Excuse me for a minute, says Nicolas Winding Refn down the phone, I just need to turn AC/DC down.
"I'm a huge fan," he says in his almost comically precise English. "I love Bon Scott. Dirty Deeds, you know. It's very rebellious music. It brings the teenager out in you."
Does it take much to bring your inner bad boy out?
"Oh no. It never goes away. I'm always the teenager. My mother is 80 – we're going to Italy together – and she still wears hot pants. It's in the genes."
After less than a minute talking to the director of Bronson (starring Tom Hardy), Drive and Only God Forgives (the last two starring Ryan Gosling), we have fuel for a year's worth of psychoanalysis. Or, alternatively, a career's worth of movies that shock, tantalise, provoke and – go on, admit it – entertain.
At 45, and 10 features into his career, the Danish director has worn out the enfant terrible tag granted on the back of a swag of hyper-violent, stylish and stylised genre films. But as the response to his latest, The Neon Demon, attests, he still knows how to get a rise.
The film was met with jeering and boos at its debut at a critics' screening in Cannes in May; The Telegraph's Tim Robey called it "the most offensive film of the year"; The Hollywood Reporter judged it "stultifyingly vapid and ponderously paced".
Yet others have loved it. "There is creativity and innovation at every turn" said The Independent's Christopher Hooton; Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times called it a "hypnotically beautiful object". For what it's worth, I'm in the pro camp: The Neon Demon is deliriously slick, sick and funny, and a serious contender for film of the year.
Presumably, none of this wildly divergent response comes as a complete shock to Refn.
"I was surprised at the amount of anger," he says. "And yet I personally enjoyed it, just as I enjoyed the people that felt good things about seeing it. In a way, I just wanted people to feel something. That's the essence of creativity – it's an interactive experience that makes you react."
The Neon Demon stars Elle Fanning as Jesse, a naive girl who comes to Los Angeles hoping to crack it as a model. She has an ethereal beauty that's inextricably tied to her innocence, and everyone who sees it is touched by it, and seeks to exploit it.
Elle Fanning plays Jesse, an innocent who arrives in LA with dreams of a modelling career.
Refn loads his frame with images of prowling beasts, both literal (the mountain lion that sneaks into her motel room, the stuffed leopard in a hillside mansion) and metaphorical (Keanu Reeves as a sleazy motel manager, Jena Malone as a make-up artist who masquerades as a friend but whose intentions are far darker). The film is a none-too-subtle allegory about the predatory nature of the modelling industry, and by extension about those other industries – film, television, music – that prize and prey on youth and beauty.
Perhaps wisely, though, Refn's pitch to investors didn't mention the word "allegory".
"When you sell a movie, it's always good to sell it very clear to the financial people. So I said, 'I want to do a teenage horror film.' Clear."
Secretly he was plotting all the other things it would be. "I would like to do a melodrama, a comedy, I love camp, oh yeah – and science fiction. Let's add all those things into it as well, down the road."
It is all those things, but at its core is the idea that our fixation on beauty is universal and ageless. It is there in literature, in painting, in sculpture (at one point Fanning wears a flowing pleated gown that makes her look like an ancient Greek statue). "It's as ancient as you can possibly imagine," Refn says.
It was there in the sagas and fairytales, too, "where men were strong and women were beautiful – but strength was very quickly played out because anyone could become strong. Beauty is far more complex, because, you know, are you born beautiful or can you obtain beauty? Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? I would say so, but at the same time we live in a society that is dominated by images. We live in a beauty-obsessed world – it's always been obsessed, but it's getting more extreme."
Beauty in The Neon Demon is a double-edged sword. It's a blessing – as one character says, "beauty's not everything, it's the only thing" – but it comes with an in-built curse: it is destined to inspire vicious envy, and to fade.
Australian Abbey Lee plays Sarah, a model who fears and envies the younger Jesse.
All of which might suggest the director has a deep ambivalence to this relentless obsession, but he insists that's not the case.
"I think it's normal. The only way to really deal with it is to accept the power of it. Otherwise we're just running around in circles pretending it's not there.
"Beauty is almost a new class system," Refn adds. "There is that inevitable truth, which is that some people are just born more beautiful than others. I know that because I wasn't born beautiful, but my wife was. So the film was my own fantasy of what it would have been like to be born a beautiful girl.
"We're afraid of being called shallow or meaningless. But deep down we all want to be beautiful."
The Neon Demon is out now.
Karl Quinn is on Facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin
