Nicolas Winding Refn's 'Too Old To Die Young' Features 10 90-Minute Episodes
Too Old to Die Young, the upcoming Amazon series from neon fetishist Nicolas Winding Refn, is not going to be something you can blow through in one weekend. According to Refn's longtime collaborator, composer Cliff Martinez, all 10 episodes of the series are about 90-minutes each, which would clock the entire series in about 16 hours.
Nicolas Winding Refn's Too Old to Die Young is debuting on Amazon at some point this year (there's no date set yet), and when it arrives, you better clear out a huge chunk of time. Speaking with ScreenDaily, composer Cliff Martinez dropped this eyebrow raising tidbit:
"For me the biggest change is just the endurance to do what I think of as a ten-hour movie – or a 16-hour movie in the case of To Old To Die Young. It's ten episodes that are around 90 minutes a piece."
In other words, Refn hasn't made a series of TV episodes – he's made essentially 10 feature films. This could be either very impressive, or very frustrating, depending on how the material turns out. Either way, I'm intrigued. I'm a big Refn fan, and if he's managed to somehow make 10 90-minute episodes that hold my interest, I'll be thrilled.
The Drive and Neon Demon filmmaker has assembled a cast that includes Miles Teller, Billy Baldwin, Jena Malone, John Hawkes, Cristina Rodlo, Augusto Aguilera, Nell Tiger Free, Babs Olusanmokun, Callie Hernandez, to tell a story about "a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, finds himself in an underworld filled with working-class hit men, Yakuza soldiers, cartel assassins sent from Mexico, Russian mafia captains and gangs of teen killers." Refn co-wrote the series with Ed Brubaker.
When interviewed about the show in October 2018, Brubaker said:
"The show will launch in the spring, I believe, on Amazon. Nic and Matt [Newman, editor] are still cutting the second half of the season, but what I've seen is amazing. It's the most Nicolas Winding Refn thing that ever existed, honestly. It's stylish and shocking, it has some of the best cinematography ever for television (our lead DP was the great Darius Khondji, so of course it does), and at the same time it is a meditation on these characters trapped in this world that's not too unlike the world all around us, that feels like it's about to fall apart, or maybe be torn apart...It's also the most exhausting thing I've ever done, writing that show with Nic. We had a 10-month shoot, which I think might be a record, with one director shooting it all."