Fresh off the Fantasia International Film Festival, Refn reflects on embracing unreality, challenging masculinity, and crafting what may be his most fantastic vision to date.
Last week I made the pilgrimage to Montreal for the 30th edition of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which opened with the Canadian premiere of Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest film, Her Private Hell. While Refn has always filtered reality through a neon soaked lens—from Pusher to Drive and Valhalla Rising —his newest work feels like the moment he finally cuts the tether altogether. Equal parts fairy tale, Greek tragedy, and fever dream, Her Private Hell is an operatic plunge into an entirely artificial world that still pulses with the neon-soaked beauty, mythic violence, and emotional intensity that have defined his career.
The morning after the premiere, I had the chance to sit down with Refn to unpack the film’s many layers. What struck me most was how Her Private Hell feels like a spiritual successor to Only God Forgives. Where that film explored the toxic gravitational pull between a son and his mother, this one shifts its focus to a father and his daughter, examining masculinity, protection, innocence, and desire through the lens of fantasy rather than reality. Along the way, we discussed his evolution as a filmmaker, embracing the unreal, collaborating with new creative voices, fatherhood, wolves, severed hands, and why this may be the film that closes one chapter of his career while opening another.
Dan Tabor: I really love the world-building in Her Private Hell. Your previous work has generally been much more grounded, though, so what gave you the confidence to become untethered and take this jump into a more sci-fi/fantasy realm?
Nicolas Winding Refn: It’s an evolution. When I started making films, authenticity was everything. Everything had to be real, everything had to be accessible. But over the years, I became more interested in the unreal.
Reality started to feel smaller. I felt there was more I wanted to explore beyond the limitations of the real world. So I became interested in unreality. That’s where Bronson was a turning point, and then it continued to grow from there.
Eventually, everything became more like fairy tales.
With Her Private Hell, all my previous films were always set in realistic environments—whether it was the Scottish hills or the streets of Los Angeles. Even the television work I’ve done always had some kind of authentic background.
But with this film, I wanted to create a completely artificial environment. Everything had to feel constructed. It had to feel fake, almost like an opera. Like a stage.
It was almost the finale of a certain part of myself, and in order to move forward—to go to the next level—I needed to make this film.
Dan Tabor: Watching it, I thought, “This is new Nic. This is a new direction.” I was honestly worried you might pull back and make something more aligned with Drive, but you went completely the opposite direction, and I really appreciated that.
The film also introduces some new collaborators. Cliff Martinez didn’t do the score this time—you worked with the composer behind Body Double – Pino Donaggio, which was incredible. You also brought on a new co-writer, Esti Giordani What brought her into the project, and what was that collaboration like?
Nicolas Winding Refn: Esti had worked for me on a show I created for HBO when I was going to do Maniac Cop. She was one of my favorite writers who worked for me.
When I decided to make a movie again, I had some very specific ideas. I had a young girl coming to a city that doesn’t exist. I had Her Private Hell itself. I had the Leatherman—the glam monster.
But I needed a very good writer who understood narrative, especially television narrative, because it’s very specific. It’s built around information and moving from point A to point B.
So we spent about a year adapting these ideas and figuring out the relationship between these three central elements: Private K, the Leatherman, and Elle, played by Sophie Thatcher.
We had to craft some kind of narrative around that triangle.
Then, once you get to production, everything starts over again. You begin dismantling what you wrote, rebuilding it during filming, and then it continues evolving in post-production.
But I loved working with Esti. She was a wonderful writer.
Dan Tabor:I love that you gave somebody like her an opportunity, especially because we need more women working in genre. I felt that perspective throughout the film. There were moments where I thought, “Either Nick got this from his daughter, or this came from Esti,” because there are these very modern conversations about identity and being relatable—especially the Instagram culture moment where she asks, “Am I relatable?” and she doesn’t even think she is.
That dialogue was fantastic.
Nicolas Winding Refn: Yeah, she had this dance with the English language.
Dan Tabor: Watching this film, I couldn’t help but think back to Only God Forgives. Both films share similar thematic elements and seem preoccupied with family, desire, and control. They almost approach those ideas from opposite sides of the same conversation.
Where Only God Forgives explored a son and his relationship with his mother, Her Private Hell shifts the focus to a father and daughter. The father is obsessed with protecting his daughter and doesn’t want her to have sex with anyone—especially someone like himself.
Were those thematic connections intentional? Were they always part of the story? I’d almost call this a spiritual successor to Only God Forgives. There are so many echoes—even the imagery of the hands. I immediately thought, “Okay, the hands are back.”
Nicolas Winding Refn: With Only God Forgives, I explored the mother-son relationship, so it felt natural to examine the other side of that dynamic.
I’ve also become fascinated with what I call dadsploitation—this genre where fathers are allowed to destroy everything around them in order to protect innocence.
It’s a very biblical and primal idea, and ultimately it’s a male fantasy. Private K is a fantasy figure because we’re attracted to the notion that we can justify extreme violence through protection—not just protecting our children, but specifically our daughters, who somehow have to remain pure because they’re ours.
It’s a very complicated theme.
At the same time, there’s the idea that fathers always leave. As parents, we all leave eventually, while the child—the daughter—keeps longing.
Then I wanted to add another twist: the melodramatic revelation that Adele and Darling were once lovers, and that her father married her former lover.
That creates this strange stepmother figure who is also the embodiment of her own desires. She becomes almost an inner child, an alter ego within Private K’s world.
Dan Tabor: And have your daughters seen the film? My joke was that maybe whenever potential suitors come over, you just show them the movie and say, “You know what the chopping off the hand thing means, right? Okay…have fun on your date.” (Refn has spoken at length at how hands in his film symbolize masculunity and how cutting off hands is a metaphor for castration.)
Nicolas Winding Refn:
(Laughs) They came to the Cannes premiere. I don’t know if they really liked it.
Dan Tabor: One thing that really surprised me was how funny the movie is. I genuinely wasn’t expecting the humor.
Where did the whole “wolf talk” idea come from? The first time it happened, it completely caught me off guard, but then it fit the movie perfectly and was hilarious.
Nicolas Winding Refn: My youngest daughter, when she was little, always insisted that she was a wolf.
So I thought it would be fun if the girls suddenly started speaking wolf.
It’s a primal behavior—an expression of animal instinct, desire, and communication.
And then having Christine say, “You guys speak wolf? That’s so cool,” was a way of inviting her into that world.
It was a lot of fun.
It also became an interesting acting exercise because it’s a very experimental form of performance—to behave like an animal while still existing within the framework of a scene.
The first time we did it, you could really feel Havana and Sophie going to places they’d never gone before. By take twenty they were saying, “Okay…we get it now. We just have to howl at the moon.”
But it added another layer to the fairy tale. It became an act of transformation, and of course the wolf carries its own symbolism.
Dan Tabor: Loved it.
Finally, one thing that really stayed with me was the way the film taps into a very specific fear that comes with fatherhood—the realization of how dangerous the world can be for your daughter. The Leatherman is even referred to as the Devil.
As a filmmaker and as a father, how do you think men can confront these darker aspects of masculinity and ultimately become better people?
Nicolas Winding Refn: That’s a tough one.
I think there’s an inherent iconography surrounding the father as protector. Obviously, the mother is the ultimate protector—especially in the animal kingdom—but the father occupies a different role.
We’re detached from the experience of giving birth, so we compensate in other ways. We project our emotions differently.
Historically, the father’s role was tied to protecting the bloodline, protecting the children. That instinct doesn’t simply disappear because we’ve built cities and religions. It’s still inherent within us.
For men, there’s almost a pornography to that instinct, because violence becomes seductive when it can be justified as protection—especially when it’s about our daughters.
It becomes tangled up with ideas of purity, confused sexuality, and our animal instincts.
We’ve created societies and moral codes that we try to live by, but in our fantasies those rules disappear. Our imagination has no boundaries. In fantasy, we can become wolves again.
Then we return to society.
I think it’s important to recognize the value of the male figure, just as it’s important to recognize the value of the female figure. They create a balance. It’s a constant struggle between those two forces.
There isn’t really a right or wrong answer. There is only your own personal ideology and your own acceptance of who you are.
Dan Tabor: That’s it.
Nicolas Winding Refn: It’s a complicated subject.
It’s very easy to reduce these conversations to sound bites—to simply repeat whatever the current social norm happens to be.
But today’s norm won’t necessarily be the norm in five years, or ten years. Everything is always evolving.
The idea of father and mother is, in many ways, very simple. They represent the yin and the yang. That’s an important balance.
That doesn’t mean those ideas can’t be challenged or changed.
But I’m a man. I believe my relevance is equal to a woman’s. I’m just as much a part of the solution as I am a part of the problem.
It goes both ways.
Dan Tabor: Thank you so much for your thoughtful answer.
