Nicolas Winding Refn says emergency heart surgery reignited his passion for filmmaking
Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn reveals that a 2023 emergency heart operation restored his creative drive and inspired his new sci-fi horror film "Her Private Hell," which has drawn mixed reactions since premiering at Cannes.
Danish film-maker Nicolas Winding Refn, known for Drive, Bronson and The Neon Demon, has revealed that his new film Her Private Hell would not exist without the emergency heart surgery he underwent in 2023.
Refn says that before the operation, at age 50, he had lost his enthusiasm for making films and felt he had reached a creative dead end. The health scare began during a summer fashion campaign shoot in Italy, when he noticed unusual fatigue. After returning home to Copenhagen, doctors discovered that a valve in his heart was damaged and his lungs were filling with blood — a condition he describes as effectively dying.
He was given a choice between a metal or a pig-tissue replacement valve, and his surgeon ultimately offered a less invasive telescopic procedure that avoided opening his ribcage. Recovery took around three months, but Refn describes the experience as a kind of rebirth that reignited his creative energy.
Her Private Hell is a genre-blending sci-fi horror set in a neon-lit Tokyo. Sophie Thatcher stars as an actor trying to repair her relationship with her film-mogul father by making her own movie, while Charles Melton plays an American soldier in postwar Japan searching for his missing daughter — a storyline Refn links to his own experience as a father, with one daughter recently having left home and another still a child.
The film has received sharply divided reviews since its Cannes premiere, something Refn says does not bother him, as he views polarised reactions as a sign that a work of art has genuine impact.
