Drive premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, winning Best Director for Nicolas Winding Refn. In the 15 years since its September release, the crime thriller has become iconic with Ryan Gosling’s scorpion jacket, the neon lighting of L.A. at night, and music by Chromatics, Desire, and more, not to mention the score by Cliff Martinez.
Refn almost blew his first meeting with Gosling, he shared at a 15th anniversary screening at American Cinematheque’s Los Feliz theater Friday night. The actor and director were paired up for a “professional meeting,” not any specific project. Refn was not at his best.
“I was high as a kite on this anti-flu medicine that Harrison Ford slipped into my drink prior,” Refn said. “It didn’t go very well. It was a disaster, like a first date. I asked him to take me home. I didn’t know L.A. very well but it was a long way. So he said, ‘Sure, I’ll give you a ride.’ We’re driving and it’s all very silent. It’s very awkward between us because it didn’t really amount to anything.”
The flu meds compromised Refn’s hearing. So when Gosling turned on the radio, Refn started singing along to “I Can’t Fight This Feeling Anymore” by REO Speedwagon.
“Because my hearing’s very low, I turn it really loud, like obnoxiously loud,” Refn said. I build myself into a frenzy and I started to sing along to the lyrics and I’m singing as loud as I can, I begin to cry. I’m hazy-eyed, emotionally unstable. Life was very weird at that moment.”
Refn was already aware of a screenplay adaptation of James Sallis’s Drive. The car karaoke inspired Refn to take the approach seen in the final film. Hossein Amini would write the film.
“I turned to Ryan and I scream in his face because the music is so loud,” Refn said. “I say, ‘I got it. We’re going to make a movie about a man who drives around at night listening to pop music because that’s his emotional relief.’ Ryan said, ‘I’m in.’”
The script was originally at Universal, who Refn said saw it as a way to capitalize on their success with the Fast and the Furious movies. In fact, Sarah Deming sued distributor FilmDistrict for misleading her to believe Drive was more action-packed. Refn said his financiers, secured at the Cannes market, were equally oblivious.
“The shooting draft, Hos and I, we delivered the day before we started shooting which no one bothered to read in production, meaning the financiers,” Refn said. “So when they saw the movie, they were like, ‘What movie is this? It’s terrible. Why are they just looking at each other? Is there any more footage?’ And there wasn’t. Drive is the kind of movie that was born and then everyone hated it until everyone loved it.”
One of their major objections was to the music. Had they gotten their way, the Drive soundtrack might have been a bargain bin compilation.
“They were like, ‘Can’t you use like classic rock?’” Refn shared. “I was like, Kid Rock? What are you talking about? It’s not a Calvin Klein commercial. They just didn’t have really good taste in music.”
In addition to musical musing at night, Refn also saw Drive as a love story. Gosling’s character, known only as Driver, falls for his neighbor, Irene (Carey Mulligan). Irene’s husband, Standard (Oscar Isaac), returns from prison in debt to mobsters so Driver tries to help him. Refn set the love story in the crime film, but his inspiration was much more mainstream.
“When I grew up in New York, there was a film that made a huge impression on me which was a film called Sixteen Candles which I think is an absolute amazing film,” Refn said. “When I was making Drive, I was remembering that film. The way that Molly Ringwald and that model falls in love was so magical for me.”
One of Drive’s most violent scenes is actually a love scene in Refn’s eyes. When mobsters find the apartment, Driver smashes a hit man’s head in in an elevator. The scene would have been a gunfight in the parking garage in the Universal version.
“The shootout scene was kind of reminiscent of a Universal Fast and Furious kind of knockoff,” Refn said. “A shootout in a garage? I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was more interested in this elevator scene because it’s a love story that is completely sexless, meaning that it’s about falling in love. It’s like teenage love stories. It’s not complicated. He needed to give her a kiss but he only had one. So it’s the only kiss and it’s the farewell kiss. But it’s also his transformation kiss because he’s now going to become a superhero.”
Even Refn’s lighting change once Driver springs into action confused the crew.
“The lights were switched,” Refn said. “Suddenly film production was like, ‘What’s happening with the electricity in the building?’ They learned.”
Refn devised the elevator scene on the set. He said he’s avoided larger budget films because with $100 million or more on the line, he’d lose the freedom to create such scenes on the fly. Even though the budget was $12 million, the elevator scene survived.
“That would maybe not go if you had a certain studio or executives behind you that already had a marketing plan in place,” Refn said. “There are certain things you would not be able to do because of political reasons. I think it’s important if there’s any filmmakers here, at least in my opinion, you have to be completely free. Free not just creatively but free financially. With every dollar you have you have a headache. How many headaches d o you want?”
His artistic resolve has only strengthened recently. In 2023, a leaking heart caused Refn to clinically die for 25 minutes. The experience made him value time spent making and watching film even more.
“My human respect for others, if I have to take their time, I need to give them an experience, not just information,” Refn said. “Most entertainment is information. It’s giving and taking information but I don’t necessarily think that’s an experience. That’s just consuming. I think there are ways that we always have to remember that creativity has to convult emotions that then creates a thought and a thought is a human experience.”
He hopes to collaborate with Gosling again, too. Gosling stepped in for Refn’s next movie, Only God Forgives, when another actor dropped out. Refn would not name the original actor, but said he called that actor’s agent to thank him for dropping out when he ended up with Gosling instead.
“Ryan and I have always had this mantra that we know we have one more left in us,” Refn said. “But because we have done the action superhero movie and we’ve done the more existential, I call it the installation film, the only thing we have left to do is a comedy. Whatever we’re going to make, it’s going to be really funny.”
