Danish enfante terrible director Nicolas Winding Refn has spent much of the last decade outside the Hollywood machine. However, the idea of a superhero movie still hasn’t completely left his system. And while his new Cannes title “Her Private Hell” marks his return to feature filmmaking after “The Neon Demon,” the “Drive” filmmaker apparently still has one DC character on the brain: “Batgirl.”
Speaking with Deadline around the Cannes premiere of his latest film, Refn was asked again about his long-standing interest in Barbara Gordon. While there is no announced DC project with his name attached, he did not sound like a filmmaker who had retired the thought. “I would love to do Batgirl,” he said, “Because Wonder Woman is done, that one I thought was super heavy.”
That tracks with his older comments. Back in 2016, while promoting “The Neon Demon,” Refn said plainly, “You know the one I want to do? I want to make ‘Batgirl.’ Let’s get Warner working on it.” Years later, when asked by The Hollywood Reporter about whether he would still consider a superhero project, he was more philosophical. Still, the door remained open: “Sure, I’ll make Batwoman, or Batgirl, whatever it’s called, if it came my way.”
Of course, Refn’s relationship to DC fantasy predates that. Before “Batgirl” became his preferred answer, he had flirted with the idea of “Wonder Woman,” at one point saying he wanted his “Drive” star, Christina Hendricks, for the role. That version never happened, and Patty Jenkins eventually turned the character into a billion-dollar big-screen property with Gal Gadot. But Refn’s interest has always made a strange kind of sense—his films are often built around mythic loners, heightened bodies, violent cities, and women moving through predatory worlds. A Refn “Batgirl” would never be the safest version of the character, but it would almost certainly be the least anonymous.
Now, whether James Gunn and Peter Safran would ever bring him into the new DC Studios fold is another question, and it seems very unlikely (“I don’t know if I’ll make an actual IP,” he told Deadline after explaining why he likes the idea of superhero movies. “The costumes, I love the aesthetics. I loved the objectification of objects, and superheroes, and comic books, and that whole subculture. It’s where I come from. I collect Japanese toys, I play with Legos…”)
Gunn’s DCU has already laid out major Batman-adjacent plans with “The Brave and the Bold,” while the previously completed “Batgirl,” directed by Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah and starring Leslie Grace, was infamously shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022. That history still hangs over the character in live-action, making any new version a delicate proposition.
For now, Refn’s focus is elsewhere. “Her Private Hell,” which premieres out of competition at Cannes before NEON releases it in theaters on July 24, stars Sophie Thatcher, Charles Melton, Kristine Froseth, Havana Rose Liu, Dougray Scott, Diego Calva, Aoi Yamada, Shioli Kutsuna, and Hidetoshi Nishijima. The film, co-written by Refn and Esti Giordani, follows a troubled young woman searching for her father after a mysterious mist engulfs a futuristic metropolis, while other storylines reportedly involve actresses gathering to make a Barbarella-like movie and a killer known as Leather Man targeting women.
The new film also arrives with a more personal charge than Refn’s usual provocations. In another recent Deadline interview, he spoke about a near-death experience three years ago, saying he was dead for 20 minutes and came back with a different relationship to filmmaking. “When I did come back alive, thank god, I was like, I had to start all over again with everything, but this time, I had 30 years of knowledge,” he said. “And I saw that I wanted to make movies again, the same way I’d wanted to make movies when I was young, but I also had a very specific mantra, which was: I will make things that come to me instinctively.”
That instinct is likely not leading him to Gotham, however. Refn told Deadline that he knows what he is doing next and appears to have the next four years mapped out. What those four years entail, however, is still a mystery for now, though surely fans of his are still holding out hope for the “Avenging Silence” spy film written by long-running Bond franchise architects Neal Purvis and Robert Wade.
