Neon Noir lives in its tactile visuals.
The story I remember reading (and I’ll link to it if I find it again) is that the original meeting between director Nicolas Winding Refn and (then-potential) leading man Ryan Gosling was not going well. Refn felt Gosling hadn’t been convinced by his pitch, and he lapsed into silence as they continued to drive around. Something about the silence, the driving, and the view out the windshield moved Refn to tears; he told Gosling, “This is it! This is the movie!”; and Gosling was sold.
For a tense crime drama about a sociopathic getaway driver and the human connections in which he somehow finds himself increasingly entangled, Drive lives in its visuals. Its plot may be about Golsing’s driver character, but its story is its meticulous choreography and mise-en-scene. Drive sits with you in its thickly humid ambience, in which you become perversely comfortable, and offers only occasional rays of light as it veers between throbbing dread and stunning violence.
Its ‘Neon Noir’ (as opposed to neo-noir, apparently, but more on that below) owes as much to Kavinski‘s “Night Call” playing over the opening titles as to Cliff Martinez‘s score beyond that; and Refn’s visual storytelling here is as much about the wordless sequences as the lights, colours and textures of the details within them.
And on top of everything, when such a lush, eerie, tensely sweaty world is populated with such an outstanding cast – Carey Mulligan, Oscar Isaac, Christina Hendricks, Ron Perlman, and a bumbling Bryan Cranston who seems to have swapped typecast roles with a properly terrifying Albert Brooks – what is there not to adore?
Along with many folks like Composition Cam, I screen-captured every shot of this film, at first to study the compositions and colours, but ultimately as a meditative exercise – a way to draw out the film’s languid, tactile aesthetic, beyond its runtime. Where mine was a purely visual / formal study, Every Frame A Painting talks through their findings:
Further Viewing
Drive‘s cinematographer, Newton Thomas Sigel, reveals the techniques he used to light and shoot the film to Indy Mogul:
Broey Deschanel references Arnett, Brody, Holden, and Zeitchik in her look at how ‘Neon Noir’ functions in Drive:
Fun fact: Drive was originally to be a Hugh Jackman, erm, vehicle. Using this story as a case study, Nerdstalgic traces how a film can be shaped long before pre-production – in development:
One of the more overt influences on Drive is the work of director Michael Mann – the themes of Thief (1981), the claustrophobic car-ride dread of Collateral (2004), and the crime masterpiece Heat (1996):