Too Old To Die Young: Nicolas Refn Against Amazon “They Wanted To Bury Me”

According to Nicolas Winding Refn, Amazon purposely buried Too Old to Die Young. The director is convinced that Amazon Prime Video has tarnished the visibility of the 2019 series for fear that the show will make the streamer look bad. Nicholas Winding Refn, during the tour of promotional interviews for the release of his new series, Copenhagen Cowboy, broadcast on Netflix, found a way to launch very venomous accusations against the other great streaming giant, Prime Video, for which the Danish director created, in 2019, the miniseries Too Old To Die Young; in particular, in an interview with Vulture magazine, Refn accuses Amazon of the precise desire to boycott the product right from the start:

“They took away my entire marketing budget because they thought that series would ruin their reputation: they told me. My series literally shocked them! I asked what was so shocking about it, and they said it would ruin their image. To which I replied: “But look, no one will think of you while watching this series“.

Too Old To Die Young: Nicolas Refn Against Amazon

Refn plunges the knife into the wound, also recalling a serious threat received during that meeting: “In Hollywood, some people are so focused on themselves that they believe they are always the center of attention. The government of fear is something very dangerous. They told me: “We will bury you”, and that’s actually what happened. But what these gentlemen don’t know is that a diamond is never fully buried“.

However, the disappointment felt at the meeting with Amazon’s top management did not prevent Refn from exorcising everything with irony. She recounts Miles Teller, the protagonist of the series: “He distributed caps on the set, caps with the inscription: “We will make TV great again!” (a reference to the motto of Donald Trump’s electoral campaign, ed) and every Friday he wrote an email to Amazon, an email in the style of Trump, and said: “I am the greatest director you can ever work with! I encourage everyone who works for me to improve, everything is going great, and it will be wonderful, the most important series of Prime Video!”

According to Refn, the series, consisting of only one season, had in any case been conceived as a self-contained product, without the need or possibility of a continuation. Based on the film of the same name, also directed by Refn and presented out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, Too Old To Die Young sees Teller in the role of a Los Angeles detective who hides a double life as a hitman. According to the director, the story was the punctual response to a well-defined political-social climate: “The series was born as a reaction to the decline of American politics and the rise of the Tea Party, but after 13 hours I had nothing left to say about America… I was drained. 13 hours, as television goes today, is two seasons, maybe even three”.

Miles Teller had recalled, at the time of the release, the difficulties and stress of the production: “Nic has completely lost his mind after the seventh episode; he is unable to settle for mediocrity; he is as if we had made 7 films for the cinema, one after the other”.

Here is the Too Old to Die Young review. The limited series was expanded upon by Refn’s 138-minute feature film of the same name, which premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival. Miles Teller plays the role of a detective who leads a double life as a hitman in Los Angeles and suffers an existential crisis in the noir series.