20 Things You Didn't Know About Drive
3. The Head-Stomp Scene Had To Be Edited
By far the most brutal feat of violence in the movie is the infamous, unforgettable elevator head stomp, where the Driver murders an assassin by repeatedly stamping his head into bloody pulp.
Unsurprisingly it's the scene which Refn struggled the most to get past the MPAA, who felt that his original version of the scene was "too violent" for an R rating.
As a result, with commercial concerns being what they are, he ended up cutting it down to something a little less extreme. Still, given how utterly horrific the released version still is, one has to wonder how nauseating it must've looked before.
Hilariously, Refn sought advice from filmmaker Gaspar Noé on how to pull off a realistic and brutal scene of cranial destruction, given that Noé's Irreversible features surely the crushed head scene to rule them all.