TORONTO—The tradition of foreign filmmakers coming to America and telling very American stories from an outsider’s point of view started at the beginning of the movies with Charlie Chaplin and continued through to Alfred Hitchcock. More recently, Holland’s Paul Verhoeven made Total Recall; Canada’s Norman Jewison filmed A Soldier’s Story; and Australians Bruce Beresford and Peter Weir were behind the iconic Driving Miss Daisy and The Truman Show.

You probably won’t see an American movie this year that feels more American than Danish-born Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. It stars Canadian Ryan Gosling as a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a prince of thieves on the L.A. freeways. He tells his partners that their getaway car will wait for them for one minute only and will leave without them if the job isn’t complete. Things go well until he falls in love with a neighbour (Carey Mulligan) who is targeted by underworld bosses when her husband returns from prison. He owes money and they don’t care who gets in the way of their pursuit of it. The film opens Friday (September 16).

Refn, just shy of his 41st birthday, may be the ultimate outsider, at least when it came to the making of this particular film. Although he lived in New York from age eight to 17 and made the film Fear X in North America (Winnipeg) in 2003, he is perhaps best known for the Europe-shot trilogy Pusher and the 2008 British movie Bronson. He is an unlikely choice for a film shot throughout L.A., a city he admits he hardly knows. And then there is this other thing: incredibly, he has never had a driver’s licence.

“I have no interest in cars,” he says in a hotel room during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. “I failed my driver’s licence eight times. I don’t have a licence and I never will get a licence. That challenge was one of the things that kind of turned me on. I was going to make a movie about something I had no interest in. How would I do that? As we went further into developing the film, I found the whole L.A. car-fetish thing interesting, but still, the cars themselves did not appeal to me.”

Refn made the movie as a collaboration with Gosling, screenwriter Hossein Amini, and James Sallis, the author of the novel on which the film is based. He says that he and Gosling talked about their approach to the material months in advance and then spent weeks working with Amini in L.A. to get things right.

“Ryan and I had almost four months to talk about the movie and the things we would be doing for it. As we got closer, I moved to Los Angeles to start the preparation. My writing partner, Hossein, was there at my house, writing it, and in the morning Ryan would come by and we would talk about everything. The movie was laid out on my table and each table had dialogue cards. We would continue to drill and drill, and then Ryan and I would go out at night and drive around and listen to music.

“We continued to do this for days until I felt we had become one person. I like to think that that is how I make all my movies. It is about the few people who are going to make the movie with you. I think the lead actor is your collaborator. He’s your alter ego, and the more you are in sync with him, the more things will flow.”

Refn says that for him the fun of making movies comes in the postproduction. “In the editing room, I discover a lot of things. The first thing I do is I cut the movie into an incoherent stage and watch it just to see what it would be like if you turned everything on its head. Once in a while, you actually find something that works. It is a constant evolution, because you keep on testing and trying things out, and if you don’t do it that way, it is not particularly fun, because then you know what you are going to do, and what is interesting about that?”

The danger of coming to the U.S. to make a movie is that you might not get to make the movie that you want. American studios are infamous for reviewing every aspect of the script and the budget and the schedule with filmmakers before taking the movie away and giving it to focus groups. Refn says that never happened to him.

“I was very lucky that I was able to have a first-class Hollywood experience and was able to make the movie I wanted. For instance, I don’t do focus groups. They don’t make any sense to me. I was very happy that we didn’t have to do that nonsense.”

Watch the trailer for Drive.