Near-death heart surgery reignites Refn's creative fire for sci-fi horror 'Her Private Hell'

Nicolas Winding Refn pulls out his phone in a London hotel bar and shows me footage of a beating heart being sliced open with a knife. The camera travels into the open chamber as needles pierce through the muscle. It's unsettling and compelling—the kind of image you'd expect from the Danish director behind Drive and The Neon Demon, films that have featured hands being severed and eyeballs gouged out. Except Refn isn't the one who directed this footage. He's the one lying unconscious on the operating table while a surgeon performs the procedure. He'd requested that someone film his own heart surgery. "At first they said no," he recalls. "But then they said, 'As it's you, we'll record it.'"

It's a very Nicolas Winding Refn thing to do—transform a medical crisis into material, to find the cinema in his own mortality. He's in London to discuss Her Private Hell, his new sci-fi horror film set in neon-lit Tokyo, a deliberately camp collision of genres starring Sophie Thatcher as an actor trying to rebuild her relationship with her film mogul father by making her own Barbarella-style movie. But for the first forty minutes of our conversation, Refn recounts the story of the 2023 operation that saved his life. Without it, he says, Her Private Hell would never have been made—not because of physical recovery, but because before the surgery, he had lost the will to make films at all.

In the summer of 2023, while working on a Prada campaign in Italy, Refn felt increasingly exhausted. His daughter noticed how pale he looked, but he attributed it to overwork. Back in Copenhagen, a doctor discovered that a valve in his heart was broken and filling his lungs with blood. "I was essentially dying," Refn says. He was given two weeks to prepare for open heart surgery and offered a choice of replacement valve: metal or pig. He was told to write a will. He made peace with his wife, telling her that after thirty years together, they'd had a good run. He went through fear, anger, sadness, desperation—emotions he kept private. "I didn't make a fuss about it," he says, "because I'm like a superhero."

The lowest point came when he met a man fresh from the same surgery. "He looked like he'd been in a boxing match with Mike Tyson," Refn says, unwilling to age a decade overnight. But just before the operation, his surgeon called. "He was the Tom Cruise of surgeons," Refn recalls with evident admiration. "He rode a motorbike, he had rings, he was very sexy. All the nurses said, 'Oh my God, you're getting him. You're so lucky!'" The surgeon told Refn he could perform telescopic surgery, avoiding the need to open his ribcage entirely. Refn interpreted this as divine intervention. "I think God was trying to tell me something. He's saying, 'You're not ready to go yet, kid. But you're going to go through a challenging process to reignite whatever that is inside of you.'"

By the time he entered the operating room, Refn had transformed himself mentally. He was, as he puts it, "a champ, a winner." The recovery was brutal—three months of rebuilding himself, learning to do basic things again like an infant. But this proved creatively advantageous. Her Private Hell centers on Private K, played by Charles Melton, an American soldier in postwar Japan searching for his lost daughter, believed to have been taken by a mythical figure called the Leatherman who roams Tokyo with diamond-studded gloved hands. The character emerged from Refn's realization that while his eldest daughter had recently left home, his youngest was only twelve and still needed him. "Private K's story was a cinematic narrative I could cling on to, my fantasy version of what happened to me," he explains.

The film echoes a line from Refn's earlier work Only God Forgives: "You should have protected her." It taps into what he calls "dadsploitation"—a form of fetish that gives fathers permission to indulge in extreme biblical violence to protect innocence. He's aware this language can resonate with contemporary right-wing rhetoric about protecting women, but he insists he's not selling a political message. "All I know is that all humans want a hero. And I believe that for fathers, whether you're left or right, we all have the same primal instinct inside us." He describes himself as deeply unmacho—someone who loves femininity, flamboyance, camp, and color. Her Private Hell, he says, is his version of playing with dolls, dressing everyone in fabulous uniforms and moving them around the frame.

The film is deliberately resistant to algorithmic entertainment, a five-movies-in-one collage that refuses the white-sheet simplicity of most contemporary media. Reviews have been wildly mixed, which Refn claims to prefer. "If everyone loved my movies, it would be devastating," he says. "If we all agree on something in this room, it's as if we don't like it. But if one likes it and one doesn't and we end up arguing about it, that's passion." He points to Raging Bull as an example—commercially bad and divisive at the time, now considered masterwork. At Cannes, audiences had what he calls a meltdown, complaining there was no storyline. "You're so wrong!" he responds. "There's so much going on, you're just looking in the wrong places."

Refn seems genuinely content now, grateful for the crisis that nearly killed him. "I'm so happy, I can't tell you," he says. "Every day I thank God for killing me and bringing me back. Because why make me go through all this if I don't have a purpose? Now I have a mission." If he gets another twenty-five years, he'll use them to make art, to forge new films from what he describes as his roaring creative fire. There is no afterlife, he insists—he saw no light during his brush with death. "Whatever time you have left, live it now, man."