Amazon has released the first official trailer for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Los Angeles-based crime thriller series, Too Old to Die Young. The series is set to premiere in its entirety on Amazon Prime Video later this June.
Starring Miles Teller, the series follows a grieving police officer who, along with the man who shot his partner, who 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. Every episode of Too Old to Die Young was written by Nicolas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker, who also serve as executive producers with Jeffrey Stott. The supporting cast includes Billy Baldwin, Jena Malone, John Hawkes, Callie Hernandez, and August Aguilera.
Now go ahead and check out the first blood-soaked, neon-lit trailer for Too Old to Die Young below:
It’s been over three years since Refn has last graced screens with any project, the last being his underwhelming “return” with The Neon Demon, which premiered to dwindling reviews from the Cannes Film Festival before being released by Amazon. This new series certainly looks cool, complete with all of the filmmaker’s eccentricities and penchant for ultra-violence, sleek camera moves, and neon lighting. It’s just a matter of whether this long-form story will out stay its welcome.
“It’s the most Nicolas Winding Refn thing that ever existed, honestly,” Ed Brubaker recently said, in an interview with /Film. “It’s stylish and shocking, it has some of the best cinematography ever for television (DP: Darius Khondji), 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.”
This isn’t Refn’s first foray into serialized television either. He’s made feature-length television episodes before. Back in 2007, he directed an episode of Miss Marple for PBS and Britain’s ITV. In “Miss Marple: Nemesis,” Refn directed Geraldine McEwan as the titular Agatha Christie character, along with Richard E. Grant as her nephew. The episode clocked in at 83 minutes. However, each installment of Miss Marple is a standalone affair whereas Too Old to Die Young is Refn’s longest form of storytelling to date.
In an interview with ScreenDaily, Refn’s longtime collaborator and film composer Cliff Martinez dropped a major reveal about Too Old to Die Young at the Rotterdam Film Festival: All 10 episodes of the show are 90 minutes or around 90 minutes long. “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 Too Old To Die Young,” Martinez said when asked about the difference between working on a streaming series versus a film. “It’s ten episodes that are around 90 minutes a piece. I warned Nic Winding Refn, you better drink a lot of coffee and get a lot of sleep when you can.” So get ready for 16 hours of unabashed Winding Refn…ness.
Too Old to Die Young is set to premiere on Amazon Video on June 14, 2019.
Source: Amazon
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