Nicolas Winding Refn on His Cathartic Experience Filming ‘Copenhagen Cowboy,’ Netflix Drops Trailer (EXCLUSIVE)

variety.com:

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent It took a pandemic and a lockdown for “Drive” director Nicolas Winding Refn to make a directorial comeback in Denmark, where he had delivered the “Pusher” trilogy early in his career. “Sometimes the strangest things come in mysterious ways, and this is one of those,” Refn says of “Copenhagen Cowboy,” his Netflix original series, slated to world premiere Sept.

9 at the Venice Film Festival. Since “Drive,” Winding Refn has directed the Bangkok-set thriller “Only God Forgives,” with “Drive” star Ryan Gosling; “The Neon Demon,” with Elle Fanning playing an aspiring model in Los Angeles.; and the Amazon Prime Video series “Too Old to Die Young,” starring Miles Teller as a grieving cop in crime-ridden Southern California.

He was preparing another project set abroad when the pandemic hit. “We were stuck as a family back in Denmark and I came up with this idea,” he says, noting his wife, Liv Corfixen, executive produced the series, and his two daughters, Lola and Lizzielou, star in it. “It became a wonderful creative process where I was no longer living in two separate worlds as a creator by day and a family man by night.

It’s a new chapter in my way of working but also in our lives.” Refn has faced some criticism over the use of gratuitous violence in his films, notably “Only God Forgives” and “The Neon Demon.” But he says he’s “not a violent person.” “If there is violence in what I do, it’s because I believe that’s what the painting needed,” he says, adding that “art is an act of violence.