WHEN director Nicolas Winding Refn took The Neon Demon to Cannes this year, the reaction was explosive. Already a veteran of the festival – his 2011 cool noir Drive won Best Director before Thai-set thriller Only God Forgives drew a vitriolic response – the press screening was equal cat-calls and cheers. “Hearing the violence of love and hate erupting,” he grins, “I was like, The Sex Pistols have arrived again.” He may not be as anarchic as Pistols’ singer Johnny Rotten (though he did once use the f-word live on BBC Breakfast) but Refn is a divisive figure.

READ MORE: Alison Rowat film review: The Neon Demon

We meet in London’s Soho Hotel for breakfast a week later – shortly before the Daily Mail implored the British censors to ban the film. Set in a super-stylised take on Los Angeles’ fashion world, the paper was up in arms about the film’s lurid sex and gore. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful,” it wrote, “if the BBFC [the British Board of Film Classification] took a stance and banned films designed only to shock, sicken, corrupt and deprave?”

Undoubtedly some will balk at scenes of cannibalism and lesbian necrophilia, but like fellow Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier, Refn is an arch provocateur. A meditation on the world’s insatiable appetite for beauty, The Neon Demon follows the arrival of fresh-faced 16 year-old model Jesse (Elle Fanning) into the L.A. modelling scene. Befriended by a make-up artist (Jena Malone), Jesse soon discovers that her youthful appearance makes her both desirable and enviable.

Whatever the film’s detractors say, the film is a fascinating look at contemporary society’s obsession with perfection. “I laugh at it but I also find it frightening because I know from a female point of view, it must be really difficult to live in,” says Refn. “But then I’m just a dumb man. I have daughters [two, with wife Liv Corfixen] so that makes me go, ‘I hope they’re going to be OK’ because it’s more and more a dominating factor about being a young girl. The obsession just continues to grow. It’s like evolution. It’s all around us.”

READ MORE: Alison Rowat film review: The Neon Demon

As The Neon Demon mutates into both a horror film and fashion industry satire, Refn claims that he never set out to lambast the world of haute couture. “I don’t know anything about fashion. I’ve never read a fashion magazine. I’ve done some fashion campaigns but I’ve never been to a fashion show. It doesn’t particularly interest me.” You suspect the 45 year-old Refn, who even directed himself in a Gucci ad with actress Blake Lively, is being disingenuous.

True, he didn’t know that Abbey Lee, who co-stars, was a supermodel but The Neon Demon ripples with reference to the cruelty and creativity of high-end fashion. Even Refn’s initials – ‘N.W.R’ – are implanted on the credits in a font that reminds you of fashion icon Yves Saint Laurent’s logo ‘Y.S.L.’ Laughing, as he tucks into a plate of eggs, he denies it was deliberate. “But I love the glamour of it...when you make something like this, you have to go all the way into it.”

Intriguingly, in the end credits, Refn thanks his good friend Alejandro Jodorowsky, the 87 year-old Chilean filmmaker behind such towering cults as El Topo and The Holy Mountain. During the making of The Neon Demon, Jodorowsky became a very useful sounding board when Refn became stuck. “We had a tarot reading every weekend while we were making the movie,” he reveals. “We did it over Skype. And it works! It was always good to talk to him.”

Beyond that, Jodorowsky represents the singularity of vision and purpose that Refn strives for. He recalls that Gucci ad. “Jodorowsky called me and said [in an angry voice] ‘What is going on!?’ But I needed the money! He said, ‘You have to be careful of vanity’. In many ways that’s what The Neon Demon is about – my own vanity. Before I went to Cannes this year, I did the whole red carpet diet. I immersed myself in as much vanity as I possibly could, to live through that part of me that always desired that, and then hopefully it will get out of my body.”

READ MORE: Alison Rowat film review: The Neon Demon

Refn is hardly a sell-out, though. Part of a family of well-respected Danish filmmakers – his father is director and editor Anders Refn, his mother is cinematographer Vibeke Winding – he was born in Copenhagen and spent his teenage years in New York, after his parents moved to the States. By the age of 24, after dropping out of film school, he wrote and directed the violent drugs drama Pusher, positioning him as an edgy new voice in European cinema.

Success was short-lived, however, after an early foray into English-language cinema, his psychological thriller Fear X starring John Turturro, flopped. Left with huge debts, and close to bankruptcy, he reached the nadir of his career directing an episode of Miss Marple, when he was “financially down and out”. But by 2008, critical redemption arrived with the surreal British true-life crime tale Bronson, starring Tom Hardy.

After the success of Drive, he and its star Ryan Gosling flirted with remaking sci-fi Logan’s Run for US studio Warner Brothers, but in the end Refn backed away, and took Gosling to Thailand. “I would’ve loved to make Logan’s Run. I just wanted to do Only God Forgives more. It was more interesting,” he shrugs. “There’s nothing better than waking up in the morning and going to work and doing exactly what you feel like doing.” Jodorowsky would approve.

The Neon Demon opens on July 8