DRIVE 2011
Nicolas Winding Refn’s arty action drama still revs our engines
THE OPENING CREDITS for Drive play as music video, montage and mission statement. It’s an intoxicating cocktail, Ryan Gosling’s getaway driver smouldering into oblivion, Kavinsky’s song ‘Nightcall’ making you melt, the warm lighting oozing off the screen. Soothing and sensual, it’s a flawless exercise in cool that continues right up to the end credits. Drive knows exactly what it is. No more, no less.
It was somewhat perverse that it ended up like this. Adapted by Hossein Amini from James Sallis’ 2005 novel, it was to be directed by Neil Marshall and to star Hugh Jackman — Refn later said it was intended to be a Fast & Furious-type franchise. But things changed. Gosling was hired to star, and was allowed to choose the director. It could only, he thought, be Refn. From there, the pair began stripping away dialogue. Gosling’s driver, a character influenced by the alpha A-listers of 1960s and ’70s Hollywood, became a wordless wonder, speaking only when he deemed it necessary. Why talk when you can kiss someone? Why chat when you could get straight to smashing their face in?
This minimalism makes it more mysterious, more of a mood. And that’s what Drive is. Refn wanted it to look like the way he saw Los Angeles at night, and in the hands of cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, every shot looks like something from a high-end fashion shoot. The songs, contemporary compositions in thrall to 1980s synth-pop, smother you in aural ecstasy, while Cliff Martinez’s woozy score seamlessly weaves in and out. Every scene is a soundbath.
Aesthetic is everything in Drive. The purple font, the satin scorpion jacket, the squelching, crunching sounds of a head being stomped to bits. It is both fever dream and fantasy, awash in colour, so seductive that you feel the heat, the hormones: it is cinematic synaesthesia. Refn would double down on this aesthetic in the future, in Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, but both of those got a little lost up their own art holes. With Drive, everything was in its right place. The perfect alchemy.