A History of Violence

[Pas]

haha, maybe it's the same reason no one cares about mutinyco's interviews. worse even cos at least ppl know who mutinyco is.

(1) P, you should've used that bait with the fuzzy orange thing on it.

(2) If I'd offered something here, it might've been justified.

(3) As I didn't, this is more an expression of your own subconscious.

(4) Go get some fresh air.

I don't understand that post

hmm, i interpreted it as such:

(1) P, stop trying to  start shit. it's not working.

(2) if I'd actually contributed to this particular thread, perhaps that may have warranted an insult/comment from you.

(3) but i didn't. so this is more about you, not me.

(4) Fuck off

Thanks ! I tought it was like : 'Don't ask why nothing bites ! You should use that bait with the fuzzy orange thing on it to catch bass. If I had offered you that lame bait you're using it might had been justified, but I didn't so it's just ...how would you qualify your relationship with your mother ? Try fishing when there's wind.'

[Pubrick]

that's brilliant pas.

anyway i thought i was complimenting mutinyco in favour of this newb. the relevance was that mutinyco's interviews also get ignored, perhaps for the same reason (whatever that may be). i was speculating.

[mutinyco]

Got lost in the translation, I suppose. No offense taken.

[b. real]

i liked this film.  david kinda done good.

[Gamblour.]

Man, this thread died pretty quick. I just saw this movie with a fairly full theater, which is suprising because I saw it at 3:00 pm on a Friday. Seems like not that many people would be up for seeing a film like this at that time of day.

SPOILERS



I completely agree with everything Ghostboy has said. And I especially agree with abuck (that scene is like this part of Family Guy, where three cheerleaders (weird connection) innocently start playing in a fountain and end up making out....the 69 begins as wholesome playful sex then gets raunchy pretty quick).

The movie is very ambiguous about what it's actually implying, which is great, I love it more for that. I was thinking while watching it that I wish Tom hadn't been with the mob for real, but then I thought "nah Straw Dogs already did what I wanted."

Does anyone know what they were smoking in front of the post office? I think it was a joint, but my friend thought it was just an amateur, high schooler way of smoking an actual cigarette? Where's pete, I'm too sheltered to figure this one out.

When that kid kicked the shit out of the bully, I felt utter joy. It's weird what Cronenberg makes you feel about violence.

END SPOILERS


This is a cool fucking movie. The gore is great. The actor who plays the son is AWESOME and well-written. I liked how it started off cheesy, almost cliche, just to really polarize the beginning and end. I really liked that small town feel. Ed Harris is incredible. William Hurt as well.

The more I think about this movie, the more brilliant it becomes. I'm starting to, dare I say, love this film.

winner=maria bello's thighs

[Pas]

winner=maria bello's thighs

Fuck yes.

Also I agree about the premature death of this thread. I tought there would be more debate about this. Anyway the more I think about it the more I like it too.

The bully-ass-kicking scene felt so good because we all wanted to do it when we were in high school but never had the guts... except those of us who grew up in the gettho and experienced the real pain of the real world.

[MacGuffin]

David Cronenberg is the brilliant auteur behind such films as The Fly, Naked Lunch, Crash and Spider. His latest film, A History of Violence, may finally be the one that takes him to the Academy Awards. Based on the graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke it stars Viggo Mortensen as a pillar of a small town community who runs a diner and lives a happy and quiet life with his wife [Maria Bello] and two children. But their lives are forever changed when Mortensen thwarts an attempted robbery and is lauded as a hero by the media, attracting the attention of some mobsters [Ed Harris] who believe he is someone else.

Daniel Robert Epstein: A History of Violence didn’t have a credit sequence like your past films.

David Cronenberg: That’s true. I guess it goes with my feeling that you don’t impose something on a movie just because conceptually it pleases you. I’ve said in the past I like to do a credit sequence that segues the audience from their real life into the life of the movie. But in this case I realized the opening sequence worked very well as one shot and had that particularly languidly sinister rhythm to it with a lot of spaces. I gradually started to feel that this could work very well as an opening title sequence on its own. When that happens, you don’t fight it. It’s basically the movie telling me what it wants and it told me that it wanted this so I went with it.

DRE: Except for Rabid you haven’t had a female character as the central figure in the movie. You always have strong female roles though.

CRONENBERG: Well, I think Genevieve Bujold’s character is quite strong in Dead Ringers and there are some quite strong female characters in Spider actually.

DRE: Absolutely, but not as the central figure.

CRONENBERG: Let’s put it this way, when I was casting, I cast Viggo first and then found someone who could play his wife, rather than the other way around. So for me he’s still the lead character. Certainly though, we often said that you could almost call it Scenes from a Marriage and in that sense it is sort of an equal partnership because it is a story about a couple and a family after that, rather than just about one person, so there is some truth in what you’re saying but I wouldn’t say that Maria Bello was the lead in the way that Marilyn Chambers is the lead in Rabid.

DRE: Is your process directing women any different from men since you have such strong sexual scenes in your films?

CRONENBERG: It’s the same in that you tailor your directing to the individual. It doesn’t break down by gender. It breaks down further into who is it you’re actually directing. For example I don’t work with William Hurt the same way that I will work with Viggo. They’re different guys and they work in different ways. So a good sensitive director has his general style and technique and personality that he uses but you don’t impose that on the actors. You really need to find out how the actor works, what he needs or doesn’t need and then you give that to the actor.

DRE: How was it directing young people like Ashton Holmes and Heidi Hayes in A History of Violence?

CRONENBERG: It’s exactly the same. Each kid has a different level of expertise and some of them are very raw and inexperienced and some are incredibly mature and experienced. So you just have to go with what they are rather than have some abstract technique that you’re going to try to apply to them.

DRE: I was lucking enough to speak to Holly Hunter a couple years ago and she said, that the set of Crash wasn’t the kind of place where people would relax, sit down, and read Variety. But then I’m watching a behind the scenes of A History of Violence on HBO and they had a very funny piece of you jumping into bed with Viggo and Maria joking around, was this a more relaxed set?

CRONENBERG: No I think there was a lot of joking around on Crash but it was a tighter schedule. I think Holly was really talking about what can happen in Hollywood when you have too much time and the crew kind of loses momentum and you do find that lacuna of energy. That doesn’t happen on my sets in general but I think if there had been a making of a documentary of Crash I think you would see a lot of joking and a lot of humor but not time wasting. We weren’t wasting time in A History of Violence either. But the other thing is that moment you’re talking about came at the end of the shoot. Our shoot was only 53 days which for an independent film would be a lot but for a movie of this scope is really not a heck of a lot.

DRE: I saw that you had a video blog on the History of Violence website. How was that process for you?

CRONENBERG: It’s interesting but time consuming. The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog. Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I’ve done that since the beginning. So that’s not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet. I don’t mind writing so I didn’t find that difficult, it’s just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it’s pretty neat.

DRE: Do you find it odd that people are calling this very violent movie, with strong scenes of sexuality, your most mainstream film?

CRONENBERG: Well I don’t think sex and violence have ever stopped a movie from being mainstream. But I think what they’re really noticing, is the accessibility of the characters. I think really that’s the key because mostly my characters tend to be eccentric, on the margins of society and even grotesque, like the ones in Crash. People find it hard to relate because what they’re doing is so strange to them. In those movies my job is to seduce the audience into the movie and into some kind of empathy and understanding for the characters. In this movie it’s sort of the inside out version of that. I start with a family that’s very recognizable and “very accessible” and a normal audience can relate to this family. However, then I take the audience into the movie and move them and the characters into a very dark and strange place. But to me that must be what people are talking about when they say this is mainstream. I don’t see anything else. It’s got a plot but my other movies have plots too so I don’t see what they’re talking about.

DRE: To stay in tune with your other work, is the virus in History of Violence the past or is it violence itself that’s the virus?

CRONENBERG: I don’t think that way. You’re bringing a concept, a sort of critical and analytical concept to bear on this movie. I absolutely don’t mind that, some very interesting and enlightening things can come out of that process. But that’s not a creative process, that’s an analytical and critical process. For instance when I was making the movie that thought would never have been in my mind. There were many thoughts in my mind but I don’t think about my other movies. I really take each movie on its own and try to give it what it needs individually without imposing something from the outside.

I don’t deny obviously that there is a connection. The thing is that I don’t have to force the connection because you literally make 2000 decisions a day as a director. There are decisions about everything from clothes to colors to walls to locations to actors and nobody else would make those same decisions. So the movie will be enough of you, you don’t have to force it. I don’t have to say that I have to put my thumbprint on it so the people will know it’s my movie

DRE: I read that after The Brood you made Scanners and that it was nice to relax and explode some heads. Did you make History of Violence after Spider to relax and kick some people in the face?

CRONENBERG: [laughs] No not at all. The reaction after Spider was that I didn’t make any money and I needed to do a movie that I could make some money on. In the sense that I couldn’t afford to do a low budget independent film with financing that was constantly falling apart and therefore we would all have to defer our salaries and not get paid. I literally did not make any money for two years and I could not afford to do that. On the other hand, Spider was still a wonderful experience and frankly I think it’s the other half of this movie. It also is about identity and the construction of it and the consequences of it. In Spider you have a man who does not have the creative will for whatever reason, to hold his identity together. He keeps disintegrating and falls apart. But each movie has a family in it with a past that has a huge impact on the present. So I think they would be pretty interesting on a double bill for a certain very special audience.

DRE: Maybe in Japan.

Do you feel that when Tom Stall is leading this small town life he’s hiding from who he is or he’s changed who he really is?

CRONENBERG: I think he’s really changed. Certainly the way we played it. But he could choose to be anything. He suddenly chooses to be part of this American mythology. This ideal guy in this ideal small town with a family and he’s been that way for 20 years. At that point he has really wanted to become somebody else. If he got hit by a bus before the bad guys came to town he would have been buried as Tom Stall because that’s who he would have been. Tom Stall is not actually a violent person. He didn’t have that incredible anger and rage.

DRE: When you showed the second sex scene you show the affect the violence had on Tom and his wife.

CRONENBERG: That’s right and when you see the movie a second time it does become a different movie and only then can you really appreciate Viggo’s performance because we were conscious of making kind of two movies at once. For me the most violent moment of the movie is when he slaps his son. That’s a shocking moment and you definitely get the feeling that it’s the first time he ever laid a hand on either of his kids violently. It depresses and shocks him as well as shocking his son because the violence cat is out of the bag and it’s hard to put it back in. Once again it’s a tool, but the adrenaline is there and it comes out in the sexuality as well.

DRE: I remember after The Fly was such a success you decided to put I think like two or three years into making a project that was probably your most difficult up to that point, Dead Ringers. If A History of Violence is a success, close to that level, do you have passion project you want to do?

CRONENBERG: It’s not really a strategy. It’s true that people did tell me in the old days “if you get a hit movie, then you can get your weird movies made” but that turned out to be completely untrue. Dead Ringers was completely difficult to finance even after The Fly. It was very agonizing and scary and almost falling apart all the time. What people want you to do is do another movie like The Fly. They’re not stupid. They read Dead Ringers and they know it’s a difficult movie to sell, so I don’t think that there’s a relationship between having a success, for me anyway, and then doing a difficult film. The opportunities to do various movies come by chance.

DRE: I remember there was someone who said that your films have a weird air to them because it’s like America but its not.

CRONENBERG: Yes, that was a producer who said many years ago, “For Americans your movies are really weird. The streets are like America, but they’re not. The people are like Americans but they’re not. It’s like the pod people kind of thing.” I’m thinking, “Well that’s us Canadians you know, we’re the American pod people.” We’re like American people but we’re not, we’re quite different. I’ve only really set maybe three films in America. One was The Dead Zone, Fast Company and History of Violence was another one that had scenes that were set in America. But I have still never shot a foot of film in America.

DRE: How was it working with [production designer] Carol [Spier] again after you didn’t work with her in Spider?

CRONENBERG: It was fine. You have to remember that Howard Shore didn’t do the music for the Dead Zone and that’s about the only one he hasn’t done. Every once in a while there are circumstances and in the case of Spider, Carol was doing Blade II in Prague. She was there for nine months so she couldn’t do Spider.

DRE: What is your working relationship with Howard Shore?

CRONENBERG: He’s done just about every one of my movies and we’ve known each other for 30 years. When we’re working we have 100 percent interaction. Any script that I’m considering to do, I send it to a group of people. Carol Spier, Peter Suschitzky my director of photography, Howard and my editor Ron Sanders who I’ve worked with for 35 years. I just want feedback from them and get them started thinking about it even before we’ve shot a foot of film. So the discussions begin very early on and get more intense and Howard sends me synthesized possibilities and themes and ideas and we discuss that. In the case of History of Violence we certainly discussed the American-ness of the movie and the western tone of it. He started to look at John Ford movies and stuff like that to get a feel for the American landscape musically. A little Aaron Copland and a little western.

DRE: One of the things that makes History of Violence so profound is that you’re Canadian making an essay about the history of violence in America.

CRONENBERG: Yeah, it’s a tendency I have and I relate it somewhat weirdly to Samuel Beckett. There are very easy things that you can do in films, especially now, to disguise yourself and make things easy and protect yourself. I’m as vulnerable as my actors, maybe more so when I direct a movie. Maybe not in the same physical way but it’s very tempting to hide behind stuff. But I try not to do it; I try not to get overly technique-y. There’s a raw simplicity that’s if you can do it right, it’s incredibly powerful because there’s a certain truth that’s right there. But if you blow it, there’s nothing to hide behind. That’s why you get guys that do jittery camera stuff when it’s just a guy sitting in a room talking. I’ve cast this guy for his face, for his voice, for his acting so I just want you to see that. Let’s just trust all that you’ve done and let’s look at this guy talking. I don’t need to do fancy, silly stuff that has no meaning or artistic purpose.

DRE: A History of Violence, is a real commentary on what’s going on in America right now with what President Bush has helped bring about, this Christian Right push. How has directing scenes of sexuality changed for you over the years?

CRONENBERG: Nobody asked me to do anything different. There were no sex scenes in the script that I got originally and I did ask for these to be written but I had more to do with the characters and an examination of the marriage. I didn’t really think you could examine a marriage without alluding to its sexuality. But I don’t feel any outside pressure one way or the other. Actually it really only has to do with the movie and the particular people you’re making the movie with. I don’t feel that my approach to it is any different that it ever was. It’s always just a question of what the movie wants and what does the movie need to work. Each movie is its own little universe with its own separate eco-system. You’re making a big mistake if you try to force some outside abstract structure on it so I don’t really think in those terms. I really just think “okay what do I want to happen here.” Then if there are battles to be fought after that, then that’s a different thing, you fight those battles. In this case there were no battles over the sex scenes; I mean the MPAA didn’t ask me to cut anything so there just hasn’t been a problem.

DRE: I saw a still photograph that you took of a chair by Lake Ontario and you just did some still pictures for Premiere Magazine; are you getting more into photography?

CRONENBERG: I actually did my first professional photo shoot for French Premiere Magazine which I was very proud of. But I had always avoided still photography. If you’ve ever seen my short film Camera you would know why. But with digital I came back to still photography. It was always frustrating doing film, especially when you’re doing color because you’ve got a lab with a guy who does your color timing and you don’t know who he is. Your pictures come back, the color’s wrong, the contrast is wrong. But with digital you have such fine control. So I really came back to still photography after having abandoned it for many years. I decided at Cannes to have some fun by shooting photos of the photographers. They loved it. People asked me if I thought they would be offended but they adored it because I was one of them. They actually asked me to sit down with them on their raised tiers. It was really sweet.

DRE: Did you see your actors in a different light?

CRONENBERG: No but it’s very good rehearsal for when you’re actually on the set shooting. It’s a different act but it’s connected.

DRE: eXistenZ was adapted into a graphic novel; do you have any interest in doing comic books yourself?

CRONENBERG: I was interested in being involved in the graphic novel that was made out of eXistenZ so it was a collaboration with me. But it’s not my art form.

DRE: I got to speak to Albert Brooks a few years ago and the DVDs of his films are very spare. I asked him about that and he said “The DVD is a garbage can now. Everything that used to go in the trash goes on the DVD.” Criterion Collection has made some great DVDs out of three of your films. For your other films that aren’t treated as well do you want to get more involved with making those DVDs?

CRONENBERG: I’ve always been as involved as I possibly could be because I always knew right from the beginning, even before there were DVDs, that my movies would be seen by more people on a TV screen than they would in the theaters. That’s why I never have done a really widescreen movie. In fact, I came up with an aspect ratio that would work for my movies right from the beginning because I knew that it would fit on movie screens in America and in Europe where the aspect ratios are different. It turned out that I accidentally came upon the formula that has now become this standard TV widescreen. So all of my movies, even the earliest ones will fit beautifully there.

The thing about The Dead Zone and The Brood DVDs is that nobody asked me to do a commentary or be involved in those.

For The Fly initially Fox said, “We’re coming out with a DVD of The Fly, will you do commentary?” I said, “Only if you let me be involved in the color timing because it has never been properly transferred to video in any form.” They said no and that was a while ago. I couldn’t believe that they wouldn’t spend the money. So I said, “Fine, I’m not doing the commentary.” They said “Eventually we’ll do a special edition.” Well that has now happened. I’ve done the commentary, I was involved in the transfer and I agreed to show some famous deleted scenes. The famous cat-monkey scene is there and some other things that the fans were clamoring for. My attitude has changed because I can see that the whole art form is shifting in an interesting way. One of the reasons that I didn’t want deleted scenes on a DVD was because you never get to finish them. You cut them, you decide that you don’t want them in the movie so you never get to fine cut them or do a sound mix. So if you show them, they have to be unfinished in a raw, not proper way. So strangely enough, for History of Violence, there are two deleted scenes that we did. We fine cut them, we sound mixed, got some music on them and that’s the first time I’ve ever done that.

DRE: Have you been in a position in which your work was impeded by someone with more power?

CRONENBERG: I tend to be very Machiavellian. I would rather negotiate and talk and manipulate and be deceptive and do whatever, than have an open confrontation. That always takes it to a different level. I am essentially a non-violent person. I’ve managed to be pretty successful in terms of getting what I want in a movie. I leave people very happy with what we’ve done, even when I end up getting what I wanted and they don’t get what they wanted. I have to say that with all of my movies if there’s something in them you don’t like it’s my fault and I can’t blame somebody else for recutting it. The only moments where I’ve had that happen are with the MPAA, which is not technically a censor. For example, with Crash, the company Blockbuster will not stock an NC-17 film. So with Crash, which was released as an NC-17 film, in order to get it into any Blockbuster, I had to cut 10 minutes out of it to have it be an R. I wasn’t very successful in stopping that from happening because I had a contract that said it had to have an R if somebody wanted it. On the other hand, when the Canadian version of Blockbuster tried to do the same, I did go very public saying, “Look, that’s the American ratings. In Canada, we released this film as what we call Restricted and there should not be a cut version in Canadian Blockbuster.” They did back down. But you do what you can. Who knows how it was cut in Finland. Who knows where it was cut in Japan. I can’t keep on top of every TV version that’s around the world. So there’s a point where you have to let go.

DRE: What do you think of your nephew Aaron Woodley’s movie Rhinoceros Eyes?

CRONENBERG: I thought it was terrific. I really liked it a lot. I thought he did a wonderful job with it. I think he’s a very talented and special kid.

DRE: I know you’ve only produced a couple movies that aren’t yours like the Bruce Wagner film I'm Losing You, would you do something like that for Aaron?

CRONENBERG: I think he needs a more serious producer than me frankly and I think he’s working with some right now. When it came to Bruce’s films, if there’s anything I can do to help a first time director, someone who I really admire like Bruce, I’m happy to help. But I’m not really the kind of producer who can go out and raise tons of money and make sure that the film is distributed properly and all that. That’s a different kind of producing and I think that’s what Aaron would need. He’s doing something with Lee Daniels right now and I think that’s a good thing.

DRE: I read that famous interview that you did with Salmon Rushdie, that helped inside eXistenZ where you talk about how beautiful you thought the computer game Myst was. Then I read in the New York Times Magazine that you’re designing a videogame with your son.

CRONENBERG: That’s right, we’re playing with that so we’ll see where that goes. It’s been a strange and interesting process. I don’t know enough about videogames to know whether I’m getting the full flower of the experience or not. I’m also working a Toronto company that has not done a videogame before so it’s kind of a learning experience for all of us.

DRE: Do you see it as puzzle game like Myst or one with more action?

CRONENBERG: This would not be an action game. I’m not that interested in that particularly, just because I’m not really interested in that in my movies. It’s more of a suspense thriller mystery kind of game.

DRE: Ashton Holmes let it slip that you have a Ferrari movie script.

CRONENBERG: I do, that’s Red Cars, an old script. It was just published by in a beautiful coffee table book with many wonderful illustrations from the Ferrari archives. We previewed it at Venice and you can go to their website. It’s a movie that I seem unable to get made but it’s nice that it got made into this book.

DRE: We’re doing this interview for SuicideGirls. Many of the girls featured on SuicideGirls have tattoos and piercings. Have you ever seen any David Cronenberg related tattoos on anybody?

CRONENBERG: I haven’t but I’d love to. I get quite jealous when I hear that Clive Barker gets to sign all kinds of people’s anatomy at his book signings and stuff. I’ve never been asked to do that and I would be very interested to see photos of Cronenberg tattoos.

[ono]

This movie is worse than Freddy vs. Jason, I say!  

...now where can I see it?

[Dtm115300]

I can't tell weather i like this film or not. I left the theater thinking i hated it. But like many of you have said; this film and its messege stays with you. The more and more i think about the movie I begin to understand what i didn't like about it. I suggest when seeing this movie not to jump right into what you don't like about the film and to give it sometime to sink in.

[Ghostboy]

My full review.

[mutinyco]

War Of The Worlds is a B-movie directed as an art film. Nothing more. Critics are grossly overthinking it.

SOMEBODY HAS ILLEGALLY ALTERED MY POST!

If you disagree with what I write, then write a fucking reply. But do not edit my fucking post.

THIS SHOULD SAY:

This is a B-movie directed as an art film. Nothing more. Critics are grossly overthinking it.

[ShanghaiOrange]

Ha!

[cowboykurtis]

after all the glowing reviews i was highy anticipating this.

after seeing it, my only way of justifying all these great reviews was to put the film in context of the market place. With all the recent dreck, I think critics were eager to have anything that was the least bit interesting and different. In the context of the brutally boring past months, this film is a pleasant departure - however far from brilliant. Ed Harris/ Ms. Bello elevated the film above what I found to be pretty commonplace material.

Many have been praising it for it's brilliant meditation on violence and it's linear tendencies. In concept this is quite an interesting idea. However I do not feel that History of Violence polarized such concepts. I find a film like Natural Born Killers (although not a huge fan) much more intriguing and effective in personifying the effect of learned and inherited violent tendencies.

[RegularKarate]

I liked it.

Not as much as Spider, but I liked it.  

This is a B-movie directed as an art film. Nothing more.

It's funny that you say this because as most people realize, the majority of his films are the exact opposite.  Art films made as B-movies.

I think everything's overrated and this is probably no exception, but it's ridiculous to say it's "nothing more" than a B-movie because B-movies don't have anything to say and whether you feel this did a good job or not, it had more going on.

The thing I really like about Cronenberg is that he can make you feel that there's more going on in a scene than appears, whether there actually is or not.  I'm still waiting on him to make a film that lives up to that feeling though... one that really clicks with me the way I feel he's trying to.  I haven't given up that he will yet.

[killafilm]

I really liked this.

Not sure why though.  I think it was just the overall tone, and how the story built up.  All of the performances were top notch.  Viggos trip in the the third act seemed a bit off.  But I guess the very end pays off of that, and beautifully.

B