Nicolas Winding Refn’s ‘Only God Forgives’ To Be All Over the Genre Map

By  · Published on May 23rd, 2011

Nicolas Winding Refn just won Best Director at Cannes, but apparently he won’t be going to Disneyland to celebrate. Maybe not surprising for a director who once told me that “art is an act of violence.” That’s also when he began talking about Only God Forgives, a western-style drama that he’d like to shoot in Asia. Why Asia?

Because they have the best toys, and Refn is an avid toy collector. I’m not making that up. Read the interview for confirmation.

Fortunately, Twitch has gotten a hold of a synopsis for the film, and it’s chock-full of all sorts of genre goodness:

Julian is on the run from the British police. He runs a Thai Boxing club in Bangkok which is a front for a drugs smuggling operation. He is well respected within the criminal underworld, but deep in his heart he feels that his life is lacking something. He meets a retired cop, The Angel of Vengeance, and finds out that he has to confront his mother.

Fighting. Cops. Drugs. Familial drama. Someone called “The Angel of Vengeance.”

These are all good things.

Refn will be shooting this in Thailand in August, apparently before re-teaming with Ryan Gosling for the remake of Logan’s Run. That means the next few years are going to be packed with Refn films, and that sounds like a bright, bleak future to me.

What do you think?

Related Topics: ,

Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.