While filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has given us movies like the “Pusher” trilogy, the Mads Mikkelsen Viking thriller “Valhalla Rising,” “Drive,” “Only God Forgives,” and “The Neon Demon,” he’s been mostly focused on the small screen with efforts like “Too Old To Die Young,” and “Copenhagen Cowboy” as of late. But is now aiming to make a big return to feature films as announced at the Venice Film Festival by the director this week (via Variety).

”Feature film is still the mother of all mediums” Winding Refn said (while promoting his new short film “Beauty Is Not A Sin“) after previously declaring that “cinema is dead” a while back. The outlet adds that his yet-to-be-titled movie is fully financed and will shoot next year in Tokyo, Japan. This new project is in both English and Japanese and is based on an original story that is being kept under wraps for the moment, but it “will have a lot of glitter and lot of sex and violence,” Refn promises.

He also hinted that themes and characters that inspired his last two efforts, “Only God Forgives” and “The Neon Demon” will make a return. Although, what exactly that means is a little unclear without more details about the plot. However, it’s an obvious nod that the movie will be another effort set within the neo-noir genre.

Tokyo would make for an exciting location to set for a neo-noir project from Winding Refn, given that you have all sorts of ways to enter the country’s underworld, from the nightlife (gaming, clubs, bars, restaurants, hosting services, sex workers, and other entertainment businesses) that has connections to the Japanese criminal syndicates known as the Yakuza to potentially other seedy avenues like Japan’s extremely lucrative pornography industry that certainly would lean into the sex side of things.

This won’t be the first time Westerners have attempted to tackle darker-themed projects set in Japan. We saw it recently used in the Michael Mann-produced crime series “Tokyo Vice,” based on the novel by American crime reporter Jake Adelstein, and the Ridley Scott film “Black Rain” (set in Osaka) from the 1980s starring Michael Douglas, Andy García, Ken Takakura, Kate Capshaw, and Yūsaku Matsuda which was an impressive effort to explore Japanese nightlife/Yakuza from a Western perspective. Both share neo-noir elements and may have an influence on this new movie, if only minor.

Another more recent exploration into the underbelly of Japan was Takeshi Kitano’s excellent trilogy of Yakuza films, “Outrage,” which explored the politics and backstabbing that would most likely occur within the crime syndicates as money/power become great motivators for violence. They’re not perfect movies, but I’d highly recommend them if you want to watch more contemporary efforts that attempt to harken back to the work of the late Kinji Fukasaku (“Battles Without Honor & Humanity” franchise also referred to as “The Yakuza Papers”), the “Outrage” movies might be worth your time.

It remains to be seen if either Ryan Gosling (“Drive,” “Only God Forgives”) or Elle Fanning (“The Neon Demon”) will be part of the new film’s cast, but it wouldn’t be all that surprising if there was a reunion. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that Gosling ends up with another meaty role with limited dialogue.

Stay tuned for future updates on the new project, such as the film’s title, plot, and casting.

SOURCE: VARIETY