"Valhalla Rising": A Q&A with Filmmaker Nicolas Refn

Danish filmmaker Nicolas Refn is a self-proclaimed genre director, yet his work doesn’t sit happily in static categories. The cult classic Pusher trilogy was a raw, nearly vérité look at the drug market in Copenhagen. Bronson (2008) told the story of a promiscuously violent prisoner, giving more than a bit of a nod to Kubricks A Clockwork Orange. Now comes Valhalla Rising, an unbelievably bloody fever dream about Christian warriors wending their way through unforgiving countryside, starring Refn collaborator Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye, a mute stranger who has visions of the future. (Confused? That might be Refn’s intent — he compares the effect of Valhalla Rising to taking LSD.) ARTINFO met up with the director to discuss Scottish drone music, cinematic theft, and why some people just can’t handle an old-fashioned disemboweling.

ARTINFO: Can you make a connection between the Pusher movies and Bronson and Valhalla Rising?

Nicolas Refn: This is pure fantasy. It’s based in a kind of realism, meaning that you believe what you see is true. If you say the Pusher trilogy is like real life, this is science fiction. Maybe if you took the science out of fiction, and make it a mental-fiction film.

What about the context of the film? We don’t really know that much about where we are or when we are.

Disorientation. It’s almost like turning on a light switch in a room that you haven’t been in for a long time. Would you know the premises? And from then on the film moves.

Did you build from any historical foundation?

No, I kind of just made it up. That was the fun part of it.

I went into Valhalla Rising, after seeing the trailer, with a very different idea than what it ended up being. I thought it was going to be an action movie.

Slam, bang!

And there’s certainly those action–filled moments, but it’s a fairly quiet movie. It’s punctuated with silence.

It’s almost like the film had to be a meditation. That was the only way, because the film’s about faith, and faith is searching within. So even though the film is about traveling beyond the stars it circulates back to traveling inwards. It’s almost like: How do you create a movie like a drug? If you take LSD, the way you do that is you consume it and then you wait for it to take over. And the waiting period is the frustrating period because you don’t know when or how it’s going to hit you. Valhalla was conceived like that. In the first twenty minutes, it’s an almost conventional fight movie. But where do we go from there?

Since the movie starts like a conventional action film, were you trying to get people into the theater expecting this blockbuster, and then toying with them?

Yes. I certainly want to be surprised and thrown around and tossed. I think that’s what art can do. I’ve made films that people have a lot of opinions about, but this is probably the most extreme I’ve gone so far.

Are you cherishing those conflicted opinions?

Well, I love that because that’s who I am. I believe in diversity and I think the chief enemy of creativity is in the middle.

Do you enjoy those reviews that are so negative — when someone just despised the movie, but at least felt passionately?

Yes. I know deep inside there is something they like, but they just couldn’t put their finger on it.

They’ll remember it.

‘Til they die. And that’s even more important. It’s strange that the people who don’t like the film are people that are very provoked by it. So it just shows that they are scared of what they should think.

Provoked by the violence?

Yeah, and also the whole nature of the film and the rhythm. The people — thank god they’re the minority — that don’t like it, don’t like it with such a passion that you just know it got ‘em. They just don’t know it yet. They’ll know it in a couple of years.

It’s got to be frustrating to be one of those critics, because if they say “I hate this movie,” your reaction is to say —

“Not really.”

In terms of filming the violence, what research was involved to make sure that it was realistic?

I’m unfortunately very good at making violence. And it’s really just all about the build up, the tension; when it comes, it comes very fast, and it’s very effective. We’ve all seen movies where people fight and they keep on avoiding and hitting and avoiding for ten minutes. It doesn’t happen like that. Violence is over within a tenth of a second.

Were you afraid to cross a line, where you try to film something violent and it becomes too over-the-top, too cartoonish?

I know that at the premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music there were people that had difficulties when he pulls out people’s guts. When people react to violent or extreme things, sometimes they have to laugh out loud to protect themselves. It only shows that it has some very deep effect on them.

The other major component of Valhalla Rising is its landscape. What locations did you scout?

The whole film was shot in Scotland because I was able to get the Scottish Green to give me money for the budget. The budget was about three and a half million dollars, so we didn’t have a lot of money but… you know. I became obsessed with this kind of remoteness and how far could I go into the mountains. Strangely, it was very close to Glasgow so I didn’t have to overnight anybody; besides, I couldn’t afford to do that. And then the traveling scenes on the boat, were done in a warehouse in Glasgow. I didn’t have any money so we basically conceived of a rig that the boat was on; the boat was made of plastic. That was the most expensive part. I had plastic garbage bags on the floor that people could push up and down to look like water, like waves, and then I could use some CGI water on top.

Did you have difficulties using the equipment to film on this terrain?

Oh! It was the toughest thing I’ve certainly ever done and also the photographer, who’d done documentaries of the ice areas of Greenland, said it was so fucking hard because the terrain was so unfriendly and dangerous. Just the movement of going up and down. We ate lunch outside, I had no money for coverage, there was nothing. We shot in chronological order.

What about color in the film? A lot of the green obviously comes from the landscape, the gray comes from the fog. And then those dream sequences, in red.

Red flashes are basically One-Eye seeing into the future. I’m colorblind, so I like extreme contrast and there are certain big colors I can’t even see, so everything had to be very diverse.

But you can see that red.

Yeah. And I think that it gives the film a supernatural feel even though it’s very much based in a kind of gritty reality.

Did you set out to make more of an art film with Valhalla Rising?

No, because I don’t make art films in the classical sense. I make genre films, and with that you can make them very progressive. I set out making films with the fear of “If this is going to be my last movie, have I made it the way that I want to?” I mean, there were some people that said, “Look, do this and this and that and we’ll give you triple the budget.” I guess they wanted it to be more like Braveheart and I certainly didn’t have an interest in that.

At the same time, are there things that you pulled from movies like Braveheart?

We all steal. I mean anybody who says they don’t steal is lying to you. I stole everything I could from Alejandro Jodorowsky; I stole a specific cut from Kubricks 2001. And then just generally a lot of things I grew up with when I was younger: samurai movies, Westerns. It’s like a catharsis of films that I go through.

The soundtrack is such an important part of the film’s tension. It’s very minimal, almost like a drone.

It was like, God, how do the 1100s sound? What would non-music sound like? What would silence sound like? The way we designed the sound was that we hired a Scottish folk band to come and play while watching the movie, one take, just play through the whole movie, and then we would take [the recordings] and pitch them down just to sounds. So it would be all organic sounds but they were pitched in bizarre and distorted ways that made them inhuman.

What did they think when they heard it afterwards?

They were happy. I mean in Scotland I think they just have to get paid.

What’s next for you? I see conflicting things online about a project with Harrison Ford called The Dying of the Light.

The Harrison Ford film — you know, classic Hollywood scenario — fell apart right before we were supposed to start shooting. I said, “I’m not going to be dependent on anybody again in my life like that.” It was Paul Schraders script, very beautiful. It was such a shame that that film didn’t happen. It was a victim of Hollywood.

Do you foresee trying something like that again?

No. I will never compromise my own material again for that.

And that’s what happened?

And then nothing happened. And then goodbye.

Valhalla Rising opens July 16 at the IFC Center in New York.