Nicolas Winding Refn has his phone out, showing me one of the goriest scenes he’s ever been involved in. Given that the Danish director’s movies have involved hands getting sliced off, eyeballs being gouged out and a son reaching deep inside his mother’s womb, that’s certainly saying something. In this video, the camera is fixed upon a beating heart when suddenly – slash! – it gets sliced open with a knife.
We travel into the open chamber, as needles arrive to pierce through the muscle. Unsettling and compelling, could this be a future Palme d’Or winner? You see, Refn isn’t the director of this footage; he’s actually the guy lying conked out in the operating room while a surgeon attends to him.
Requesting that someone films your own heart surgery is a very Nicolas Winding Refn thing to do. But for the first 40 minutes of our chat, he recounts – with precious little interruption from me – the story of the 2023 operation that saved his life. Without it, he says, Her Private Hell would never have been made – not so much on health grounds, but because, before he was given this second chance at life, he had lost the passion for making movies.
I had fallen into a form of abyss. I was 50 years old and had no idea what to do with my remaining years.” The story begins in summer 2023, when Refn was working on a Prada campaign in Italy. He was feeling increasingly tired, and his daughter mentioned how pale he appeared, but he put it down to overwork.
It was only after he returned to his home in Copenhagen that a doctor examined him and discovered that a valve in his heart was broken, and filling his lungs with blood. They told him to come back in two weeks for open heart surgery, and gave him a choice of replacement valve: metal or pig. Her Private Hell stars Sophie Thatcher as Elle, an actor hoping to rebuild her relationship with her film mogul father by making her own Barberella-style sci-fi film: throughout the movie, you’re never quite sure if what you’re watching is the actual plot, or scenes from the fictional movie, or one of the characters’ fever dreams.
That’s pretty much how I feel listening to Refn’s tale of heart surgery, which he has transformed into some kind of epic cinematic quest. He mentions the quality of the light, the long silences (both features of his movies), and describes himself pleading to a higher power like George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life (his favourite film of all time): “Like, please God, just give me five more minutes, man!” Refn was told to write a will and says he “made peace” with his wife: “I said, it’s been 30 years, we had a good run at it, but like tears in the rain, everything has an end.” (He really does love that Blade Runner quote.) He says he went through all the typical emotions: fear, anger, sadness, desperation. Not that anyone would have known.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
