronson so much and I’d heard about Valhalla. I had missed it in England and I got a copy of it when I was living in America.
And it was after watching Valhalla that you told your agent you wanted to work with him?
Yes. I hadn’t worked in about a year. There wasn’t anything significantly different from anything I had already done and then I emailed my agent, having watched Valhalla, that same night, and I was like, ‘I just want to work with Nicolas’ and he emailed me back two weeks later: ‘Well Nick has this script but you are not right for it. The character is a Latino woman, older. You could just try, go in see him and talk.’ Nic and I had met actually in Melbourne, the first time I ever did any kind of press. I went to Australia for ten days, through Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane. I did three days in each promoting An Education. So we had already met. He is just the most tender man. He is hilarious. He knows exactly what he wants and is brutally honest. He is also one of the kindest men, honestly, and I feel extremely lucky to become one of his friends as well as working with him.
Why didn’t you work for the year beforehand?
As much I wanted to I just couldn’t find something that I felt justified in doing. There was just too much that was similar to the parts I’d played before and things I had already done. I felt that until I found something that I felt excited about in terms of something different, I was going to wait.
What sort of roles were you being offered on the back of An Education; characters with quirks?
Yeah. It was like ‘The Girl Who Wore Black Eye Make up and was into The Ramones.’ It was just lots of stuff like that. And as brilliant as they were, there wasn’t a good enough reason for me to do them. And then costume drama, British things — I have by no means done enough work at all in that area but I felt I had just come out of a really long two years of doing lots of British TV, and lots of costume drama, Austen and Dickens, and I just didn’t feel like going back into that territory. I just thought that I should wait. Then Drive came along and then I did Shame with Steve McQueen and then I just suddenly found all these exciting things, but there was definitely a time when I thought there wasn’t much for me.
Much like Ryan Gosling, rather than chasing big-money blockbusting parts, you’ve found really interesting pictures…
I have always been interested in human stories and I probably lean towards drama really and those character parts are more interesting, generally. The part that I did in this and in Shame, they just weren’t there. I haven’t been strategic about picking the size of the project but I have found that a lot of the most interesting stuff has been in the independent films so that’s what Drive was and Shame but then Gatsby is an amazingly interesting role and an amazing cast but a massively different budget and scale. It has just been where the parts have been.
The part in The Great Gatsby, Daisy, was much coveted; were you a big F. Scott Fitzgerald fan?
I’d tried to read The Beautiful and The Damned at school, but I only read The Great Gatsby before I auditioned. It’s a great role. With Daisy I think her biggest problem is that she feels very two dimensional, she feels in herself that she doesn’t have very much to offer to the world but she is continuing this guise of being fascinating and interesting and it pains her that she doesn’t have anything to back that up. People talk about whom Fitzgerald drew from to write Daisy and there are elements of Zelda Sayre and of another woman he met called Ginevra King so that’s fascinating. I love reading about Zelda and her life and I think Daisy is just struggling with not finding herself interesting, and trying to fill the air, basically. I don’t think she is hard-hearted either. I could defend her for hours. I haven’t played anything like that before so it is exciting, something different.
And how do the paparazzi treat you nowadays?
I haven’t had any problem in London. In LA if they find out where you are living then it is quite hard. LA is worse. I have no problem in London.
What can you say about your Steve McQueen movie, Shame?
We shot it at the beginning of the year. It is Michael Fassbender who plays a guy living in New York struggling with loneliness and I play his sister, his slightly worried sister who comes to stay with him — the sister is a struggling artist and really it is a story about people struggling with loneliness — and incidents of hilarity ensue, as you can imagine (laughs!).
I understand the character is quite terrifying…
The character did terrify me. I had no idea. She’s an outrageous person, loud, uncompromising, very unlimited and brash and I begged Steve to give me the job and then afterwards it was like, ‘Sh*t. I now have no idea!’ But I just felt at that point there was a lot that I wanted to exercise. It was just one of the best experiences ever.
Nicolas Winding Refn (Director)
Nicolas Winding Refn exploded into the world of international cinema with his 1996 film Pusher, starring Kim Bodnia as a small-time drug dealer whose life is spiralling out of control. The more experimental drama Bleeder followed, and in 2003 Refn made his English-language debut with the hallucinatory thriller Fear X. Shot in Canada and co-scripted by cult writer Hubert Selby Jr, the film starred John Turturro as a man looking for his wife, who has gone missing in mysterious circumstances. The film was a critical success but a resounding box-office failure. As a result, Refn committed to making two Pusher sequels in a bid to reverse his company’s ailing fortunes.
After directing several episodes of the UK TV show Miss Marple, Refn went on to make two of his most ambitious and financially successful films to date. Bronson (2008) starred Tom Hardy as Charles Bronson in the real-life story of a petty crook who became notorious in Britain during the 1970s as the prison system’s most violent inmate. The following year Refn reteamed with his Pusher and Pusher 2 star Mads Mikkelsen for his psychedelic, surreal Viking adventure Valhalla Rising. Drive marks his first Hollywood venture, starring Ryan Gosling as The Driver, a nameless drifter who works as a film industry stuntman by day and moonlights as a getaway driver by night.
You’re mostly known for the Pusher movies, but Drive is very reminiscent of one of your more obscure movies, Fear X. Would you agree with that?
It is. You can say that the first wave of my filmmaking goes from Pusher to Fear X, with Bleeder in between. Bleeder is probably my most interesting film, just because it’s the first film where I tried not to make a conventional genre movie but still work with genre elements.
The love story in Drive is very similar to the romance in Bleeder…
Yes. My mother said that. She said, “This is like Bleeder in Hollywood.” (Laughs) Now, Bleeder is not in any way a perfect film, but there are parallels, and there are things in it that I was able to fulfil much more strongly in Drive. But going from Pusher to Fear X, that was my meltdown, both creatively, financially and everything, so I had to reinvent myself. And the Pusher Trilogy – by which I mean Pusher 2 and 3 – was basically me going back and starting from scratch in exactly the same pattern. I did Pusher 2 and 3 then I went off and did Bronson, which is a genre film that is more theatrical in its language. Then I did Valhalla Rising, which is very similar to Fear X, in that it’s a trip movie. And this movie, Drive is almost like the combination of everything before it. But this time it’s with a Hollywood movie star, in the heart of capitalistic filmmaking.
Did Ryan Gosling bring the script to you?
Yeah. It was really cool. And strange. They were trying to make this film at Universal. They’d bought the book by James Sallis about eight years ago, when it was published. But they didn’t read it – they just read the reviews, which said, “Pulpy action getaway movie,” and they thought, “OK, let’s buy that.” It was 100 pages long, and they were gonna make a $60 million version of it with Hugh Jackman. Then I think they read the script and thought, “Uh-oh.” (Laughs) Because it’s a very strange, existential story about the film industry.
Who wrote that original script?
Hossein Amini, who’s a really good scriptwriter, had been hired by Universal at that time to adapt the book into a commercial studio film. And poor Hossein, who is such a good, classic writer – he did Wings Of A Dove and Jude – had been able to find an interesting structural way to tell the story, because the book jumps backwards and forwards in time and is very episodic, which works as a book but wouldn’t work as a movie. Universal, though, basically forced the book out of the script. All the stuntman stuff was out. All the movie-world stuff was out. It just became a conventional real-man, all-action summer blockbuster. But for some they kept on not wanting to finance it.
How did it get to Ryan?
Ryan had read it by chance, because Marc Platt and he were trying to see if they could do a movie together. Marc Platt had been the producer assigned by Universal to do it. [After Universal passed on the movie] Ryan said he would do it on one condition: that he had approval of the director. So while all this was happening, I was in Los Angeles trying to get The Dying Of The Light made with Harrison Ford, a project that continues to decompose, to this day. This was going to be a Harrison Ford spy movie, in which Harrison Ford dies at the end. That was the thing – I wanted to kill Harrison Ford – and Paul Schrader did a really good script. But it just went haywire. And then I got a call asking if I wanted to meet Ryan Gosling.
How did that meeting go?
I was only in LA for four days and I had really bad flu. I was like, “Oh, I gotta get out of bed. OK…” So I took these US meds, these anti-fever meds, which was like… smoking morphine! (Laughs) I was high as a fucking kite! I’d had to read this script that my manager said Ryan was thinking about doing, and he set up a meeting for us. I’d read the script, but only once, and it was a bit hazy in my mind. All I remembered was that it was quite well written, technically, but that it was bit of a studio mess. So I agreed to meet with Ryan, I met him at a restaurant, and I sat next to him. But I couldn’t look at him. I just simply could not look at him.
Why not?
Because I was so ill! I couldn’t move my body, I had a stiff neck and all that. And he was really trying to pitch the film to me, saying how cool it would be and how much he loved everything I’d done and referencing all the movies I’d made so far… I said, “Yeah, yeah. Would you please take me home?” Because I didn’t drive a car. (Laughs) It was like a blind date gone really bad! So we got in the car and we were driving to Santa Monica where I was staying, and Ryan turned on the radio, because the silence was unbearable. He wanted to get it over and done with really fast! And on the radio comes REO Speedwagon’s Can’t Fight This Feeling Any More. And for some reason I started singing along. And I got louder, Then I turned it up really loud. And I started to get really emotional, to tear up. And I suddenly turned to him, for the first time since we met. It was like, “Are you gonna kiss him now or what?” (Laughs) And I said, “I got it! I got it! I know what we’re gonna make! We’re gonna make a movie about a guy who drives around at night listening to pop music because that’s his emotional release!” And Ryan was like, “Let’s do it.”
What was the next step?
I went back and read the book, because I needed to find the source material. And I fucking loved it. It’s a fucking, fucking awesome book. I put the whole stuntman storyline back in and I ripped 30 pages out of the studio script until it was just 81 pages. And then we went off and made the film. But, y’know, that story is very similar to how Bullitt got made. Because it was Steve McQueen who wanted Peter Yates to come from Britain and do Bullitt with him. This was the same thing here.
How did you cast the movie?
All the actors, except Bryan Cranston, came to my house and pitched themselves. Carey Mulligan, Albert Brooks, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks… They all came said, “We would love to be in this film.” I would sit in a big chair, and they would sit on my couch, and I would say, “Hmm, interesting…” (Laughs) But Bryan Cranston I had to go out and woo.
Were you wary of working in LA?
Well, I am a one-man army, and here I was, going to work in the lion’s den. But there were two advantages. One, the budget was low, so there were limits to how much it could be tampered with. And two, I had Ryan as my partner. We were changing the script every single day, we shot almost no coverage, and then Cannes said they wanted it for the festival, so I had a deadline – I had to do all the post-production in three and a half months. Actually, it wasn’t until the Cannes premiere that the producers and the financiers saw the finished movie, fully.
How was the premiere in Cannes?
We had a 12-minute standing ovation. I was so overwhelmed. I didn’t expect it.
Were you surprised to be in competition there?
It’s interesting. When I met [Cannes artistic director] Thierry Fremaux in February – we met in LA – we talked a lot about Sam Peckinpah, and it seems like a lot of the genre directors are now being rediscovered as great artists, which they always were. Like Peckinpah. Or even [horror director] George Romero. Suddenly they’re being analysed. The noir people we know about. But LA noir – and the mini-subgenre of that, which is neon noir – is something no one really knows about.
The aesthetic of Drive is very stylised and ’80s, but the structure is quiet conventional. What did you bring to the script?
The structure of the way it was made came from the fact that some years ago I started reading Grimm fairytales to my daughter. She’s at that age now – she just turned eight – when she can appreciate them. And I thought, I would love to make a movie that’s like a fairytale, because I felt that my films were moving in a much more fantastic direction. So I applied that structure to Drive. If you look at it, it’s very minimalistic, and all the characters are these archetypes. Irene is an innocent woman in danger who needs a hero, and the hero is a knight in a satin jacket with a scorpion on his back. That scorpion, by the way, is an exact replica of the scorpion in the logo of Kenneth Anger’s film Scorpio Rising.
Was there as much violence in the script as there is in the finished movie?
Yes, but perhaps not as explicitly as it is in the film! (Laughs) Like the scene with Ryan and Carey that starts with a kiss in the elevator – that was something we made up halfway into shooting. Because I wanted to find a scene that was the heart of the film. That’s the scene where he transforms himself into a superhero, because that’s where he goes on to kill all the bad guys. I like the idea that the driver protects purity. He loves this woman so much that he’d rather protect her than be with her. I always thought that was an interesting dilemma for a protagonist.
What’s happening in the scene where Ryan puts on a rubber mask to go after Nino?
It was actually Ryan who had this idea that we had to show a literal transformation scene. We had all these various ideas about the driver grooming himself, or changing his clothes. And then one day Ryan said, “What about a handsome mask?” I said, “That’s a great idea.”
What’s a handsome mask?
It’s basically a mask you can buy online that makes you look like someone else. The reason we’d heard about it was because there were some bank robberies that had been committed by a guy wearing a //black// handsome mask. They thought they were looking for an African-American, but it was an Eastern European guy, running round doing heists. So Ryan said we should look into it.
How did you come up with the score?
It basically comes from my editor Matt Newman, who’s more obsessive about these things than I am. When I told him I wanted electronic music for the movie, he knew about modern bands, and what was happening now in the electronic world, so he came in with a lot of suggestions, and I just picked the ones I liked. The only piece of music that I knew from the beginning was going to be in the movie was Oh My Love, the opera song. It’s actually taken from an Italian movie called Goodbye Uncle Tom [a 1971 “mondo” movie about slavery directed by Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco Prosperi] and if you see that movie, it’s the most offensive movie ever made. I thought it was kind of interesting doing that in a Hollywood movie, because nobody knew it.
That electronic sound is very important as regards setting the film’s tone…
Once I figured out what kind of songs I liked – always knowing that it had to be electronic – I had my composer, Cliff Martinez, emulate the sound of those songs, and that automatically made it a kind of a retro, 80ish, synthesiser Europop thing, which in America is kind of unusual – they didn’t really get into that kind of music, ever. When I decided to go with that route, a lot of people thought it was very strange, they thought it had never really been done in American popular movies. But then I had to remind them that John Hughes did it in all the wonderful movies he made in the 80s.
And what about the look of the film? Drive looks very 80s too…
LA is very much an ’80s city, it’s never left the ’80s, so it was very easy to get that retro feel. But it wasn’t an intention I went out to get – that’s just how LA actually looks.
In retrospect, how would you describe the experience of making this film?
I gotta say, I had the fucking best, best Hollywood experience. (Laughs) I lived in the Hollywood hills. I had a house with a swimming pool and an orange tree. I had assistants. I had Soho House membership. I lived under the Hollywood sign. I just needed the blow and it would have been 1974! (Laughs) I was always waiting for the knives to come out – like, when were they gonna slit my throat? And I had all these plans about how to avoid that. I was ready to go to battle. I was going to take my name off it and make an Alan Smithee movie if that was going to be the case. But nobody ever stood in my way. It was strange. It was like walking through a minefield when you know that almost everyone else who’s walked through it has been blown up. And then you get across, you look back, and you just think, “Wow.” So it’s not impossible. And when the Hollywood system works, I think it’s probably the best possible scenario. Because if you look back at the 30s and 40s, when all the Europeans came to Hollywood, it was a golden age of cinema.
What’s next for you?
Ryan and I are doing Logan’s Run, but before that I’m going to Bangkok to start shooting Only God Forgives, with Kristin Scott Thomas. I have a two-picture deal with Wild Bunch, and this is the first one. I’m going to write, produce and direct it.
What’s it about?
It’s about a man who thinks he’s god and a gangster looking for a religion to believe in. And to settle their differences they’re going to fight it out in a Thai boxing match.
DRIVE is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
