Nicolas Winding Refn makes art house movies like Bronson, Drive and Only God Forgives. But his movie poster collection – his obscenely large movie poster collection – is grindhouse to the extreme, full of sleazy rarities and flagrant false-advertising for films with titles like X-Rated Supermarket and Psychedelic Sex Kicks. And damn it, that’s art too.
For the first time ever, Nicolas Winding Refn has collected his bizarre posters into a massive volume – Nicolas Winding Refn: The Act of Seeing – and he is sharing them with the world. The book launches later this week during Fantastic Fest and goes on sale in the U.S. for $100 on October 5, 2015 to the masses, with 324 full-color pages of sleazy poster goodness, featuring commentary on each film by Alan Jones. (You can pre-order it now through FabPress.com.)
I spoke on the phone with Nicolas Winding Refn after perusing an early, digital version of The Act of Seeing, in order to understand his motive for collecting these supposedly classless posters in the classiest book possible. What follows, is what he said.
Fab Press
Crave: Why did you end up with all these posters in the first place? Why was that something that intrigued you to begin with?
Nicolas Winding Refn: Well it basically was more of a strange coincidence. I had purchased all these posters from a friend of mine, a writer, and I didn’t know quite why I bought them. I just kind of did. When they finally came, a lot of boxes with about a thousand posters her in Copenhagen, I was like “Oh my goodness!” Liv [Corfixen, Refn’s spouse] was more like, “What the fuck?!” [Laughs.]
I’m not a walking encyclopedia of film. I don’t know every movie, I haven’t seen every movie, so I realized I didn’t really know what they were. But going through them was a bit like a time capsule, and I was like, “I do admire that era, the heyday of exploitation… or at least these kind of exploitation [movies], the more seedy or obscure ones…” I felt what could be interesting – so I don’t pack these away – is I’m going to produce the most expensive poster book ever produced, consisting of posters from films no one has ever heard of. That became the book.
“There’s a kind of flow of just, I guess what it must have been like walking down 42nd Street, not really knowing what you’re going to see but being promised everything.”
I know you’re responsible for laying out the order of these posters. How do you do that if you don’t know the films at all? Are you worried there’s someone out there who has seen all these films going, “Well that doesn’t make any sense?”
[Laughs.] No because I look at it more… See, what’s interesting, just historically, is that this is all they had to promote these films. So I love the fact that they kind of go all out of some of these one-sheets, and promise and pretend what they can show you. The idea from the book is like [how] I edit my movies. Each page is like a turn into something else. You never know what’s going to come next. It was almost like finding the rhythm of a melody. Until that was found, it was kind of disoriented, but now there’s a kind of flow of just, I guess what it must have been like walking down 42nd Street, not really knowing what you’re going to see but being promised everything.
Fab Press
Do you have a favorite? Is there a particular aesthetic that you’re gravitating towards?
I have a lot of admiration for Curtis Harrington. There are two of his films in the book, actually: Queen of Blood, which does show up on some of these high-end auction sites, and then Night Tide, which is just an absolute magnificent film. I love the posters as well. I’ve seen those movies. There’s a poster [for] The Nest of the Cuckoo Bird which apparently is a lost film, and it’s the most pop art poster in the whole book. It looks like an abstract, it looks like a Basquiat painting rather than a poster for a movie.
I love some of those crude ones, the ones where it’s like they just got some black and white photos and did a quick mockup, and you have no idea what the connections are. Is it a theater? Is it a band? Is it an underground magazine? I love all those where it’s almost transparent that what they’re selling is all an illusion.
“Polarization, it’s a wonderful word because it means that loving or hating, it will plant a thought, and that’s what art can do.”
We don’t have that so much in our advertising anymore. People complain if you sell people on a movie and it isn’t exactly that film that was advertised. Do you think that’s a decent evolution or do you prefer this older era where you could just kind of put anything on a poster to get people into a theater, and hope that they don’t get mad?
Well I love the aesthetics of these posters. I mean, film posters to me is a wonderful art form. It’s something that has really gotten a revival, especially because of Mondo and all those great artists taking posters and designing all the movies and really creating great art. I love these kind of aesthetics. I love the curiosity. I love the imagination that a lot of them have. They’re probably more imaginative than the films. I love to be surprised, personally, so I like seeing something that touches me but doesn’t exactly tell me what it’s going to be, so it allows myself to see it and not be told everything beforehand.
Is that an aesthetic that you attempt to put in your own films, when you market them or approve poster designs?
Oh absolutely. I think the one element that art can do is surprise people. We live in a time where there’s apparently a very high interest in categorizing or defining everything, even from the beginning, and I believe that’s wrong. I believe it’s the opposite, it should be about discovery and imagination. And polarization, it’s a wonderful word because it means that loving or hating, it will plant a thought, and that’s what art can do.
Fab Press
You said that Night Tide was one of the films in the book you actually had seen…
Yes.
How many would you say you actually have watched out of all of these posters?
[Thinks.] Probably twenty percent?
Is that a coincidence? Did you seek any of them out?
No, no, I just don’t have the time. [Laughs.] I mean I would love to see some of them but I just don’t know even where to begin. But the reason more for Night Tide was that I was quite friendly with Curtis Harrington before he died, and I really, really, truly, truly love Night Tide. I think it’s just an absolute brilliant film.
“It’s preserving part of our culture and presenting it, in a Warhol style, where it was originally treated like trash and was probably disposed of, and then suddenly you turn trash into high art by presenting it a different way.”
Is that why there are two posters for Night Tide in the book? Not a lot of films get multiple representations…
I think that it has to do with my own… Curtis Harrington had a very, very sad career and is generally written off or very much forgotten. But I consider him one of the great ‘60s filmmakers who made some wrong choices, but it doesn’t take away from what a great filmmaker he was, and the movie itself is just one of the great films of that era, in terms of I can’t come up with another movie that I can think of that has had two such incredible posters for the same film.
So it was both a personal thing between me and Curtis, and also I thought it was interesting, again, to show the book has a structure that’s always a surprise. You never know what’s going to happen next, just like… One of my favorite things in the book is the easter egg of the hand-painted posters.
You consider that an easter egg?
It’s almost like with everything else I don’t think everyone expects to see a hand-painted poster from some obscure cinema, or [that was] shown illegally and that’s why they made their own posters.
Fab Press
There’s this whole poster culture, of finding alternate posters, creating alternate posters. Are you completely on the outside of that, or do you feel like – with this book – you are a part of it?
Oh god. [Laughs.] I don’t look at it more like that. I look at it more like a time capsule, almost like history, in its definition. It’s preserving part of our culture and presenting it, in a Warhol style, where it was originally treated like trash and was probably disposed of, and then suddenly you turn trash into high art by presenting it a different way. That I thought was a kind of enjoyable thing. But there is a great film poster history and if you go on some of those auction sites around the world, there’s a lot of money in selling and buying movie posters. It’s almost like a profession.
Are you going to be exhibiting these posters, or is it only in the book?
No, we’re doing a gallery with Mondo, an event as well, […] and then we’re doing a gallery showing in Sitges, Spain in October, and then we are doing a very big gallery showing in Lyon, in France, which is where film generated.
I really enjoyed this book. Thank you for putting these all together.
You’re very welcome. I paid for it by taking money that I made from my Lincoln campaigns with [Matthew] McConaughey. [Laughs.] I wanted to pay for everything myself, so it’s some of the money I made shooting McConaughey riding around the desert, thinking gibberish.
Top Photo Credit: Gunther Campine
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
