Author: Mad About Movies (Page 1 of 6)

The master filmmaker describes the making of his challenging new film and praises its surprising star.

Film audiences have had 35 years to figure out David Cronenberg, and they’d be fools if they thought they’d managed the trick.  

Just when you reckoned you had the Canadian writer-director pegged as a master of sci-fi and horror (“Scanners,” “The Fly,” “Videodrome”) he turned to tales of sexual confusion (“Dead Ringers,” “M. Butterfly,” “Crash”), then to crime stories (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”) and then, just last year, to a biopic about Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (“A Dangerous Method”).

Now he’s back, very quickly, with “Cosmopolis,” an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about Eric Packer, a financial tycoon riding in a limousine through a tumultuous Manhattan day as his fortune is buffeted by global markets and his state of mental well-being decays.  Ostensibly, the troubled fellow is trying to get downtown to get his haircut.  But like Odysseus’s voyage home in “The Odyssey,” there’s much more to it than that.

Describing the story in a telephone interview from his Toronto base, Cronenberg explains that “the barber shop is not just a place where you go to get a haircut.  It is his past.  He’s returning to his childhood, to capture or reconnect with something that in his young adulthood he has lost.”

Packer is an unsympathetic protagonist, a titan of finance at age 28 who browbeats his employees, cheats on his wife, and presumes (and often incites) the worst in every person and every situation he encounters.  It’s no wonder that he travels in an armored car, with a bodyguard, under constant fear of death threats.  And yet, Cronenberg, following DeLillo, finds a poignancy to his situation.  

“As the movie progresses,” he says, “he becomes more and more vulnerable and childlike, and he begins to confess that he doesn’t know how to interact, how to talk to his wife.  He says, ‘This is how people talk, isn’t it?’  Although he is incredibly powerful and successful in his abstract bond-and-money-trading way, he has disconnected himself.  Just as he has insulated his limo, he’s insulated his life from the vibrancy and human energy of the city.  And he’s trying to connect with that.”

There’s a terrific claustrophobia to “Cosmopolis” based simply on the fact that (again, following DeLillo), it’s predominantly set in the interior of the protagonist’s high-tech limousine.  Cronenberg, who confesses that “For me to just do what is normal is not that interesting,” was excited by the challenge of making a movie in such a confined space.

“I really like the structure,” he says.  “I showed my crew two movies.  I showed them ‘Lebanon,’ which takes place entirely inside an Israeli tank, and I showed them ‘Das Boot,’ which takes place almost entirely inside a German submarine.  And in some ways this limo of Eric’s is a tank and a submarine.  But it’s also a kind of vacuum tube or bell jar.  It’s his environment that he’s created. The limo becomes something surreal.  It becomes his moving environment that he forces everyone to come to, not just for conversations and business but for sex and medicine.  You come into my environment and I control the space.  Even the way he sits: it’s like he’s on a throne at the back of the limo.  And it gives you the sense that this is his place of power, and he’s created this environment to exercise and demonstrate that power.”

Given the heavy New York atmosphere of the film, it’s something of a surprise that Cronenberg should have chosen the British actor Robert Pattinson for the lead role.  Pattison is best known, of course, for the relatively featherweight demands of the “Twilight” films, which reveal little of the heavy, internal and intellectual stuff that “Cosmopolis” demands.  After declaring that “casting is a black art: there’s no rule book to guide you,” Cronenberg explains that he watched some of Pattinson’s non-“Twilight” work, especially “Little Ashes,” in which he played the young Salvador Dalí, and felt he’d found his man.  Still, he admits, there is, in all such matters, a leap of faith.  

“It’s just intuiting that he can do the role,” he says.  “Because you’re asking him here to do things he hasn’t done before.  But I was convinced by the time that I had done all my work that he was the right guy.  I knew he was good, and he surprised me by how good he was.”

One of Pattinson’s challenges was the sheer density of the dialogue.  “Cosmopolis” is filled with deep, thick, abstract conversations that can feel more literary than cinematic.  But Cronenberg says that it’s a mistake to think of cinema as a more purely visual than verbal art.  “If you ask me ‘What is cinema?,’” he says, “I would say that the essence of cinema is two people talking.  That’s the thing we photograph most in a movie: a person’s face, usually talking.  Even in an action movie you get a lot of that, percentage-wise.  I’ve never shied away from dialogue because, as I say, I find it innately cinematic. You find people who say, ‘That’s theatrical,’ because for them theater is dialogue. But to me that’s completely wrong.  Dialogue is innately cinematic, and when you think of something as ‘theatrical’ you’re thinking of something else, you’re thinking of something structural.”

What’s more, he says, DeLillo’s dialogue uniquely lends itself to the screen.  “I think of Don’s dialogue in the way I think of David Mamet or Harold Pinter,” he explains.  “It’s based in reality, it’s the way people speak, but it’s also very stylized.  It has an askew kind of quality that gives it a heightened coherence.  And everybody in ‘Cosmopolis’ speaks in the same way; they understand this kind of talk.  And that only happens when you’re in a very enclosed community.  But in a weird way that’s what you get with Don:  a closed community of Don DeLillo.”

That said, Cronenberg continues, his “Cosmopolis” is not DeLillo’s. “My approach to adapting his book,” he explains, “was to accept the difference between the two media, and to be brutal about it and not to resort to voice-overs reading the book to you and so on.  I’ve said it many times: to be loyal to the book you have to betray the book.  And I did that with ‘Cosmopolis.’  Although in the case of ‘Cosmopolis,’ almost every word of dialogue in the movie is directly from the book.”

The finished film is a chilly look at this unstable moment in American culture, with unrest on the left and the right, a financial system seemingly on the verge of collapse, and all the traditional ways of understanding ourselves and our world challenged.  Cronenberg says that, as a Canadian, he feels that he’s got a front-row seat to the spectacle of a superpower in a state of change and tumult.

As he puts it, the Canadian cultural critic Marshall McLuhan believed “that not being in America but being in a kind of backwater and observing America gave him a perspective that an American couldn’t have.  And there could be some truth to that.  You can’t claim it as a triumph or victory; it’s just happenstance.  But in Canada we are uniquely positioned to observe America, because in one way we’re obsessed with America, and our destinies are very linked, and in another way we really are a very different culture. So I think that being a Canadian and living in Toronto gives me kind of a perfect perspective to do a New York story.”

("Cosmopolis" opens in Portland on Friday, August 24.)