Nicolas Winding Refn On the Genesis of ‘Her Private Hell’

May 21, 2026 / Sophie Clearwater /

Sophie Thatcher in Her Private Hell. Courtesy Cannes Film Festival

It’s not often in Cannes that a filmmaker talks about his own resurrection—literally. “Three years ago, I died,” Nicolas Winding Refn told a black-tie audience after they cheered at the premiere of his latest film, Her Private Hell. “I was dead for 25 minutes. And that changes you.” The Danish director, who nabbed Cannes’ Best Director Prize in 2011 for his electrifying Ryan Gosling thriller Drive, was back at the festival for the first time since his 2016 fashion horror fantasy The Neon Demon. Just like his last movie, Her Private Hell (which opens July 24 in the U.S.) is stacked with sumptuous visions of gorgeous young people in peril—this time featuring heartthrobs like Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Havana Rose Liu, Kristine Froseth and Diego Calva.

“You look great, Charles,” Refn cooed at Melton during the premiere. “You have a sexy body. I wish I had your body. Diego has a good body,” he continued. “Everyone has great bodies. The chicks have great bodies. Everyone is so beautiful.”

When he wasn’t ogling his cast, Refn was putting up his fists on the red carpet and inspiring his actors to join him in the pugilistic stance. He was even his own hype man in the Grand Lumière Theater, waving his arm like a conductor and goading the crowd to amp up their applause for him—a fair enough indulgence for someone who had just cheated death three years ago.

“Dying is very interesting,” Refn explained to nervous laughter the next morning at the film’s press conference. “Before I died, I had come to the end of my career, because I didn’t have anything left in me.” He said that a doctor had discovered almost accidentally that he had a leaking heart valve, which was causing blood to run backward through his heart. “I was dying as my lungs were filling up with blood. Two weeks later, I was operated on, and thank God the surgeon was Tom Cruise! This guy was beyond genius. He fixed my heart with his hands, and I was put together with electricity like Frankenstein.”

The moment was a reawakening for the 55-year-old father of two. “When I came back, I realized that I would have maybe 25 years left. So I would make damn use of them. How many people in their lives get a second chance? How can I expand my kids’ horizons? How can I expand everyone’s kids’ horizons?” Refn then started to choke up and wiped away tears. “Because it’s for the kids.”

Then again, Her Private Hell is anything but a kid’s movie, boasting nightmarish visions of nubile damsels being ripped asunder by a silhouetted black figure with tiny glowing eyes—all set to the lushly haunting romantic orchestrations of legendary Italian film composer Dino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now, Dressed to Kill).

Thatcher stars as Elle, a troubled actress whose father, Johnny Thunders (Dougray Scott), just married Elle’s friend Dominique (Liu). Both of them, along with a wide-eyed waif named Hunter (Froseth), are making a film adaptation of a sci-fi comic book series called Candy Floss. The trio is staying in a strikingly empty luxury hotel situated in a mysterious pink-and-blue city that’s shrouded in mist. And lurking outside is a terrifying serial killer named The Leather Man, who is looking for his doomed daughter, finding instead helpless women to tear open with his diamond-encrusted black-gloved hands. “A myth?” ponders one of the girls. “A monster? A God?”

“I started my career trying to capture authenticity,” said Refn, who first gained notice with the gritty Pusher trilogy, featuring a young Mads Mikkelsen as a low-life thug navigating the mean streets of Copenhagen. “And I realized after three movies that I would never be able to do that, because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t exist in the same way. So I became interested in unreality.”

And after increasingly dreamlike projects that include feature films like Bronson and Only God Forgives as well as TV series like Too Old to Die Young and the magical realist Copenhagen Cowboy, Refn (who himself stylized his own moniker into simply NWR on his film’s credits) seems to have forsaken verisimilitude for a dark fairy-tale take on life. “It’s really about human behavior, but set in a world of magic and fantasy where anything is possible,” he said. “And also now includes aesthetics and fashion and fetish and beauty and ugliness and desire and sex and pain.”

The actors were more than ready to dive into Refn’s arresting visions, especially Thatcher. “It was one of the most artistically satisfying experiences of my life,” said the Yellowjackets star. “He really opened me up in ways that I never imagined. It was so stylized, it was so different, it was so still.”

Liu agreed. “Nothing is clear-cut; everything is poetic,” she added. “Every answer you want, you get a question. It keeps you in a sort of creative liminal place. I’ve never been challenged that way before.”

Melton, whom Refn discovered when his daughter made him watch Riverdale with her, was just as smitten. “He’s one of the great auteurs in cinema,” he said.

Refn admitted that he’s more interested in rethinking the nature of narrative so that it more accurately reflects how people receive information in an algorithm-inflected, dopamine-driven, scrolling-screen society. Goodbye traditional storytelling, hello sensation-driven subconsciousness—an approach that definitely had its fans at the press conference. “Thank you for a stunning visual masterpiece,” said one Russian reporter. “Plenty of us got a visual orgasm yesterday.”

The biggest challenge for Refn these days is making sure he’s not rigid about his filmmaking process. “For me, Hell is when I know what it’s going to be,” he said. “Because then I don’t know how to make it. I’m only interested in not knowing. Creativity is like liquid. Flow with that. Life exists in the creative space. When you work together is when you’re alive, that’s when you’re living. Not knowing is the most exciting thing, and knowing is just not very interesting.”