STRAIGHT SHOOTER
Nicolas Winding Refn rides in for the strangest horse opera…
With his new neon-drenched curio Copenhagen Cowboy, Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn is back where it all started: the city where his 1996 grimy debut movie Pusher was set. This time, it’s a little different. “When you say ‘Copenhagen’, expectations come up,” he tells Teasers. “Usually wonderful ducks! Maybe pornography, I don’t know, depends on what you’re into! But there is a very clichéd version of the word ‘Copenhagen’. And I thought ‘How do I turn that on its head? What could be interesting?’”
In a Netflix six-parter that mixes crime, fantasy, and the supernatural, the Drive director recognised just how different the city is now from a quarter of a century ago. “In a way you can say it’s my interpretation of what I think modern Copenhagen is and will essentially be. That’s why there’s multi-languages where there is not a barrier of subtitling. People understand each other’s dialects, whether you’re Chinese, Serbian, Albanian, Danish, English, Japanese, whatever.”
Centre stage is Miu (Angela Bundalovic), who makes her escape from a brothel to head out into the Copenhagen underworld. With Refn’s daughter Lola Corfixen also appearing, this female-centric saga makes a change from his earlier testosteronefuelled
tales like Valhalla Rising. “My life is run by women,” Refn shrugs. “Everything that I live and breathe for is some way connected to women. And in a way, I feel much more comfortable in that world. And so for me, I’ve always looked at women as being the strongest of the strongest.”
Curiously, it was the pandemic that inspired the show, marking Refn’s first Danish-set work since he concluded the Pusher trilogy in 2005. “We were as a family, like everyone else, forced to be together. And I said, ‘Well, why don’t I make something that my kids would watch?’ And specially Lola’s age, which is the generation that needs heroes and maybe heroes that are more reflective of them. And I said, ‘Can I contribute to that?’ So that’s how the idea came.”
Marking Refn’s second streaming show, following Amazon Prime’s Too Old To Die Young, he’s enjoyed tinkering with the serial format of late. “It’s like when people talk about sex. Any sex is good sex. I would suggest any canvas is a good canvas. And we probably haven’t even seen what the future is going to bring. I certainly didn’t expect the world to have foreseen TikTok and that now suddenly becoming a choice for a lot of younger generations to use creatively in a way that we’ve never seen before.” Is he on TikTok? “I do have a TikTok account. But my kids usually have to help me with it!” What does he do?
“I do dance,” he grins. “But with my kids!”
‘ I’ve always looked at women as being the strongest of the strongest’ NICOLAS WINDING REFN