Top 66 Nicolas Winding Refn Quotes

Whenever I make a movie, I always try to figure out what kind of music it would be.

Polarizing is the greatest achievement in any art form, even in cinema.

People react to ‘Drive’ in a way that is very primal.

All my films represent my own needs and wants.

When I was 20 years old, my uncle was an arthouse distributor, and he would take me to Cannes every year to work as a film scout.

For me, it’s all about having the performers feel confident in their movements and surroundings. And then I’ll figure out how to photograph it afterward.

L.A. films are hard to define compared to New York films because New York films are their own subgenre, in a way. L.A. is more transparent.

The best way to move forward – to bury the past. That doesn’t mean you forget it.

Filmmaking is not about what we see – it’s a very misconceived notion; it’s about what we don’t see.

I love to look at beauty.

I base everything on my instinctual approach. There’s something very satisfying in that creativity, and it’s a bit like an infant drawing.

L.A. is, on one hand, very mysterious; it’s very modern. It’s a mysterious place – it’s a haunting place – and everything in our culture around the world of entertainment leads back to Hollywood.

Art has the power to influence and to make you react to something that you normally wouldn’t concern, worry, or even think about or wouldn’t want to talk about.

For me, the greatest pleasure is when you make something, and everyone argues about it.

I’d love to do a yakuza movie.

I’m not a guy’s guy. I always loved girl things. I loved dolls. I loved dressing up and much more.

I moved to New York when I was eight years old, in 1978. I grew up in Manhattan. I couldn’t speak any English, and I had dyslexia, so it took me many years before I could read.

The greater the darkness, the better the drama.

I very much love Los Angeles, and I love working here. I find it very inspiring and very creative, and some of the best crews are in Los Angeles.

Oh, I love L.A. It’s not so much about Hollywood. I love everything in L.A.

I wanted to be famous. I guess I thought acting would make me famous.

I’m not a political filmmaker.

‘Valhalla Rising’ is a fusion of my upbringing, basically: everything I grew up loving and wanted to make a film of.

Denmark is like a Sylvanian world, but one thing it breeds is malady. The malady is generally in good taste. Opinions are correct. That is the chief enemy of creativity.

Every film that you make has to have a scene that is the heart that blood flows through in every other scene. That scene doesn’t always have to be in the beginning of the film. But it can also be at the end, or in the middle, and that can sometimes make the film more effective.

Creativity is about taking what is the norm and expanding it and continuing to expand it and expand it and expand it and expand it.

I think the Internet is the greatest invention since women.

I’ve always worked a lot with silence in my films. It forces the audience to concentrate on what they’re seeing, because silence is pure emotions. It has no logic; it goes straight to the heart.

When I was 12 or 13, I started going to the cinema myself.

As long as your movies don’t lose money, you’ll always be able to make them.

Coming to Hollywood, you always hear the horror stories, but I had good people around me who maybe didn’t understand what I was doing but always protected me.

My writing has always been more out of the need to write a movie rather than me being a good writer.

I was very affected as a foreigner coming from Copenhagen, which is the safest, most liberal town in the entire galaxy. I was like an alien stranded in a strange land for the first time in the U.S.

Filmmaking is like any kind of art form. You have to try to figure it out, and you’re going to do that by trying.

Beauty is like a new class system. The world is so obsessed with beauty; it has been for the last 2,000 years. It’s the one stock that’s never gone down, the one stock that’s never gone out of fashion.

I’m a huge John Hughes fan, and I grew up in the ’80s, when his films came out. So, my introduction to what you’d call ‘cinema love,’ that illusion of love, was ‘Sixteen Candles’ and Molly Ringwald.

My world is just one big chaos!

I think that art is an act of violence, and the more emotionally engaged you are in a piece of art, the more violent it feels.

I think that, again, filmmaking is the director’s medium in the end, and the best thing a producer can do is stay out of the way and support the director one hundred percent.

A lot of the surreal filmmakers, like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or countless other underground filmmakers… Their sense of explosive images have always dominated their films. It’s a way to shock the senses, to make them open themselves.

The only thing that would really make my mother angry would be if I liked horror movies or violence or Ronald Reagan. And very violent films were a way for me to rebel. You have to rebel against your parents.

I always, as a firm rule, make my movies based on how inexpensively I can make them because that means the more freedom I’m going to have.

The ‘Neon Demon’ is very much designed to be like a YouTube movie. It’s designed to be chopped up. You can cut it up into seven or eight pieces and they’re, like, vignettes.

The first thing I do when I go to people’s houses is look at their television, turn it on.

The greatest artists were in a situation where they had to pay their bills. That’s a very convenient way to get very creative very fast.

It’s hard to always challenge yourself, coming up with new ways to make your life difficult, so when you make something, it becomes more interesting.

You cannot go through life without cause and effect.

I would love to make a kids’ movie. But they are very hard to make.

I’m a very funny man, so funny comes natural. And if you want to create horror, you need to be funny or campy.

There are wonderful artists who deal in the fashion world only, and you see by their creations that they are changing our understanding of sexuality and freedom and gender-bending.

I like all kinds of film.

Writing is fantasizing about what your film will be like. Shooting is reality. And the post-production is recovering the idea you had.

I find beauty very frightening because it’s such an all consuming subject in our society.

Good and bad are not really relevant to me.

The most creative phase of a film is in shooting, because structure is the defining element of that phase.

Hollywood is Hollywood. It’ll never change, although it does go through its own transformations. I think that there’s this obsessiveness with making money, which has gotten out of proportion.

I started making films purely based on what I would like to see.

I like extremes.

‘Bronson’ was like, ‘I’ll do a movie about my own life.’ And it became like an experiment.

I like to take things as they come.

America has no one to catch you when you fall. That makes you want to achieve. It is healthy for the soul. But all that is valued is success.

I’m calculated in other things, but not in what I make.

I would love to make a romantic comedy.

I’m dyslexic, which means I have trouble reading and writing. So images really speak to me.

People need to express themselves. The more you do that, the better a person you become.

My mother and stepfather were documentary filmmakers and, of course, had a very healthy Scandinavian mentality. When it came to cinema, my mother was very obsessed with the French New Wave. That was her generation.