Nicolas Winding Refn’s new film had no set script and needed 85 takes for one scene. “Every day was like, How are we gonna overcome this together?”
Photo: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images (Arnold Jerocki, Sameer Al-Doumy/AFP)
Nicolas Winding Refn is back at Cannes this year with Her Private Hell, an out-of-competition horror thriller about — well, it’s hard to say, exactly. Refn hasn’t made a feature since 2016’s Neon Demon; as he explained before a screening here, he spent the past ten years primarily working on streaming TV, where he joked that he’d “made a lot of money.” Then, he “died for 25 minutes” — he had a “leaky heart” — and when he came back to life, he was newly inspired to make his latest film. The resulting feature is enigmatic and lightly campy, strange and hallucinatory, taking place in a liminal futuristic city that’s clogged with thick mist and terrorized by a violent serial killer named Leather Man.
Hell’s protagonist, Elle (Sophie Thatcher), is an angry, depressed actress filming a high-concept, Barbarella-style movie while dealing with all sorts of offscreen drama. She’s got a strained relationship with her father (Dougray Scott); a complex psychosexual dynamic with her very young ex-friend turned stepmother (Havana Rose Liu); she’s being driven crazy by her impressionable, irrepressible co-star who won’t stop taking selfies and gyrating (Kristine Froseth); and she’ll ultimately cross paths with a stoic, single-minded local soldier (Charles Melton) who’s been brass-knuckling his way across town in search of his missing daughter. And, of course, there’s the whole problem of the serial killer, whom Elle and her band of misfits try to avoid as they film and fuck and fight and bark like dogs in couture costumes and Euphoria-grade eye makeup.
Liu and Froseth, who are good friends and recently co-starred onstage in New York’s All-Nighter, are particularly fun to watch in the film, draping themselves across various dreamy sets and speaking in slow, elliptical sentences. I sat down with them near the beach before the film’s French premiere to talk about the intensive, sob-inducing experience of making Her Private Hell. They’d both arrived in France the day before and were a little jet-lagged and delirious. “Turns out Cannes is about looking hot and feeling dehydrated,” joked Liu. “You’re supposed to look the best you’ve ever looked but feel somehow the worst.”
This is your first Cannes, right? What’s been the most surreal moment so far?
Kristine Froseth: I’ve done a TV Cannes series. Like seven years ago. But this is my first film Cannes. Getting to hear everyone’s interpretation of the film is the most exciting part. I’m loving having these conversations with people. And seeing Nic again. He’s in a great mood. It will take me a long time to process it all.
Havana Rose Liu: I went to a Celine dinner like, three years ago, during the festival. I saw the gowns. Beautiful gowns. Cannes feels like the perfect place to premiere this film. This environment, the water, the big dresses, the lights. It’s a heightened dream reality, like our film.
So what are people’s interpretations of the film?
HRL: People right now are more asking us. And the coolest thing about this process was being able to have entirely different interpretations. We talked about it being an open-world video game because there wasn’t a set script. So we’d follow along with their characters wherever they’d go next. We were all living our own journey of what it meant for each of our characters individually. And then we talked about what we were doing symbolically, archetypically, what we were commenting on in terms of masculine, feminine, hero, villain, victim.
Tell me about not having a set script. What was the pitch?
KF: I didn’t get a pitch! I had like, a five-minute conversation with Nic. I had these books behind me on Zoom about trauma and human behavior. And he really caught onto that and that’s all we talked about. I’m really interested in that but in a different way than my character is. Then he sent me some dummy sides and I actually taped with Havana for it. She’d already gotten the role at this stage. After that, he told me why he wanted to make it. His experience of having been dead. I think for a few minutes? Or how many seconds?
At the screening he said he was dead for 25 minutes.
KF: Yeah, I don’t remember the duration. He said he needed to come back for his youngest daughter. And he was very honest: “I don’t know what it’s really gonna ultimately be.” And throughout shooting he kept saying that. Just meeting him again now, he said, “I just figured it out. Kind of three days ago. What it is.” I love that. There was no certainty. He had a little power blanket he’d wear on set every day. He had these visceral dreams he’d come to set with every day. It would constantly change. But I never received a pitch.
So he was literally just like, “I died; let’s make this.”
KF: Yes! What he talked about was how the Leather Man is ultimately trying to find his daughter, and there’s so much about family and loss and love and abandonment. He needed to come back for his youngest daughter, and that’s ultimately what Private K and the Leather Man are doing.
HRL: After we met with him, he did have someone hand-deliver a script to our house for like three hours. We read it as fast as we could without taking photos. I really wanted to take a photo.
KF: I was scared if I did it that they’d somehow know.
HRL: The script did chew on a lot of the same things that are in the movie. The themes were there. The ending was vastly different. My character was vastly different. The second time I read a script, it was vastly different from the first one. But it was always the same core elements of a daughter with a complicated relationship to her father, and she’s in an unreality of the future, and there’s a father who’s in the past who’s searching for his daughter, and this serial killer who weaves the stories together.
How much say did you get in terms of your characters’ arcs?
HRL: It was collaborative, and we could always bring up thoughts or concerns or ideas. But he pushed up against it. Sometimes he’d say, “No.” And sometimes he’d say, “That’s exactly it.” We never had full say, but we weren’t excluded from the creative process. He gave us scaffolding and let us play inside of it. It was a lot about movement, a lot about paring things away. How much can you remove?
The way you guys move and speak is so interesting. What was the direction there?
HRL: My favorite line: “Nothing is everything.” He would say that to us all the time.
What does that mean?
HRL: What a great question!
KF: I’d call him the Riddle Man. I’d be like, “What about this? What about this?” And he’d give us the most poetic answer. It never made any sense.
HRL: It was just always trying to pare down or slow down. Almost to hit a trance or meditative state. And we’d enter into that world together. That was really tough for the two of us in the first week.
KF: Yes. Because we just came from a play that was so high intensity.
Yes, I saw it. The tone could not be more different.
KF: We were supposed to speak very, very quickly. And it was broader and bigger. And then we went to this film where we were like dolls.
HRL: And we could barely breathe. The first week was … I’ve been referring to it as “our private hell.” [Laughs.]
What were you saying to each other behind the scenes?
HRL: It was more just crying. Being like, “I don’t know how to do this.” But then we locked into what the tone was. Once you suspend disbelief and realize, “Oh, this is a response to the immediacy and quickness of our times.” It’s like slow cinema. You let your subconscious do the acting. But it was goddamn hard.
KF: I was the first one filming. I went to her apartment — we all lived together in an apartment complex — and I was picking her brain and being like, “I’m gonna try this out, this out.” Like we were cramming for the SATs or something. It was a scene that was ultimately cut, where my character checks into the hotel and my room is taken and my luggage is lost. And he’d always say, “Just one more time.” Then it was 60 takes later. He’d also stand next to the camera lens and observe you while you’re acting, which I’d never experienced before. He shows you the monitor so you can see yourself in the space as well. I’d also never liked that before. But I started to understand the pace. He would always tell me to “Slooow down. Callm down.” But it was quite the shock.
Coming from the play?
KF: From any set. It was completely different. Every single part of it.
HRL: It feels like what they do in Denmark. Hot, cold, hot, cold, saunas. The whole experience was that. Hot play to cold set. Every day, we were in this vortex of a world where you feel like dolls in these playhouses, being objects, being so still. All of our costumes were supposed to be stiff, to embody this dark, shadowy world. Then we’d leave and it’d be this gorgeous Copenhagen summer. And we’d jump in the water. Every day.
How did your friendship in Copenhagen differ from your friendship in New York?
KF: Well, I’m obsessed with Havana. When we met, I just immediately latched onto you. You’re my rock. I’d come in and bother her during the play. We’d share snacks. It sounds very codependent.
HRL: It was half a year of Havana-Kristine time. We cry together. That’s a highlight. It’s nice to have somebody to mirror with and be like, “I see you. You’re doing amazing.” On both of our hardest days in the play or the film, we’d really lean on each other. She’d be peeking at the monitor like, “So good!” We’d take care of each other.
KF: We help each other get out of spirals.
How do you each get the other out of a spiral?
KF: You fact-check me. What are the actual facts compared to where my brain goes, which is the worst-case scenario. You just ground me.
HRL: And she was so reassuring to me. I can get so self-critical. And she’d come and be the best cheerleader. After my first day, she bought me flowers, to be like, “You got this!” We were really life partners.
Did you ever spiral at the same time?
HRL: Yes. And on those days, we’d take some time apart. [Laughs.]
KF: That’s actually so true. And you didn’t like my tough-love phase.
HRL: Kristine had a crazy tough-love phase. But we got through that.
KF: I was in the gym all the time, and I was like, “We just gotta fucking do this shit. Just show up.” I was like, “We’re gonna lift weights and be fucking strong.”
HRL: Then about two weeks later she was like, “I feel like I wasn’t in a good way, so sorry!” And I was like, “I missed you, you bitch!”
What was the most surreal or difficult or strange moment in this film for you? There’s a lot of weird shit going on.
KF: I had a hard time in her climactic scene. We’d usually do so so many takes. But after one take I was hyperventilating and shaking. I couldn’t process it. The trauma, the desperation for love. She was so stuck in this awful cycle, and she needed that release. It was so late in the shoot, and it just started to feel so real. We were in chronological order, and we were so related to the characters. I said I could only give him one take. I couldn’t deal with it.
HRL: I remember you feeling nauseous.
How do you come down from that?
KF: The crew was so nice. They helped me do breathing exercises. Even Nic was very understanding, even though I know he wanted to do way more takes. It was the best part of the shooting process. Every day was like, “How are we gonna overcome this together?”
HRL: I think even just stepping into the first scene was daunting. It was so daunting to have to set something in stone. My climatic scene was very hard too. I think I shot it like 85 times. And by the end of the day, I was fully a cicada shell. I felt crispy and lost. I had already wept out everything I had so many times. I had no more voice left. And we used so much mist in that scene. I said, “Did you get it?” And they were like, “We couldn’t see you.” I remember being like [weeps].
The rigor was intense. As someone who can be self-critical, it’s a really interesting task to do it again and again and again and never feel like you fully got it. You push to the point where you break. And you’re kept in a state of the unknown the whole time. I had to find a full sense of surrender. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
How many times did you have to shoot the scene where you bark at each other like dogs?
HRL: Eighty-five times! The whole day. We shot basically one scene a day.
Did you switch up the barks?
HRL: A hundred percent. Maybe a hyena this time? A Chihuahua? What about a wolf? You do what you can!
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