With The Neon Demon premiering at Cannes, a bunch of new images and clips have been released for Nicolas Winding Refn's movie.
When aspiring model Jesse moves to Los Angeles, her youth and vitality are devoured by a group of beauty-obsessed women who will use any means necessary to get what she has.
Writing in the movie's official production notes, Refn had the following to say:
'With The Neon Demon, I wanted to create a funny, beautiful, violent, sexy, melodramatic, titillating teen horror film, but without the horror. This idea had been simmering in my brain from the time I started making films, but it was my beautiful wife who inspired me to turn it into a story about beauty and insanity, resulting in a very visceral experience.
I believe there is a 16-year-old girl in every man and making The Neon Demon was my opportunity to explore this side of myself. I imagined myself as a young girl, moving to Los Angeles for the first time in an attempt to make it big. It’s the classic star-in-the-making subgenre. Within this fantasy, it occurred to me that in fairy tales, we define men by their strength and women by their beauty. However, in reality, beauty in and of itself has become a source of strength to be reckoned with. As time passes, our obsession with beauty continues to grow while the longevity of what we consider to be beautiful has been shrinking. The idea for The Neon Demon was to find out what happens when the obsession with beauty supersedes its longevity. Once we start devouring superficial physical beauty, we start to crave internal beauty—innocence, youth, vitality.
At the same time, people today are becoming evermore obsessed with the image of themselves, which brings with it a certain degree of madness, not unlike the beautiful chaos in Valley of the Dolls. We live in a world where narcissism has become a dominant factor in our lives and it is facilitated, in part, by the digital revolution. Personal devices and social media is the modern day water in which Narcissus sees and falls in love with his own reflection.
Shooting The Neon Demon in Los Angeles was important to me because I view it as the very Mecca of self-projection. While other metropolitan areas, like New York, Paris, and London are highly influential, everything we mirror ourselves in flows out of LA. It is this “reality,” then, that I wanted to use to tell a tale of beauty and death while incorporating my insight into the high-strung, competitive, and fetishistic attitude of the modeling world. On the one hand it’s all glamour and on the other hand it’s a very elitist environment, where those who have, prosper, and those who have not, sit on the sidelines wishing.'
A selection of stills and behind the scenes images:
Here are some of the movie's posters from various territories:
The Neon Demon is in UK/ROI cinemas July 8th.
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