(Check out my previous Refn essay on Valhalla Rising if you haven’t already.)

2011’s Drive was Nicolas Winding Refn’s first true Hollywood Feature. The screenwriting and much of the casting was done before he joined onto the project, and this itself was only achieved because the film’s star Ryan Gosling (Driver) would only join the project if he could choose the director. This arrangement seems odd to me, but is actually pretty common on large Hollywood productions. Refn checked out the script and put his own spin on it thematically and focused it while also beginning to apply his own visual sense of what the film should look like.

He elicited the help of a cinematographer he had never worked with previously in Newton Thomas Sigel. Their collaboration on Drive was their first and as of 2018, their only work together, though it bore fruit and created what Refn’s most beloved, most well-received film he has made to date. Sigel previously had a career spanning six decades from the 70s to the 2010s and had worked on dozens of major productions including Platoon and Wall Street with Oliver Stone, The Thin Blue Lin with Errol Morris, The Usual Suspects, Casino, and most importantly for Refn, Lucifer Rising with Kenneth Anger, a film that was a big influence on Refn’s previous film Valhalla Rising. The film is a neo-noir drama with high contrast color cinematography and near chiaroscuro. He applied a zone theory approach to the framing of subjects that makes the film visually potent in a directed and consistent manner unlike previous stylized Refn productions like Fear X or Bronson.

Most importantly, arguably, to the overall sense of power of the film’s mise-en-scene is the soundtrack and how it’s pulse-pounding synthpop sensibilities often heighten our sense as viewers of the alienation of Driver and the desolation of his world, as well as giving potent emotional elevation to scenes of warmth, of paranoia, and of intense violence (such as the absence, or dropping out, of sound in the infamous elevator scene). Most notable is Kavinsky’s great opener Night Call, which has since become something of a synthpop, ambient, House, and even pop classic for millions of people. Two works by Bronson composer Johnny Jewel also feature prominently in Under the Spell by his band Desire and Tick of the Clock by his band The Chromatics. Jewel was initially hired as a composer just for the purpose of setting the right mood for the shooting of film sequences, but a second composer, Cliff Martinez, was later hired to write new music in the same vein as Johnny Jewel’s and Kavinsky’s songs that were chosen for the production. Martinez proved a great choice as he has a background working within multiple musical genres and is something of a chameleon in this regard. He had previously played for Captain Beefheart, The Weirdos, and The Dickies, among other groups. But he had been a film composer for years and has worked on around seven Steven Soderberg films, most notably Traffic, Contagion, and Sex, Lies and Videotape. The latter of these put the final nail in the coffin for Refn who chose Martinez mostly on the strengths of just this one work.

And just as Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d’Or, the greatest prize in the entire film world, back in 1989, Refn would win best director at the Cannes film festival in 2011 for Drive. The film was made on a $15 million USD budget, but more than quintupled its money in the Box Office with a final total of around $78.1 million USD, more than Refn has made previously from all of his films combined, and on a budget only about double that of his previous box office flop Valhalla Rising. Most of the reason here seems to be in the marketing of the film by distributors as another Fast and the Furious blockbuster, all brawn, no brains film. But this film had both and appealed mostly to an arthouse crowd. So, while many viewers expressed discontent over the film’s even pace and downer mood, legions of others hailed it as the best film of the 2000s to date.

In my own mind its the best film since 1982, since Blade Runner, and it comfortably sits at #2 in my all-time favorite film list. Gosling’s performance in the film is subdued mostly but occasionally extreme violence seeps out, which colors the character by allowing him to contain multitudes. He speaks little and acts with his face and body language often, but every acting choice seems to fit perfectly within the mood of a scene and a sound. Refn and Gosling went on to collaborate again on the 2013 film Only God Forgives, as did composer Cliff Martinez. Gosling’s roles in these two films, and especially in this film, were in most minds, the reason why he was cast as Agent K by Denis Villeneuve in Blade Runner 2049. He brought much of Driver into that role and strengthened the film, which bears many similarities to Drive as a neo-noir about alienation, existentialism, and the question of what it means to be human. Both films are gems and masterpieces of evoking a certain mood and allowing one to think about deeper issues of identity in the Industrial, post-Industrial, and Future ages, as I think they will continue to do in coming years for people of all ages. As long as the viewer has the mental fortitude to give the film’s their time and to avoid projecting “action thriller” upon what are in essence tone poems and essays on the human conditions.

Cody Ward

[Check out my earlier thematic essay on the Parable of the Scorpion and the Frog in Drive]

[Next up: Only God Forgives]