Art director

Nicolas Winding Refn on his favourite collectible posters.

How did this book start?

I bought a poster collection from a writer called Jimmy McDonough, who is famous for writing biographies about Neil Young, Russ Meyer and Andy Milligan. We’d become friends and one day he said, “I have this huge poster collection from when I used to work on Times Square, in the ’70s and ’80s. Would you want to buy them?” A few months later about a thousand posters showed up. I didn’t know what to do with them at all, and then I got this idea to do a poster book. I wanted to make the most expensive poster book ever produced about films no-one – including myself – had ever heard about.

What is it you like – the obscurity or the artwork?

For me, it’s more about the obscurity. It’s more like a historical time-machine into an era that no longer exists. It’s an era we romanticise a lot because most of us weren’t alive back then. So for me, it was more like collecting historical documents that otherwise would’ve evaporated into nothingness. The majority of these films… I certainly don’t know what they are.

Are any of these posters framed in your house?

No, none of them! We have an El Topo poster from Italy, but I don’t have any movie stuff up. I collect toys! The posters are just in a box in the basement. I’ll probably have to find a way to donate them somewhere. I don’t really know what else to do with them. I thought, ‘Put them in a book and then bury them somewhere!’

Of your own movies, which is your favourite poster?

I thought the American one-sheet poster for Only

God Forgives with that neon dragon was great. That was an amazing poster. JM

ETA | 14 September The Act

Of Seeing by Nicolas Winding Refn and Alan Jones is published by Fab Press, www.fabpress.com.