Eating pig hearts, silent sets and neon obsession: It’s 'take your daughter to work day' with Nicolas Winding Refn

Following her first day on set with Nicolas Winding Refn, one actress commented on the size of the Danish director’s ego. This isn’t just any actress, mind you, but Winding Refn’s eldest daughter, Lola Corfixen. “The first thing you said to mom when you came home was, ‘God, dad has such a huge ego’,” Winding Refn says, addressing his daughter. Corfixen grins, adding, “I was like, ‘He is actually popular at some place’.” The father-daughter duo are sitting in a nondescript hotel room in their native Copenhagen.

Winding Refn appears, as he always does at premieres and press obligations, in a well-tailored suit, slim tie and chunky black frames (thanks to a decade long collaboration with Prada, the suiting has gotten an upgrade in recent years). Corfixen sits to his right in an elegant black pussy bow blouse, her blonde hair in the soft waves of a bygone era. While her dad is talking, oft in extended, easily quotable musings, she is perfectly still, an inscrutably cool look on her face – much like the not-so-chatty characters in Winding Refn’s films, come to think of it (Ryan Gosling in Drive, Mads Mikkelsen in Pusher II, Elle Fanning in Neon Demon). Occasionally she’ll crack a subtle, distinctly teenager-y face; a relat able response to one’s father saying something a little bit extra.

Corfixen wound up cast in a Nicolas Winding Refn series almost unknowingly. Winding Refn, his wife Liv Corfixen, and their two daughters Lola, 19, and Lizzielou, 13, had decamped from Los Angeles to Copenhagen full-time during the pandemic – “a good thing”, the director notes. But Winding Refn “likes to work”, so he drafted up a concept he describes as a sort of spiritual successor to the Pusher trilogy, which explored the drug trade in a seedy, neon-tinged Danish underworld. This was, after all, the first time Winding Refn would be directing a project in Copenhagen since* Pusher III* in 2005.

Enter Copenhagen Cowboy, a six-episode Netflix series and the latest neon and synth-heavy addition to the director’s violent and beautiful oeuvre (for the record, the neon serves a practical purpose; Winding Refn is colour blind and naturally gravitates towards a saturated palette). The series centres a round Miu, another mostly-silent Winding Refn protagonist, as she navigates – you guessed it – the seedy Copenhagen underworld. This time around, there are supernatural elements, pigs and cool tracksuits.

A few months into filming, Winding Refn, who shoots his projects chronologically, handed Corfixen some dialogue to read in the family kitchen. She didn’t think much of it; her mother (who occasionally acts in her husband’s films and also serves as executive producer on Copenhagen Cowboy) is always reading dialogue around the house. Little did she know, it was an audition to play Rakel, a powerful undead vixen and Miu’s nemesis who shows up – or rather, springs to life – in the show’s final act.

“We were casting everywhere around Denmark and I couldn’t quite find anyone that I felt represented the youthful fire – that rebellious youth,” Winding Refn says. “Sometimes you have to go outwards to look inwards.” It was Liv who pointed out to her husband that the character was, in fact, “a bit like Lola”. But Winding Refn wasn’t sure if his daughter was even interested in acting. So he concocted the “fake audition”. Corfixen’s reading had the “energy and the stillness” that her father was looking for. A few days later, he offered her the role. Her answer? “I have exams”. Still, she was up for it.

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Corfixen never showed much interest in the family business. “I distanced myself as much as I could from my dad and my mom’s world,” she says. Her little sister, Lizzielou, is a “ film fanatic” (she has a cameo in Copenhagen Cowboy and Winding Refn tells me she already has directorial aspirations) but Corfixen adopted more of a “you do you and I will do me” approach. Yet when this opportunity was thrust upon her, she thought, quite simply, “why not?”. Plus, it would be a chance to see her dad “make his visions come true”. “It’s not a secret that film is such a big part of his life,” she says. Corfixen was taken with Winding Refn’s ability to draw different emotions out of his actors. “That ’s something new that I learnt,” she says, cheekily. “He’s actually good at something.”

Another thing Corfixen learned rather quickly on the set of Copenhagen Cowboy: Winding Refn can demand a lot of takes. As he puts it, some directors follow the straightforward approach of “repeat, repeat, repeat” as opposed to his preferred “method of repeating”. “Then you find it, somewhere along the way,” he says. “That’s where it works, and you can see it right after. That’s when you know that you have exercised it truthfully.” According to Winding Refn, finding that elusive “purity in a creative moment” can sometimes happen quickly and sometimes happen very, very slowly.

One such slowly discovered moment came during a scene in which Corfixen’s character is eating a human heart. “It was a pig heart,” says Winding Refn (it’s a fitting stand-in; pigs are a common motif throughout the series). “I was eating the pig heart just over and over and over and over,” Corfixen says. “I was just eating that heart.” What did it taste like? “Surprisingly it didn’t have that much taste,” she says. “It was more the consistency. It was a little gooey.”

“All you need is time,” Winding Refn concludes. Luckily in this case he had a lot of it; the series was supposed to wrap after four months, but he wound up shooting for eight. He took a similar approach to our Vogue shoot, which expanded from a traditional one-day fashion shoot to a massive three-day production. Calling on many of the creatives he worked with on Copenhagen Cowboy – cinematographer Magnus Jønck, set designer Gitte Malling – Winding Refn built three distinct environments (bathed in neon, of course), including a makeshift indoor forest.

Corfixen stars as a mysterious heroine; another complex character emoting wordlessly. One creative producer at byNWR, the director’s streaming platform and creative studio, put it best: “Nic never does anything half”. Though Winding Refn’s characters tend to luxuriate in silence, his household is anything but. “I live with three women so... I’ll leave it at that,” he says. Corfixen elaborates. “We all have big personalities,” she says, adding that she and her sister can “fight pretty heavily”. “Quiet is not something that is valued in our home, except when we all go to bed. I think on set, that’s where he gets his silence.”

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Winding Refn didn’t seek out a career in filmmaking. Rather, “filmmaking came to me,” he says. It came quite early, in fact, when he was just 13 years old. Born in Copenhagen, he spent his formative teenage years in New York City. It was there that an impressionable young Winding Refn went to the West Village movie theatre Cinema Village to catch a screening of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (fittingly, Copenhagen Cowboy features a not-so-pleasant chainsaw scene). From that moment, everything changed. Or perhaps Winding Refn was just born this way; his mother, Vibeke Winding, is a cinematographer and his father, Anders Refn, is a director and editor best known for working on Lars von Trier films like Antichrist and Breaking the Waves.

“I’ve been forced to see the world through a different lens,” Winding Refn says, referring not only to his aforementioned colour blindness, but also his dyslexia, which presented “a huge challenge for me growing up.” Perhaps that explains why his characters move through his films in relative silence. His predispositions coupled with his transformative Texas Chainsaw experience culminated in a short film he wrote, directed and starred in. The right people saw it, and, at just 24, he was offered a tidy sum to turn it into the
feature film Pusher. The film became a cult hit.

It was Drive, however, that thrust Winding Refn into the mainstream and earned him a Best Director award at Cannes. Despite his appeal (and despite seemingly having Ryan Gosling on speed dial), his work has never veered commercial. Instead, he displays the sort of true-to-his-style tenacity of David Lynch or the aforementioned Lars von Trier. Love or hate his singular vision, one has to appreciate that such a filmmaker exists in our superhero-heavy content culture. Few other directors would get the green light from Netflix to make a six part Danish language series that is firmly arthouse (ironically, Winding Refn has described it as his take on the superhero genre).

If you don’t like watching Winding Refn’s films, you’re in good company. Corfixen doesn’t watch her dad’s movies... not willingly, any way. Just recently, sequestered at the family country house, her mother “forced” her to watch Drive (“I loved it very much,” she admits). “He does his own thing and I don’t have an opinion,” Corfixen says. “He’s just my dad.”

Winding Refn stays away from watching his own work as well. “Once I’m done with something, I don’t have a desire to revisit it again,” he says. This can be a challenge for a director whose films are more often than not in competition at various film festivals. “Then you have to sit through it,” he says. “So I sit with my eyes closed and my fingers in my ears.” This was particularly unpleasant during the Venice Film Festival premiere of Copenhagen Cowboy, at which Winding Refn had to sit through all six hours of the show with his eyes shut.

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There was another crucial incident in Winding Refn’s life: meeting Liv Corfixen. He was editing the first Pusher film while, in the editing suite next door, Winding Refn’s father was working on Breaking the Waves. Liv, 24, just so happened to be working as Anders’ personal assistant. She asked Winding Refn, then 22, out on a date and the rest, as they say, is history. “ She became my first and only girlfriend and then became my wife,” Winding Refn says.

Much like her father, Lola had an early epiphany regarding her career. At 12, she called up her dad, who was travelling at the time, and said “I want to be a model”. Today she’s signed to Unique in Copenhagen and has walked at Copenhagen Fashion Week for the likes of Munthe and Soeren le Schmidt. Her second collaboration with her father is firmly in her wheelhouse; she stars in the latest Winding Refn-directed Prada film. Appearing in Vogue is a culminating moment for Corfixen, one that her father neglected to inform her about. “You didn’t even tell me,” she says to Winding Refn. “Mom told me.” Her reaction? “I dropped dead on the floor.”

Though fashion is still her primary interest, Corfixen takes a decidedly Gen Z approach to diversifying her portfolio. She doesn’t need to be just one thing – an actress, a model. She sees the exposure garnered from Copenhagen Cowboy as a means to other opportunities, both within and beyond film and television. It ’s a mindset Winding Refn admires. “Her and her younger sister’s generation are much more advanced and sophisticated at looking at opportunities because of technology,” he says, adding that “film and fashion are more than ever entwined into each other”.

I ask Winding Refn if he’s a social media guy and Corfixen makes one of those teenager-y faces again. “Well, I need help,” he admits. “A couple of days ago, he was like, ‘How do I post this on my story’,” Corfixen says. “And I’m like, ‘You click on the button that says story’.” “Well, I didn’t know how to do that,” Winding Refn says, matter-of-factly. “Lola is our social engineer.” Growing up with a renowned director for a father has its ups and downs. On the one hand, you get to travel the world – for instance, Winding Refn took the whole family to Bangkok for the shooting of Only God Forgives (Liv captured the experience in an intimate documentary titled My Life Directed By Nicolas Winding Refn).

On the other hand, Corfixen’s father can be “very much in his own thoughts”. “Sometimes you can’t even get through to him,” she says. “It’s like a one-way ticket.” Still, for as much as Winding Refn speaks poetically and romantically bout filmmaking, he speaks of his family with more weight. To that end, Copenhagen Cowboy is at its core a merging of his two loves. The entire Winding Refn-Corfixen clan walked the Venice red carpet together at the premiere (wearing Prada, natch). “It was a beautiful moment,” says Winding Refn. “For the first time we were united in a completely different way.”

Seeing Lola and Lizzielou through this altered lens – not only as his daughters but also his collaborators – was transformative. “You’re proud of your children, and that proudness seeps into everything you aspire to be as a parent. You’re a collaborator, but you’re also seeing your children become independent in a completely different way in front of you,” he says. “It can be very emotional.”

Below, come behind the scenes of our shoot with and immerse yourself in the neon fever dream.