A biography for Nicolas Winding Refnhasn’t been written yet.
“I've always felt that I was from the future because the future is really not about what you make but what you stand for.”
“Whenever I make a movie, I always try to figure out what kind of music it would be.”
“Art thrives on obstacles. The bigger the obstacle, the better the drama.”
“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.”
“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.”
“People need to express themselves. The more you do that, the better a person you become.”
“I like to take things as they come.”
“For 'Drive,' we needed the songs to dictate emotions and really bring you into the mind of The Driver; he's a unique and complicated guy, so the music itself had to be unique and complicated.”
“Oh, I love L.A. It's not so much about Hollywood. I love everything in L.A.”
“I always approach every film I make as if it was going to be the last. So if I'm going to go out, I'm going out with a bang.”
“I'm calculated in other things, but not in what I make.”
“I'm not a political filmmaker.”
“I believe that the constant possibility of failure or possibility of decision-making feeds your creativity.”
“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.”
“I'm not the greatest filmmaker. There are a lot of better filmmakers than me.”
“To me, the darkest film ever made and the film, to me, that's the darkest picture in the human humanity's soul is 'Pretty Woman.'”
“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.”
“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.”
“People have called me everything. Every word in the dictionary I've been called at one point or another.”
“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.”