David Cronenberg: Taxing the Mind with Cosmopolis

Occupy Cosmopolis

David Cronenberg never achieved his early aspiration of becoming an “obscure novelist that was too difficult or too dark to be very popular”. As a director and occasional screenwriter, though, he has never been afraid of dividing audiences. “You should be provocative [if you’re an artist],” he once told me. “If you make a movie that everybody loves, you’re in big trouble.”

He was presumably over the moon, therefore, when his glacial adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis split opinion at this year’s 65th Cannes Film Festival. While some critics simply scratched their heads in puzzlement at the opaque tale of twentysomething billionaire Eric Packer’s death trip across New York in a white stretch limo, others praised the film’s cool style (reminiscent of Crash), intelligence, and nuanced central performance by Twilight’s Robert Pattinson.

A long way from the body horror films such as Shivers – in which a parasite spreads sexual anarchy throughout a high-rise building – or Rabid – in which porn star Marilyn Chambers spreads disease from a phallic growth in her armpit – which defined Cronenberg’s fledgling career, Cosmopolis is the director’s view that “dialogue is the essence of cinema” writ large.

This is not a new idea, he says. “Everybody would talk about the gore or the creatures or the science fiction, but if you look at those early movies the dialogue is pretty interesting, I think, still,” he says, when we meet in London a week after Cosmopolis’s Cannes debut. “It’s not the normal low-budget horror dialogue that’s very banal and ordinary. It’s unusual, and the characters are unusual, and I think very funny as well. So I say I have always been concerned to write good dialogue, and to have interesting dialogue.”

Cosmopolis, like his previous film A Dangerous Method (adapted from Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure), is such a tsunami of words and ideas, however, that it even took DeLillo, who loves the film, two viewings to absorb everything.

Cronenberg is unapologetic about making viewers work, and dismisses much of modern Hollywood’s output as a “very superficial version of what cinema can be”. “It’s like eating candy,” he says. “You consume it, and then it’s gone and you forget it. I like to put a lot into my movies so that it’s not an instant consumer item.

“Now I’m completely aware that offends some people, because they’re used to the consumer version of cinema, and I say, ‘Well, too bad. Then maybe my cinema’s not for you.’”

What Twihards will make of the latest Robert Pattinson vehicle, and in particular a scene in which Packer undergoes a weirdly sexualised prostate examination, is anyone’s guess. The 26-year-old is surprisingly well cast though, despite personally having doubts about whether he was good enough, playing a role which effectively reverses the journey of many Cronenberg protagonists.

Where a character in the Canadian’s films will often mutate into something else, as in The Fly or Videodrome, Packer is already a kind of alien when Cosmopolis begins. Disconnected from society, and even from his own humanity, by his immense wealth, he gradually transforms back into a recognisable human being, filled with dread and doubt, the closer he gets to fulfilling his own elaborately self-engineered suicide. What had begun as a trip to get a haircut – symbolising “a journey into his past, into his childhood, and perhaps an innocent time,” says Cronenberg – turns into an existential odyssey.

Packer is representative of a type well known to Edouard Carmingnac, a French investment banker and hedge fund manager who put money into the film because he loved the novel’s “absolute accuracy”, says Cronenberg: “He knows many people just like him. Money isn’t real to them any more, or it’s almost a game, or they deal in billions of dollars but never actually touch real money; it’s all in their heads and they don’t even have time to connect with real people in a real way. So for him this is not a fantasy; this is a documentary.”

If the film felt like a fantasy to Cronenberg when he took it on, it started to feel increasingly less so as real world events alarmingly mirrored their story.

“We were directing scenes of anti-capitalist riots in Times Square [on a soundstage in his native Toronto], and then we’d go home and read about the Occupy Wall Steet movement.” On another occasion, Paul Giamatti, who appears as Packer’s executioner/saviour, Benno, texted him just after they’d filmed a scene featuring Mathieu Almaric as a cream pie-throwing anarchist, saying Rupert Murdoch had been attacked with a pie. “We said, ‘This is bizarre. Everything we’re shooting is happening.’ Of course, we never really thought of it per se as a documentary, but it was really interesting to see.”

Cosmopolis inevitably taps into widespread anxieties about capitalism and the yawning gap between haves and have nots. However, looking at what Occupy Wall Street actually stands for (anti-fraud, anti-corruption, anti-greed) made Cronenberg realise that nobody in the film is actually anti-capitalist. 

“Occupy Wall Street is pro-capitalist, they just want to be part of it,” he says. “They’re saying capitalism has excluded us and we’ll be happy if we are part of the 1 per cent.” Similarly in the film, Benno hates the younger, more successful Packer because he feels too left out, too old, too left behind. “So in terms of these characters it’s not really an anti-capitalist screed of any kind, it’s an analysis of capitalism.”

And a certain kind of rapacious capitalism at that. In Canada, says Cronenberg, where things are more conservative, the banks have evaded the financial disaster afflicting America because regulation has prevented them from running amok. When banking was deregulated across the border, no-one was amazed by the consequences. “If you just say to Americans, ‘Go crazy’, they will go crazy of course. And they have a history of that. So we’re not surprised.”

Canadian capitalism is less extreme, says Cronenberg. Unlike the Packers of this world, “we just think it’s natural that you want some safety net for certain members of society that can’t hack it, and that’s human. Sure some people try to scam the system, and so what? That’s also human and you try to balance that, too.” He laughs. “In America they think we’re pinko, they think we’re socialist or worse, we’re almost communist. And in the heartland of America, Canada is quite threatening in that way.”

Some Americans also used to find Cronenberg threatening because of his films. Even Martin Scorsese, who’d already directed the violent gangster movie Goodfellas at the time, once admitted to Cronenberg that he was scared of meeting him because he thought he would be “some crazy person”.

It is risky judging an artist by their work, of course. That said, it is hard not to wonder what goes on inside the mind of a man whose films include exploding heads (Scanners), identical twin gynaecologists obsessed with a woman with a “trifurcated cervix” (Dead Ringers), wounds that offer new orifices for sex (Crash), and a sexualised prostate examination (Cosmopolis). The latter make me wonder if Cronenberg believes that anything can be eroticised.

“I think so,” he says unhesitatingly. “Certainly Freud suggests that when he talked about what he called polymorphous perversity: the idea that to the child who is almost pre-sexual in a sense, everything is sexual; eating, shitting, sensuality, touching, drooling, there’s an eroticism to all of that. So I think the answer is yes, under the right circumstances.” He smiles. “And in the right delicate hands, of course.”

It isn’t any wonder that over the years Cronenberg has shocked, sickened and provoked, attracting labels such as the King of Venereal Horror and the Baron of Blood. Subversion and transgression, and a sometimes queasy fascination with human physiology, still colour his work. But its maturity and complexity is now such that no-one could seriously mistake Cronenberg for being “just some kind of schlocky horror film-maker”.

The French love him so much that in 1997 he was made an Officer in the prestigious Order of Arts and Letters, while in Canada (and this could perhaps only happen in Canada) he is regarded as a national treasure.

“I’ve had to endure that,” he says wryly. “But you take strength from it, especially given that I have always been rigorous in being true to my own visions of things, and am not just being loved for the sake of being loved.”

If he ever “lost the edge”, he says it would be time to seriously consider retirement. “I’m not interested in becoming an establishment kind of old fart. That would be the end of your career, and at that point you would hope that you would have the grace to stop.” While he’s still making films as provocative as Cosmopolis, that day, even at 69, looks some way off yet.

First published in The Scotsman June 7, 2012

FILM FESTIVAL 2012: THE WRATH OF CANNES

Final preparations are made for the 65th Cannes Film Festival. Picture: AP

By Stephen Applebaum
 
Published on Wednesday 16 May 2012 
 

AS the world’s coolest film festival gets underway today, Stephen Applebaum finds that behind all the glitz and the glamour there lies an institution not to be messed with

THANKS to the internet, we are living in an age of leaks. And it seemed like the security-conscious Cannes Film Festival might have sprung one, when a list of 24 films supposedly selected for this year’s 65th edition appeared on a French website calling itself Blog du Festival de Cannes, nearly three weeks before the official launch of the Competition line-up on 19 April.

It was a tantalising post, designed to get film fans’ juices flowing (and, no doubt, to attract traffic to the website). However, the inclusion of last year’s press-shy Palme d’Or winner, Terence Malick, as well as There Will Be Blood’s Paul Thomas Anderson, with films that most commentators believed wouldn’t actually be finished in time for the 2012 edition of the world’s glitziest – and frequently most vulgar and crazy - collision of cineart and commerce, instantly called its authenticity into question.   

Launching into damage-control mode, festival director Thierry Fremaux pronounced it “all lies” and warned that “Cannes is an institution and must be preserved. There is a code of conduct for Cannes and it must be respected,” he told website Deadline.com, adding darkly: “Those who don’t respect the code will never come back to Cannes.” 

He wasn’t kidding. As Lars von Trier discovered very publicly last year, one of the first rules of participating in Cannes is, don’t embarrass Cannes. After making some ill-advised off-the-cuff remarks about being a Nazi and having sympathy for Hitler when he was holed up in his bunker, at the now infamous press conference for his Competition film, Melancholia, the Danish iconoclast was declared persona non grata, and banned from the festival. Although the furore didn’t stop Kirsten Dunst from winning the award for best actress, the decision to exclude her director sent a powerful message: if one of Cannes’ favourite sons, and a past Palme d’Or winner to boot, can be barred, then no-one is safe.

Indeed, it is not just filmmakers that can provoke the wrath of Cannes’ organisers. Journalists are also bound by strict protocols, the breaking of which can result in one’s festival badge being revoked. These precious pieces of colour-coded plastic, depending on their hue, can make you feel like a king or la merde de la Croisette. Some people have the luxury of sailing fairly smoothly into screenings and Press conferences, while others find themselves in a situation that creates the sensation of cattle being herded to slaughter. (The fact that some films make you wish you could be put out of your misery only adds to the effect.) Consequently, tempers have been known to flare and fists to fly.

Whether there will be any of that this year remains to be seen. On paper, though, there is much in the official line-up with the potential to get passions running high. 

Malick and Anderson, to nobody’s surprise, are not part of the programme. Even so, fans of auteur cinema should be well served by the likes of Wes Anderson, whose Moonrise Kingdom kicks off proceedings tonight; Michael Haneke, whose film Love reunites with him with his daring Piano Teacher star Isabelle Huppert; Leos Carax, whose Holy Motors is his first feature since 1999’s Pola X; and the UK’s own Ken Loach, whose Scotland-set whisky heist movie, The Angels’ Share, is a lighter and less controversial proposition than his last Cannes winner, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, six years ago. No doubt Loach’s detractors on the Right are already preparing their well-rehearsed jibes about champagne socialists hobnobbing with the conspicuously rich on the French Riviera. 

Another festival favourite, David Cronenberg, will pitch up with his hotly anticipated adaptation of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, which the trailer suggests is far more recognisably Cronenbergian than his recent Freud/Jung face-off, A Dangerous Method. Some fear it could be dragged down by its star, Robert Pattinson, whose recent performance in Bel Ami failed to convince many critics that there was more to him than Twilight’s Edward Cullen. Perhaps Cronenberg can help him silence the naysayers.

Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand will go toe to toe for the top prize in the shape of The Road director John Hillcoat’s prohibition era thriller, Lawless, and Andrew Dominik’s dark tale of revenge, Killing them Softly, starring Brad Pitt, both of which should be hot tickets.

America’s Lee Daniels returns for the first time since Precious with The Paperboy, which boasts Zac Efron, Matthew McConaughey, Nicole Kidman, John Cusack and Macy Gray among its cast. He will be joined by Jeff Nichols, who follows last year's sidebar placement for Take Shelter with a Competition slot for Mud. Meanwhile, first-time feature director Benh Zeitlin will bring his acclaimed Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, Beasts of the Southern Wild, to Un Certain Regard.

With other Competition entries also including films from the likes of Cristian Mungiu (2007 Palme d’Or winner for 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days), Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah), Thomas Vinterberg (Festen), and Jacques Audiard (A Prophet), the jury – headed by Nanni Moretti and counting Ewan McGregor, Andrea Arnold, and, surprisingly, Jean Paul Gaultier among its members – could have a tough time choosing the winner.

All will be revealed when the festival wraps on 27 May, after which the world’s media will stumble out of Cannes as if suddenly awoken from a fever dream and head back to reality. For 11 days, however, the small seaside town with hyper-inflated prices will have felt like the only place to be.

• The 65th Cannes Film Festival runs from today until 27 May.

First published in The Scotsman, May 16, 2012