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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.
I had met Keanu [Reeves]a few times so it was a great way to reach out to him with an actual job offer. He very kindly agreed to be part of it and it was an amazing experience.
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.
Only God Forgives was very much a generation gap in a way. It was all the youth of the world that embraced it. I make films for young people. That's what I will continue to do.
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.
When you make something that everyone likes, it's very easy to say, "Well, I'll just repeat that." Because that was easy. I have a formula. But creatively, it's not very interesting.
I think you have to be so indulgent in creativity in that, if you're happy, it's successful. If it's then financially successful, which is different parameters, then you're also happy.
We live in a time where it's very much in vogue, constant search for pure utopian equality, and which, on one level, is quite amusingly silly but also on another probably very important.
I just think it was time [in THe Neon Demon]to do a film about women. But not just women, I wanted to do a movie about a teenage girl. It was a great counter to the masculinity of "Drive."
I was in Hollywood. It's the mythology heart. It's where all the European films came in the '30s and '40s. The marriage between Europe and Hollywood has always been the best when it works.
You must understand that violence in a movie is only a tool. If it's used badly, it will be horrible. If it's used correctly, it can be very interesting. But, essentially, it's just a tool.
Ironically, even the fashion in New York or Paris or Milan or whatever, or music in Berlin, or art in, I don't know, Madrid - all these scenes come and go. Everything leads back to Hollywood.
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.
In "Drive," there's a heightened male edge. In "Only God Forgives," it was almost crawling back into the womb of the mother. And now with "The Neon Demon," being reborn as a 16-year-old girl.
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've been trying to get away from physical violence; it's too easy; it doesn't satisfy me artistically to work with it. Dramatic violence is much more interesting, but it's much more difficult.
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.
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.
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.
I think that television has become really, really interesting, in terms of character development. You can have 13 hours to develop a character, as opposed to 25 minutes in a movie. That excites me.
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.
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.
We have basic urges all the time. They just manifest themselves in different scenarios, and we have to turn those weaknesses into our strengths. Art is very much about making your weaknesses your strength.
People very quickly define success due to the amount of money something makes. In the end, I think everyone is searching for that experience. That's why we continue to go to the movies and watch television.
I very much enjoy my freedom creatively but I also would love to make one of those big Hollywood films that costs a lot of money and has a lot of people running around with cell phones and all that insanity.
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.
If an actor or actress is recognizable, that changes our perception of them. Sometimes you can play against type, or you can just repeat what they've already done. It can be an obstacle; it's a very fine line.
I try not to have too specific notions because it messes up the process later on. I leave it very open to interpretation until I start casting. Everything changes a lot when you start casting. I mean everything.
I don't know if power seduces less or more. I think power is a constant evolving mechanism that, since the dawn of time, on one level corrupts and on another level does not. But I think, no matter what, mutates.
The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.
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.
I feel that silence is the greatest word, ever. When you don't talk, people begin to read things into you or you become what they long for. When you don't talk, you almost become the mirror image of the other person.
The power of art is as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; it's just where war destroys, art inspires. But in order to inspire, you need to react to it. And, if it doesn't penetrate your mind, you can't react to it.
How can creativity be bad? You can have, "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," but, in the end, it's an individual experience. How can you even begin to define that? I find that sometimes extremely arrogant and counter-productive.
My movie [The Neon Demon] is a hyper-version of the obsession with beauty. As this crazy obsession grows, longevity does not. Everything seems to become younger and younger. The girls and people around them cannibalize themselves.
If you create something that is essentially alien to you - as a man - and make a film about woman, the more I can surround myself with woman and combine it with my soul's point of view, the more I become a stranger in a strange land.
In the end, self-indulgence is very much about your ego and your vanity and your own id. The more you can indulge in it, the more pleasurable it becomes. And then when it feeds out, it's able to penetrate the mind and create a reaction.
I am not a fan of improvisation, because it bores me. Working off a tight scenario gives you the confidence and ability to - why don't we change this a little bit and bring it back to the script. You always discover things while shooting.
I've never really been on a date, because I've been with the same girl since my early twenties, but on our first date, I showed her The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I was like, "Hey, you've got to see this!" And we've been together ever since.
Beauty is on one level pure surface, and on the other hand, it's the most complex subject that we can touch upon because it says everything about us as people. It's a subject we very quickly begin to argue about. I think that's so interesting.
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.
I think the idea of individualism has become more dominating in our society. You can even see it by our political system: how people vote, the job situation, the sociological evolution that's happening, what's happening in the Middle East and so forth.
I mean, what do you think creativity is? Nothing but self-indulgence. And the more self-indulgent it is, the more interesting it becomes. So I think that part of creativity is also falling in love with your own narcissism: accepting it, using it as an asset.
I love to be on location. I love to be in other parts of the world. I love to be where I'm reminded about real, you know, emotions. I love to touch things and design things, and I think that, for the actor, it certainly - it certainly helps their performance.
I am a child of cinema, and I am a cineaste, so everything I do is a reference to something I've heard or experienced or seen. And we all do it, we all steal. The ones who claim they don't, are obviously lying, because you do. You just have to make it your own.
I've stopped showing actors what to actually do. I rather just talk to them about it. Then I usually play music. That's a great way to convey inner emotion, bring the power of style and acting together. That's really what it is, very good acting without talking.
It's the hardest thing for an actor not to speak because you take away their main tool. So for an actor, it's very frustrating and very challenging, and very few people can pull it off. Some actors can say a thousand words with just a look, and it's a unique gift.
Financing films that are demanding is a task, in itself. Because people are so afraid of taking any kind of chance, because they're afraid the audience isn't going to respond. But the audience is so hungry for anything that's a bit original, personal, or different.
[Liv Corfixen] very much part of my life in that she's everything in my life and we found a way to use each other much more on a creative level as well. She was kind of the idea for this movie so I wanted to acknowledge that. She gave me the original idea to make the film.
Amazon, being a provider - not just on the playing field - is, of course, opening up a whole new set of possibilities. At the same time, Amazon also understands platforms. For them, theatrical is an extremely important event. I also believe it's the best way of seeing a movie.