How did 'Drive find that higher gear? The director says it was thanks to 'Sixteen Candles'

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Set us as preferred Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn is willfully and delightfully unpredictable: part showman, part provocateur.His movies are moody and stylish, dashed with violence and a sense of spiritual grace that often wrongfoots audiences.

His 2011 breakthrough, “Drive,” starring Ryan Gosling, earned Refn the directing prize when it premiered that year at the Cannes Film Festival.It captured the romantic appeal of cruising Los Angeles at night and became nothing less than an immediate local classic.Refn’s first movie in America, “Drive” presents Gosling as a nameless young man who works as a mechanic and occasional stunt driver by day, criminal wheelman for hire by night.

His quiet, structured existence is thrown into disarray when he befriends his vulnerable neighbor (Carey Mulligan) and her young son and soon their separate worlds collide.Movies Our list of the 101 best Los Angeles movies is as sprawling as the city, and includes “Chinatown,” “Clueless,” “Blade Runner,” “Mulholland Drive,” “Heat,” “Pulp Fiction,” “The Big Lebowski” and “La La Land.”Having spent the better part of the past decade making streaming series — “Too Old to Die Young” for Amazon and “Copenhagen Cowboy” for Netflix — Refn has once again returned to cinema.

His newest film, the horror-fantasy hybrid “Her Private Hell,” starring Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton, opens this weekend.In town to promote the movie, Refn will also be appearing on Friday night at American Cinematheque‘s Los Feliz Theatre for a 15th anniversary screening of “Drive.” (The show is already sold out, but there will be a stand-by line.) Refn, 55, got on a video call this week while in L.A.to talk about the unlikely impact of “Drive” and some of its more unexpected influences.The movie was such a c...