Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has capped his quietly impressive career in crime thrillers with the critically acclaimed Drive. Edmund Lee talks to the best director winner at Cannes.

When Robert De Niro presented the Best Director award to Danish writer-director Nicholas Winding Refn at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, a small footnote in cinematic history came full circle. The former played a psychotic driver out to protect his favourite girl in an obscure little film – called Taxi Driver – all those years ago, while the latter has just officially arrived at the big time with a Ryan Gosling-starring heist-gone-wrong flick – called Drive – about a psychotic driver out to protect his favourite girl. “That shows [De Niro] has good taste,” deadpans Refn over the phone from Bangkok, where he’s preparing for his next project with Gosling, a Western titled Only God Forgives, which will begin shooting at Christmas.

Although his surprise win at Cannes – if you listen to Refn – hasn’t changed much of anything, it’s hard not to notice the 41-year-old’s rising star in Hollywood; but don’t call Drive a ‘Hollywood production’. “Well, it’s a Nicholas Winding Refn movie,” he corrects me as I bring up the H-word. “It wasn’t a Hollywood movie because all the studios passed on financing it, so I had to get [my own ways] to finance it. It was [more] like making a ‘Nicholas movie’ in Los Angeles.” That paper-thin distinction, however, may soon prove obsolete with his Logan’s Run remake, for which Refn is writing the script and will collaborate with Gosling yet again. After describing the widely known project as ‘a secret’, the writer-director breaks into restrained giggles. “Let’s say that I’m a fetish filmmaker,” he says, as if finally giving us a hint on his vision for the movie. “I make films based on what I like to see.”

It is safe to say that what Refn likes to see is usually not what most of us would gladly admit to like – for his is a world marked by constant stylistic flourishes and, more alarmingly, occasional outbursts of ultra-violence. When a minor character blows his own head off with a shotgun in Refn’s directorial debut, the low-budget crime flick Pusher (1996), it has turned out to be just an appetiser for the director’s seeming penchant for grindhouse material. (Pusher has developed into a very popular trilogy down the years – of increasingly grotesque violence.) And while he loves to call his latest retro-thriller ‘a fairy tale in Los Angeles’, Drive does bear witness to one character having his wrist sliced open and another having his head smashed by repeated stamping – and so the gallery of brutality goes on.

Based on an existentialist novel that was first brought to the director’s attention by Gosling (“Ryan wanted to make a movie with me, and I came up with an emotion. Then the movie just happened.”), Drive follows the actor’s unnamed protagonist – a Hollywood stuntman by day, a getaway wheelman by night – as he gradually finds his inner psychopath while caring for his vulnerable neighbour, played by the ever-innocent Carey Mulligan. “The more psychotic the protagonist, the better the drama,” Refn remarks, half-jokingly, at one point. From the font used in its opening titles (which was taken from the 1983 movie Risky Business) to its sumptuous 1980s ambiance throughout, Drive also marks a nostalgic return of sorts for its director. “I’m from the ’80s,” says Refn. “I was a teenager in the ’80s. It’s in my DNA.”

By his own admission, the one ’80s landmark that he has not referenced, however, is John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow – even if Gosling keeps chewing on a toothpick in exactly the same fashion Chow Yun-fat did in that 1986 action classic. “No,” Refn dismisses the influence, before adding, “but I love the film.” He then reveals the cineaste in him, which long-term viewers would certainly have noticed from the film-loving misfits in his second film, Bleeder (1999). “John Woo’s The Killer,” he enthuses, “my favourite Hong Kong movie of all time!”

Drive opens on Nov 10.