As Nicolas Winding Refn teams with NEON Rated for his Cannes return, the film marks an important collaboration ahead of the indie banner’s 10th anniversary.
The co-writer and director of Her Private Hell, debuting May 18 at Cannes before its July 24 U.S. premiere, recently explained how his 2016 film The Neon Demon inspired the name of Tom Quinn and Tim League’s production and distribution company.
“Well, Neon is called Neon because of Neon Demon,” Refn told IndieWire of the hyper-stylized fashion noir film starring Elle Fanning, which he co-wrote with Mary Laws and Polly Stenham.
Following the movie’s 2016 Cannes premiere, a mysterious Chinese buyer that turned out to be NEON debuted, buying Nacho Vigalondo’s Colossal out of TIFF.
“Tom Quinn has been very instrumental in my life. Because he brought the Pusher trilogy to the U.S., and we did Only God Forgives together, which was a very, in a way, pivotal point in my own creative endeavor,” he explained. “We have always remained very close over the years, and so when I wanted to make a movie again, he was the one and only that I reached out to … he’s just amazing, and he was like, ‘What do you need?’ And I explained what I needed, and he was like, ‘I’m in.’”
Sophie Thatcher in ‘Her Private Hell’
NEON
Refn continued, “That kind of reminded me of the experience with Pusher One, where I was like, ‘What do I need? Well, I need this.’ And the government just gave it to me. [Pulls up blank paper] My CV was as blank as this piece of paper. I had no prior anything. And with Tom, it was like, ‘What do I need? This is my CV.’ It has a few little things on it, but he was still, you know, ‘I’m in.’ And that kind of gave me a re-evaluation of everything around me, but also an incredible amount of joy and pleasure in wanting to make a movie in how I see movies are for me now.”
Co-written by Refn and Esti Giordani, Her Private Hell stars Sophie Thatcher as Elle, a troubled young women searching for her father in a futuristic metropolis that’s been taken over by a deadly mist, crossing paths with Private K (Charles Melton), an American GI trying to rescue his daughter from Hell.