Nicolas Winding Refn

“There will always be a theatrical experience because there will always be cinemas no matter what. It's like there will always be theaters to have stage plays in.”

“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 t...”

“I'm not a walking encyclopedia. I'm not one of those types that knows every single film ever made or can recite every dialog.”

“When I was 20 years old, my uncle was an arthouse distributor, and he would take me to Cannes every year to work as a film scout.”

“With 'Only God Forgives,' what's great about that movie is it just freaked so many people out.”

“Polarizing is the greatest achievement in any art form, even in cinema.”

“For me, the greatest pleasure is when you make something, and everyone argues about it.”

“Denmark is like a Sylvanian world, but one thing it breeds is malady. The malady is generally in good taste. Opinions are correct. That is the chief enemy of creativity.”

“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...”

“Writing is fantasizing about what your film will be like. Shooting is reality. And the post-production is recovering the idea you had.”

“To me, the darkest film ever made and the film, to me, that's the darkest picture in the human humanity's soul is 'Pretty Woman.'”

“Television is dead. And television will not be reborn. It will not come back.”

“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....”

“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'm glamour. I'm vulgarity. I'm scandal. I'm gossip. I'm the future. I'm the counter culture. I'm commercial reality. I'm artistic singularity.”

“We're premiering 'The Neon Demon' in Cannes, which is the representation of 'The Neon Demon,' which is all about glamour and vulgarity.”