Drive (2011)
- To accurately portray their role in Drive, Ryan Gosling spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Nicolas Winding Refn.
- Drive utilized mostly practical sets and locations to ground the story, a specific choice insisted upon by Nicolas Winding Refn.
Drive is a 2011 American neo-noir action drama film directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and starring Ryan Gosling as an unnamed Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals. By day, he works in a garage run by his mentor Shannon, played by Bryan Cranston, and performs precision driving for film productions; by night, he offers his services to anyone who needs a wheelman, with the strict rule that his clients get exactly five minutes of his time. When the Driver falls for his neighbor Irene, played by Carey Mulligan, and her young son, he agrees to help her husband with one last heist to clear a debt โ a job that goes catastrophically wrong and draws the Driver into a violent confrontation with organized crime figures played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman.
Nicolas Winding Refn crafted Drive as a hypnotic, deliberately paced art-house film disguised as a genre thriller, drawing from 1980s aesthetics, European art cinema, and the mythic archetype of the lone, unnamed hero. The film's synth-heavy soundtrack, featuring Kavinsky's "Nightcall" and College's "A Real Hero," became a cultural phenomenon that helped launch the synthwave music revival. Ryan Gosling's performance was a masterclass in minimalism โ his Driver speaks rarely, smiles gently, and erupts into shocking violence with an intensity that makes each outburst feel genuinely dangerous.
Albert Brooks's performance as the genial-seeming gangster Bernie Rose, who commits brutal acts with businesslike calm, earned widespread acclaim and was considered a major Oscar snub. Drive earned $76 million worldwide on a $15 million budget and won Refn the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival.
