Nicolas Winding Refn Defends Ryan Gosling's LOST RIVER

Last week we showed you the teaser for Ryan Gosling’s directorial debut, Lost River, and it was a little, um, puzzling? But it definitely looked intriguing. A couple days later the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and no one likes it, basically. It has been the subject of some fantastically mean tweets and reviews. Some of the kinder reviews liken it to a student film or a practice run. Apart from calling the movie “unthinkingly offensive,” the main criticism seems to be that Gosling doesn’t have much of a voice yet, so the film feels like an inferior knockoff of other directors’ work. 

One of those directors is, of course, Nicolas Winding Refn, Gosling’s bromantic partner and two time collaborator. Vulture caught up with the director at the festival and asked him what he thought of Gosling’s movie.

"I think it's a beautiful, beautiful, great movie that will grow on people. There are images from it that still stick with me."

So at least one person liked it. Getting into specifics, he found the central mother-son relationship to be moving, and he thought Ben Mendelsohn was fantastic. As for whether it was too similar to his own work?

"Because we're twins we make the same movie. Separated at birth, we found each other. That's the thing about twins. We stick together."

I guess when you’ve sung along to REO Speedwagon and cried together, you have forged a psychic mind link that leads you to make the same movies.

Lost River stars Matt Smith in his first post-Doctor Who role, along with Christina Hendricks, Ben Mendelsohn, Eva Mendes, Iain De Caestecker, and Saoirse Ronan. There is no U.S. release date yet.

Source: Vulture