Quotes from Nicolas Winding Refn

Sometimes I just play the theme from Arthur. It reminds me of my childhood in New York and I just love it.

I think that Danish people may be thought off as the happiest people, but honestly...I love America.

The minute you celebrate narcissism, which on one hand is very complex, it's very ridiculous. You have to love oneself with humor.

My world is just one big chaos!

I'm not a knowledgeable comic fanatic, as a lot of other people are.

I never desired to really go to Hollywood and make films, and purely because I want my entire control, which I'm used to having.

Like all art forms, film is a media as powerful as weapons of mass destruction; the only difference is that war destroys and film inspires.

I believe silence is the greatest sound of all.

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.

The best way to move forward - to bury the past. That doesn't mean you forget it.

L.A. is, on one hand, very mysterious; it's very modern. It's a mysterious place - it's a haunting place - and everything in our culture around the world of entertainment leads back to Hollywood.

I'm a very funny man, so funny comes natural. And if you want to create horror, you need to be funny or campy.

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.

A lot of the surreal filmmakers, like David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowsky, or countless other underground filmmakers... Their sense of explosive images have always dominated their films. It's a way to shock the senses, to make them open themselves.

It's hard to always challenge yourself, coming up with new ways to make your life difficult, so when you make something, it becomes more interesting.

I just think it was time [in THe Neon Demon]to do a film about women. But not just women, I wanted to do a movie about a teenage girl. It was a great counter to the masculinity of "Drive."

Creativity is about taking what is the norm and expanding it and continuing to expand it and expand it and expand it and expand it.

Filmmaking is not about what we see - it's a very misconceived notion; it's about what we don't see.

'Valhalla Rising' is a fusion of my upbringing, basically: everything I grew up loving and wanted to make a film of.

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 of fashion.

America has no one to catch you when you fall. That makes you want to achieve. It is healthy for the soul. But all that is valued is success.

I've been trying to get away from physical violence; it's too easy; it doesn't satisfy me artistically to work with it. Dramatic violence is much more interesting, but it's much more difficult.

I don't believe that art makes people violent in any way. I don't. But I do believe art can show people how to be violent and that's much more dangerous in a way.

I think that experiencing through art is a wonderful way to expand the horizon and everything around it.