Ryan Gosling reportedly wrapped up filming on Muay Thai action movie Only God Forgives in Thailand on March 28, 2012.
It seems like he Canadian actor/hunk was quite a hit! Photos of him leaving from blog Socialite Life show him wai-ing, hugging, posing for photos, and just generally being gracious to workers on the set.
Gosling had been in Thailand for a few months shooting on Bangkok-set film, in which he plays an exiled American named Julian who runs a MuayThai gym that’s a front for drug smuggling. When Julian’s brother is killed by a retired ex-cop named Chang, or the Angel of Vengeance, he must seek vengeance for his brother’s murder, as directed by his gangster mother (Kristin Scott Thomas). Bloody mayhem ensues.
In fact, director Nicolas Winding Refn has said that the film will be more violent than Drive, the last film he and Gosling worked on together and quite bloody in its own right. Gosling also reportedly said that the script was the strangest he had ever read. How intriguing.
Refn recently spoke with French newspaper Liberation about Only God Forgives and his love of Bangkok, in an interview that was translated by IndieWire’s Playlist blog.
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“I love this city. Sometimes it feels like the sets of Blade Runner,” he said about the Thai capital. “I could eat Thai every day, buy lots of toys, robots, movie posters. Yesterday I found two original posters for…Godzilla. Sublime.”
Refn is known for shooting his films in chronological order (very unusual) and often editing the same day a scene is shot. “I hate the idea that the film is over before we started shooting,” Refn said. “I spent whole nights finding places in Bangkok. Especially in Chinatown, where most of the film unfolds. We saw dozens of nightclubs, each more kitsch than each other, the walls covered with carved paneling, thick velvet, with flowers in colored plastic gueulardes, erotic statues or classic gold…they give me ideas for scenes. It’s like the neon lights in the streets, forming strange perspectives. No one realizes that once on site. Then I decide, and always by instinct.”
If he shot everything in chronological order, does that mean that the recently released photo of Gosling bloody and battered is from one of the last scenes? We can only speculate for now.
One thing Refn has revealed though: The scene in Drive where Gosling nearly hammers a nail through a baddie’s skull in front of a gaggle of scantily clad strippers will be mirrored in the new film, with Chang administering the beating. “Only God Forgives will feature a sequence in which Chang assaults a man in front of a dozen young women. They close their eyes, like dolls in a toy store, while a horrible thing unfolds before them,” the director said.
There’s no release date for the film yet, but Refn allegedly hinted that it could be ready for the 2012 Venice Film Festival in late August. Color us excited!
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