Nicolas Winding Refn & Elle Fanning interview: The fantasy and familiarity of The Neon Demon's vicious womanhood

The director and star discuss the hypnotic power of what's destined to be one of the year's most controversial films

Murder. Cannibalism. Necrophilia. Welcome to Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon: one of the most oddly familiar cinematic experiences I’ve undergone this year. Though for vastly different reasons, I promise you that.

Winding Refn, best known for his sleek neo-noir Drive, has always carried his reputation for provocation to its extremes. It’s a pin worn on his lapel with a near-impish glee, a half-cocked smile that betrays neither full sincerity, nor complete derision. He’s the illusionist on stage, shrouding truth in the flash of a neatly gloved hand.

And, projected like sickly neon advertisements on the pale bricks of LA’s spotless buildings, The Neon Demon’s tale of a young model (Elle Fanning’s Jesse)’s arrival to the city and her subsequent tumble into its sinister depths lives to be sensationalised.

It’s a headline-churning, grotesque kind of glamour; where depravity and violence shiver with the anticipation of the torch-wielding conservative mob. People will talk about the cannibalism. They will talk about the necrophilia. They will be repulsed, angered, and fascinated. And that’s everything Winding Refn wants.

“Whether it’s good or bad is irrelevant to me, “ the director tells me. “It’s more about: did you react?” And how exactly did I react? Like I’d been hit by an icy, frozen punch to the soul. Staggered. Dazed. Possessed by the illusionist’s spell, though its mechanics fall far beyond my feeble grasp.

The Neon Demon, for all its excesses, taps into some secret world of womanhood; the part where its viciousness – its living battleground – is talked of only as the smallest of whispers in the dark. Yes, the superficiality of LA’s modelling industry, and all our twisted notions of beauty at large, is a well-rehearsed notion in Hollywood; Winding Refn’s hardly a pioneer there.

But it’s the supreme force with which he puts those feelings to screen that so moved me; the absolute degradation of self that our shallow pursuit of perfection drives us towards, leaving us like twisted, pitiful little creatures snapping at our competitors in the scramble to a non-existent goal.

It was strangely gratifying, in that sense, to hear Elle Fanning express something of that same familiarity tucked within all of The Neon Demon’s outrageous fantasies. “This is one of my favourite films that I’ve ever done,” she enthused. “It’s just so different and, I think, very relatable in a funny way. Relatable to me being the age I am, and being a girl; that obsession with beauty, it’s a very intense thing.”

Exactly, I thought. It is intense. Not, thankfully, in the way that would drive an individual to cannibalism, but in the way that makes you feel as degraded as if you had.

“There’s a fantasy world in it,” Fanning continues. “Jesse’s kind of like Dorothy who comes to Oz and is seeing all these things happen, but Nic let me incorporate a lot of things that are true to me as well. Lots of things were from personal experiences; but then also, like, very exaggerated. I’ve never had Keanu Reeves shove a knife in my throat in real life [laughs].”

“The Neon Demon was a lot of combination of my own obsession with fairy tales and the mythology that comes from that,” Winding Refn later states. Indeed, if there’s a trick to be found in The Neon Demon’s hypnotic powers, it’s that ability to tap into those ancient forces of folklore, fairy tales, and mythologies. Storytelling so rooted in primal symbolism, that emotional reactions trigger themselves with a subconscious instinctiveness: blood, life, childbirth, immortality, the feminine, purity within and without.

Admittedly, it’s natural to have some reservations about a male filmmaker attempting to dive into the very darkest of feminine impulses in a way that understands them to their fullest extent; but The Neon Demon rather feels like the feminine voice catered through a male creator’s own awareness of distance. It’s a film that can swing from the unnervingly intimate – particularly when it comes to Jesse’s violating treatment by an acclaimed male photographer – to the coldly observant.

That’s likely thanks to the fact Winding Refn sought out female collaborators here; in cinematographer Natasha Braier’s intoxicating visuals, to playwrights Polly Stenham and Mary Laws, who worked with Winding Refn on the screenplay.

When I ask the pair for some of their favourite movies that define the feminine experience, Fanning eventually opts for The Virgin Suicides. Which, in a way, feels fitting; as it, in turn, combines the deeply personal perspective of director Sofia Coppola, and the deliberately obscured viewpoint of author Jeffrey Eugenides, whose source novel views the Lisbon sisters from the viewpoint of the neighbourhood boys. Furthermore, I’m fairly assured The Neon Demon will soon catwalk its way to join The Virgin Suicides as a cult classic.

But would Winding Refn admit any of these aims or ambitions himself? Of course not, for he remains the stage illusionist in eternity; and when I ask him simply what he hopes for from his audiences, his reply is predictably obscure.

“I’m not a political filmmaker,” he insists. “I don’t have an agenda of what I would like to do to you. I think, it’s more interesting what you tell me your reactions were like, because that to me – it’s like gathering information. “

“I think creativity is all about the subconscious essentially, you know? If something really stays with you and travels with you for the rest of your life, you have to immerse yourself in that. You have to react to that. And I think that’s the only thing we have together for the rest of our lives. But at least that’s something no one can ever take away from us.”

The Neon Demon opens in UK cinemas 8 July.