Are Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn the next De Niro and Scorsese?

From John Ford and John Wayne, to Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, to Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale, there have been many great actor-director teams. Very quietly, a new one could be budding right before our eyes. EW has confirmed that Ryan Gosling is negotiating to star in Only God Forgives, a crime thriller set in Bangkok and the third movie he and Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn plan to make together. (Variety first reported the story.) The only problem is that few people have seen a single film the pair has made. More specifically, most moviegoers in the U.S. haven’t seen any of Refn’s work yet. But with the news of the casting and the critical buzz around their first collaboration, Drive, picked up this May at Cannes, there might be some magic brewing between the two artists.

Anyone familiar with Refn’s work will tell you his style is hard to forget. Refn made a name for himself in Europe with the Pusher films, a gritty crime trilogy that boosted the career of future Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen. With 2009’s Bronson and 2010′s Valhalla Rising, he established a small following Stateside for his dark, stylistic and often bizarre films. Bronson found some critical success, but, more importantly, it established its lead, a barely-recognizable Tom Hardy, as someone to watch, and arguably led to his star-making turn in Inception.