Although a date has yet to be announced for the home video release of “Drive,” director Nicolas Winding Refn suggests that fans might want to skip the first release of the film on DVD and Blu-ray and wait for a deluxe edition that he’d like to put together in a year or so. Speaking to The Playlist recently, Refn indicated that an upcoming double-dip will offer greater insights and information about the film than the bare-bones iteration that’s due in a few months.
“The version that is released now, like soon, is fairly standard,” Refn revealed. “It does not include any audio commentaries with either Ryan [Gosling] or myself, and it does not include any secret, revealing elements, or mysteries solved, or a huge amount of spinoffs. [But] because I’m a Blu-ray fanatic – no, fanatic, like religiously – I hope that in the near future, I will be able to release a movie that’s not just a movie, but also one that describes the process of the filmmaking, and answers some of the more mysterious elements of the success of that it has achieved.”
Retrospective featurettes typically seem most interesting only years after a film is released, when audiences and critics, and even the filmmakers themselves, have had an opportunity to honestly assess its artistic and commercial merits. But Refn said he’s confident he and star Ryan Gosling will be able to provide some deeper perspectives, much less production details, about the conception and execution of “Drive.”
“I think it will be fun to sometime next year to just start thinking about putting it all together,” he said of the potential timeline. “By then it has played itself through in all of the countries in the world, and all of the various Blu-ray editions have been released. So that would be the time to make, what I would say would be the ‘Queen’ version. That’s what is in the plan for Ryan and I.”
Of course what he means by "Queen version" we'll have to wait and see, but hopefully everything can come together for Refn to deliver the full blown DVD/BluRay release the film deserves. And if FilmDistrict aren't up to the task, maybe The Criterion Collection can step in? Dare to dream.
