Xixax Film Forum

Mortensen signs up for mobster film 'Promises'
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Viggo Mortensen is reuniting with director David Cronenberg for "Eastern Promises," a thriller being produced by Paul Webster for Focus Features and BBC Films.

Penned by Steven Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things"), the story is kicked into gear after a Russian prostitute dies during childbirth and a nurse is dragged into an underworld involving the Russian mob. Mortensen will play a mysterious man with ties to the mob.

Webster was one of the producers of last year's "Pride & Prejudice."

Quote from: MacGuffin on April 25, 2006, 12:47:14 AM
Mortensen will play a mysterious man with ties to the mob.

hmm...why does that sound familiar?   :ponder: are you guys sure you want to go back to the well already?

Watts making "Promises" for Cronenberg

Naomi Watts has signed on to star alongside Viggo Mortensen in "Eastern Promises," a crime-flavored drama from Canadian director David Cronenberg.

In the film, a 14-year-old girl dies on Christmas while giving birth in a London hospital. Watts plays a midwife whose search for the girl's family takes her to London's shady Russian crime community and to a Russian crime boss (Mortensen) who is not what he seems. The script was written by Steve Knight ("Dirty Pretty Things").

Focus Features will produce the project and release it stateside. Shooting is set to start in November in London.

This will be the second pairing of Cronenberg and Mortensen after "A History of Violence," which bowed in competition at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cronenberg is back in Cannes this year to receive a lifetime achievement award.

Cassel making "Promises" with Watts
Source: Hollywood Reporter

Vincent Cassel will join Naomi Watts in "Eastern Promises," a London-set thriller that will be directed by David Cronenberg.

Watts plays a nurse investigating the identity of a young Russian prostitute who dies in childbirth. She unwittingly stumbles into a Russian police operation that seeks to expose a major Russian Mafia prostitution ring.

Cassel has been cast as Petrid, whose family owns a Russian brothel. The French actor most recently starred in "Ocean's Twelve" and "Derailed."

The Focus Features/BBC Films project was written by Steve Knight, who covered equally grim territory in "Dirty Pretty Things."

Quote from: MacGuffin on May 18, 2006, 10:37:46 PM
Watts making "Promises" for Cronenberg

Quote from: MacGuffin on August 30, 2006, 01:02:43 AM
Cassel making "Promises" with Watts

Somehow I'm not seeing this little trend stopping anytime soon.

Cronenberg Makes Eastern Promises

Focus Features has informed ComingSoon.net about the start of production on David Cronenberg's next film Eastern Promises, which will reunite the director with his History of Violence star Viggo Mortensen, joined by Academy Award nominee Naomi Watts. The supporting cast includes Vincent Cassel, Academy Award nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinead Cusack, Donald Sumpter, and filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski.

The film, which starts shooting in London next week, follows the mysterious and ruthless Nikolai (Mortensen), who is tied to one of London's most notorious organized crime families. His carefully maintained existence is jarred when he crosses paths with Anna (Watts), an innocent midwife trying to right a wrong, who accidentally uncovers potential evidence against the family. Now Nikolai must put into motion a harrowing chain of murder, deceit, and retribution.

Written by Steven Knight, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Stephen Frears' Dirty Pretty Things, the Kudos Pictures and Serendipity Point Films co-production will be distributed domestically and internationally by Focus Features with Canadian distribution handled by Alliance Atlantis* Motion Picture Distribution LP.

Quote from: MacGuffin on November 17, 2006, 06:24:50 PM
Jerzy Skolimowski.

Slightly Green met him!

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Trailer here. (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809794102/video/3182401/)

Release Date: September 14th, 2007 (wide)

Starring: Viggo Mortensen, Naomi Watts, Vincent Cassel, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Sinead Cusack 

Directed by: David Cronenberg (A History Of Violence)

Premise: The mysterious and ruthless Nikolai is tied to one of London's most notorious organized crime families. His carefully maintained existence is jarred when he crosses paths with Anna, an innocent midwife trying to right a wrong, who accidentally uncovers potential evidence against the family. Now Nikolai must put into motion a harrowing chain of murder, deceit, and retribution.

oh my god, armin mueller-stahl is alive!

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poster looks cool... i didnt love history of violence but this may be good

Eastern Promises
Source: Entertainment Weekly

Before reinventing himself with the bare-knuckle drama of 2005's A History of Violence, David Cronenberg was best known for creating brain-searing cinematic images of exploding heads, violent parasites, and videogames made of flesh. Now the director returns with another naturalistic film, a look at some truly scary Russian mobsters living in London. Has the creator of classic creepfests like Dead Ringers and The Fly officially left his old ways behind? ''All of my movies have dealt with crime in the sense of transgression,'' Cronenberg says. ''In the last two, it's been more traditional. But creatively, there's a real continuity amongst the films.'' So, not even one more man-fly creature? For old time's sake? ''You get bored with yourself,'' he says. ''I think it's good to get out of your own rut.''

Cronenberg's search for fresh material led him to a script by Oscar nominee Steven Knight (Dirty Pretty Things), in which a half-Russian midwife (Naomi Watts) becomes entangled with one of the Russian Mob's most infamous crime families. Viggo Mortensen costars as a steel-eyed gangster; his performance — and one indescribably intense scene in particular — is sure to be among the most talked-about this year.

Despite the film's ''normal'' subject matter, Vincent Cassel, who plays the scion of the Mafia clan, says the director still put his unique stamp on the material. ''You have forbidden things in the movie, but it's more about what you think you're seeing than what you really saw,'' he says. ''In that sense, it's a very David Cronenberg movie.''

New Trailer here. (http://www.focusfeatures.com/clips/eastern_promises/trailer2-480x360.mov)

FOREIGN AFFAIRS: David Cronenberg talks about his strangely intimate new Russian mafia movie Eastern Promises and snuff films on the Internet
by Amy Taubin; Film Comment

Set in London within the ritualized underworld of the Russian mafia—the dread vory v zakone—David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises couldn't be further, in terms of ambience, from the Americana of A History of Violence; and yet the two films are bonded, first by the enigmatic presence of Viggo Mortensen, once again playing a character with a mysterious past, and by the eroticized violence that is the currency of Cronenbergian male relationships.

Floating intermittently above the film is the voice of a 14-year-old Russian girl who, lured to London and imprisoned in a mafia whorehouse, hemorrhages to death in childbirth. A hospital midwife (Naomi Watts) finds the dead girl's diary, which leads her to the red-plush restaurant that is the mafia's front. Watts's character opens the door to this illicit world but she remains an outsider, hovering at the periphery of the narrative. Cronenberg, however, with a mastery of film space that now seems like second nature to him, ushers us deep inside, placing us in intimate proximity to the casual barbarism of everyday life among thieves and murderers. The film builds to an extraordinary action sequence, a ballet of butchery choreographed for a trio of performers and set in the theater of a Russian steam bath.

Although the version of the film I saw in July was unfinished (Cronenberg was still mixing the sound at the time of the interview below), it left me literally shaking but also feeling that I now possessed secret knowledge. And knowledge, no matter how terrible, is power.

AT: How did you get involved with Eastern Promises?
DC: The script was developed at the BBC under David Thompson. It was very different when I first read it, but the characters and the subculture were all there. It was written by Steve Knight, who wrote Dirty Pretty Things for Stephen Frears. And it's obvious he has a good feel for embedded subcultures, which is something that appeals to me too. Those strangely enclosed little worlds where rules are made up and become like the laws of nature. I was intrigued by that very intense hothouse climate.

It's the first film you shot entirely outside of Canada. What was it like working in London?
It was good because the crew was good and the producers made me feel as supported as you can possibly be, and I brought most of my heads of department with me. But once I start shooting, wherever I am just becomes a big film set. Talk about a subculture—when you're shooting you're barely aware of anything else. Although the polonium poisoning happened just down the street from me so I couldn't ignore that. When we started, the subject of the Russian mob in London was not particularly in the news, but pretty soon it became radioactively hot. Not that it's exactly the same subject as the movie, but it is connected.

Like most of your movies, this one pivots on the question of identity. Viggo Mortensen's character, Nikolai, has his identity literally written on his body in the form of the tattoos he got in a Russian prison.
Viggo does incredible research on his own. When we started, he sent me this two-volume book, Russian Criminal Tattoos. And a friend of his, Alix Lambert, had done a documentary about Russian prison tattoos called The Mark of Cain. So they became the focus of our intense rewriting. Steve Knight had alluded to tattoos, but in the rewrites we brought that forward, and it gave the story a real visual and metaphorical center. And then there's such a wealth of books about modern Russia and the disaster it is in so many ways. All of those things were fed into our production.

The fact that Nikolai's story has been coded onto his flesh is part of what makes the fight in the steam bath so extraordinary. How did the original script describe the scene?
The script said, "Two men come in with knives and there's a fight." The question of whether Viggo is naked or not isn't addressed. And of course the details of the choreography are not in the script. That is the work of many months working with the actors, and with Carol Spier, the production designer, and with the stunt coordinator. If I had had an actor who wouldn't play it naked, I would have had to shoot it with a towel around him, which would have been pretty silly, or I would have had to shoot it in a very restrained way. But for Viggo, there was no question. He said, "I have to do it naked." That freed me to do it the way it had to be done. It took three days to shoot, but planning went on constantly. Every week, we'd work on it and refine it more and more. Viggo got really bruised. He didn't tell me, but the makeup people did. They had to keep covering his bruises.

I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain't It Cool News about having seen a preview of the film.
Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo's balls?

I don't know if I performed an act of repression, but I don't remember seeing his balls.
You do see them. It's just that they go by rather quickly.

Right. I meant I didn't notice them in particular.
It wasn't like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote "big hairy balls." Well, that's one way of looking at it. They're definitely there, as you would imagine, but it's only if you're looking for them that that's what you see. Because mostly he's shot in full figure. So when people decide to run the DVD frame by frame, they are going to see everything at one point or another. Of course, a lot of the time it's going to be slightly blurred because he's in motion.

It's a very homoerotic film. And not just because of that scene. You have this cocooned, violent all-male society where everyone is jockeying for power. And I think the central relationship of the film is between Vincent Cassel's character, Kirill, the real son of the mob leader, and Nikolai, the "adopted" son, who Kirill sees as a threat while at the same time being crazy in love with him and unable to admit it.
I discussed this with Vincent a lot, and he was completely ready to do this. He's played gay characters before. At first, he was thinking that he would have to approach it that Nikolai is a father figure to him, which he partially is also. But then it morphed as we played it, and became very flirtatious. You can see how the Nikolai character is mercilessly manipulating him by using the sexuality to turn him on and off. And that was definitely in the script.

But by the end, there is something oddly tender about that relationship, because Nikolai seems to have pity for him.
Yes, it's odd because it seems so real. And the Nikolai character is ultimately so mysterious that you don't know if it's pure manipulation or if there's real compassion there. It's hard to say.

Could you talk about the violence? There aren't many violent scenes—only three or four—but they're very bloody, and one of them happens at the very beginning, or two do, really, if you count both the throat slitting and the pregnant girl hemorrhaging to death. After that, there's one other throat slitting and the big scene in the steam bath. But they're placed so that the effect of the entire movie is that it's written on the body in an extreme way.

I remember when I first picked up the script and saw the title, Eastern Promises. I thought, this sounds like a cheap perfume, especially since in North America, "Eastern" doesn't mean Russia, whereas in England it does. But then, the first scene changed my whole attitude, not only because it was violent, but because it introduced so many interesting elements—a kind of retarded murderer and a Turkish/Chechen cultural combination. And there are very few characters in the violent scenes. It's intimate, which makes it more intense. The placing of those scenes is crucial. We need to know all the time that they are criminals and they are dangerous. The response I've gotten is that the movie is incredibly violent. And I keep saying, "Did you see The Departed? The body count there and the brains all over the wall?" But some people seem to feel that this movie is more violent than The Departed. So then, what are you talking about? You're not talking about how many incidents, because The Departed has dozens and we have four. Somehow, it's the close-up, the intensity, the carrying-through.

Also, knife violence is different from gun violence. And because it's shot so close, the violence is very sexualized.
We have no guns in this movie. There were no guns in the script. The choice of those curved knives we use in the steam bath was mine. They're not some kind of exotic Turkish knives, they're linoleum knives. I felt that these guys could walk around in the streets with these knives, and if they were ever caught, they could say "we're linoleum cutters." And it's almost like they are using their knives to re-tattoo Nikolai and change his identity by changing the marks on his skin.

On another subject, I want to ask you about At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World [Cronenberg's four-minute film for Chacun son cinéma, the compilation put together for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival]. I didn't think anyone could do anything anymore that would make that audience really uncomfortable, but your film did.
I hope so.

You often talk about being an atheist, but your secular Jewish identity seems to be more on your mind than in the past.
I think circumstances have forced it a little more out in the open. We all know about the Holocaust and that it's never really gone away. There's just been an incident here in Canada. A radical Muslim preacher had a regular show on VisionTV, a television network devoted to religion. Every week he'd give his sermon, saying Jews are parasites, the Holocaust was divine retribution, and ultimately all Jews will be annihilated. People started saying we don't think this should be on the air in Canada, so they pulled him off, and then they were going to put him back on because he's highly respected. Meanwhile the guy issues a statement saying, "I'm not anti-Semitic. Everything I say is just prophecy. It says in our holy book that the Jews will be annihilated. It's not that I don't like Jews."

So in that short film, it was interesting to think for all these people who would like there to be no Jews. Let's propose we're down to the last Jew. What does America think, and what does popular media culture think? I have one of my younger TV commentators saying, "I'm much younger than you so, no, I have no memories whatsoever." So will this yearning for extermination of Jews really make much of an impression? Or will it be a moment of dancing in the streets in certain cities of the world, and then what? I was alluding to all that without making a big deal of it. I don't think this is something new for me to be thinking about. I was also thinking of all those nice beheadings you can get on the Internet.

I was thinking about that in Eastern Promises. The current biggest provider of snuff pornography is the Muslim extremist movement. Remember when Al Goldstein from Screw magazine offered $50,000 if someone could bring him a real snuff film, and no one could? Now they're everywhere, and most involve beheadings and throat slitting, and once again, as in Eastern Promises, it's very sexual, very intimate. And needless to say, very disturbing.

since no one's gonna read the whole thing, i just want to highlight this part:

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 05, 2007, 09:55:31 AM
I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain't It Cool News about having seen a preview of the film.
Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo's balls?

I don't know if I performed an act of repression, but I don't remember seeing his balls.
You do see them. It's just that they go by rather quickly.

Right. I meant I didn't notice them in particular.
It wasn't like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote "big hairy balls." Well, that's one way of looking at it.

and i HAVE to see this:

Quote from: MacGuffin on September 05, 2007, 09:55:31 AM
On another subject, I want to ask you about At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World [Cronenberg's four-minute film for Chacun son cinéma, the compilation put together for the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival]. I didn't think anyone could do anything anymore that would make that audience really uncomfortable, but your film did.
I hope so.

title of the year (so far).

Cronenberg gets down and dirty with Russian mob

There is a moment in the Russian mob movie "Eastern Promises" when the level of violence rises so high that the audience lets out a collective gasp, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter.

But director David Cronenberg and his star Viggo Mortensen insist the vicious climax to a murderous bathhouse battle between mob killers is an essential part of the movie, bringing home the reality and the finality of death.

"Murder is a serious thing. I am taking it very seriously," Cronenberg told Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the Toronto International Film Festival, where "Eastern Promises" had its premiere on Saturday night.

"I'm an atheist," Cronenberg said. "To me an act of murder is the act of total destruction, it's absolute. There's no comeback, there's no going to heaven, that's it. And it is very easy for that to be veiled or covered up, in a movie especially.

"To me it makes perfect legitimate, artistic and, if you push me, moral sense as well to do that this way."

The movie pairs Cronenberg with Mortensen for the second time in three years after the two worked together in the Oscar-nominated "A History of Violence," another movie about crime and how people respond to it.

Mortensen, speaking a convincing Russian-accented English, plays a chillingly efficient driver for a Russian crime syndicate in a grimy, rain-swept London, although there is of course more to driver Nikolai than first meets the eye.

"I worked really hard," Mortensen said of his efforts to perfect a Russian accent and to learn to speak the jargon that a gangster might use.

HEAD-TO-TOE TATTOOS

His movie tattoos, the head-to-toe signature marks of a criminal who served time in a Russian jail, were so convincing that he twice frightened Russians in London before deciding it was best to scrub them off after a day on the set.

The making of the movie coincided with the real-life murder of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London in November 2006 after receiving a dose of radioactive polonium-210.

"The Litvinenko poisoning was while we were filming," Cronenberg said, reminiscing about haz-mat suits and forensic vans outside a building near where the crew was working. "Sure enough they found traces of polonium there. We are undoubtedly totally polluted."

The movie opens in Russia this week but Cronenberg said feedback was already positive.

"We hear the Russian criminals are loving the movie because of the accuracy," he said.

"The moral aspect of it is not really the issue for them. The issue is are we being mocked and did we get it right? Or did we get it wrong? And so far we have passed. They are not worried about being shown being criminals because they are, so why should they be upset about it?"

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Mortensen on 'Eastern Promises': 'I have to play this naked'
David Cronenberg put Viggo Mortensen through the wringer once. Now the actor's back for more.
Source: Los Angeles Times

AS Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg plotted the unforgettable bathhouse knife fight in their new crime thriller, "Eastern Promises," Cronenberg told the actor he wanted realism and "body-ness." The director wanted to challenge his audience to really experience the intimacy of such violence.

"Well, it's obvious," Mortensen told him, "I have to play this naked."

Boy does he. And Cronenberg captures every clammy square inch of Mortensen's well-toned flesh as it's pummeled and slashed and slammed into the unforgiving bathhouse tiles by two clothed real-life professional fighters, turning an otherwise excruciating four minutes of film into a quintessential Cronenberg statement.

"Eastern Promises," a Focus Features release opening Friday in L.A. and in 1,500 theaters nationwide on Sept. 21, explores the fine line between fragility and brutality, humanity and horror in the lives of three Londoners: Russian mob driver and sometime "fixer" Nikolai Luzhin (Mortensen); London midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), who is striving to unite an orphaned baby with her Russian family; and mob boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who hides his sex slavery trade behind the guise of a grandfatherly restaurateur.

The film is Cronenberg's first collaboration with Mortensen since their 2005 Oscar-nominated "A History of Violence," a critical and commercial hit that fans of Cronenberg's previous work -- "Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch" and "The Fly," among them -- considered surprisingly accessible. It's also a tough act to follow.

So far, reviews have been strong, praising Mortensen's complete immersion in the role -- adapting his body language and perfecting the accent -- calling the performance "brilliant," and even "Oscar-caliber." Indeed, Focus Features' decision to open the film in mid-September, traditionally a dead period for serious films, could give "Eastern Promises" a jump on the glut of performance-heavy fare coming in October.

And despite its disturbing subject matter and memorable fight scene, the film could prove even more commercial than "A History of Violence." It has just three scenes of violence. But the director gives each throat-slice, each blood pool a natural, three-dimensional effect.

"I have a very existential approach to the human body," Cronenberg said. "I take bodies seriously, [as if] I'm actually photographing the essence of this person."

"Unless you have a story this profound, it doesn't matter how good anything looks," added Mortensen. "Then you just get an exercise in brutality. That's what I like about his films. It's like real life."

Mortensen is only the second actor in Cronenberg's 30-odd-year career to collaborate twice with the director. (Jeremy Irons is the other, having starred as twin gynecologists in 1988's "Dead Ringers" and as French diplomat Rene Gallimard in 1993's "M. Butterfly.") The affinity between Mortensen and Cronenberg was evident as the two friends deconstructed the "Eastern Promises" naked fight scene recently, sitting opposite each other in the director's fashionable Beverly Hills hotel room, volleying tongue-in-cheek gibes, often finishing each other's thoughts.

Still, Cronenberg pointed out that it took some convincing to get Mortensen to agree to the part of Nikolai.

"He plays hard to get," the director said.

"I'm always very reticent until I have a handle on it," Mortensen said. "I wanted to make sure I had the proper time to prepare."

Mortensen researches his characters exhaustively. To understand mobster turned small-town family man Joey in "A History of Violence," he took a road trip through the Midwest and spent time recording costar Maria Bello's uncle, a Philadelphia native, to nail his accent.

For "Eastern Promises," Mortensen set out alone for Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Ural Mountain region of Siberia, spending weeks driving around without a translator. (The actor speaks Danish and Spanish fluently and can get by in four other languages.) Mortensen studied the gangs of the vory v zakone (thieves in law). He read books on Russian prison culture and the importance of prison tattoos as criminal résumés. He perfected his character's Siberian accent and learned lines in Russian, Ukrainian and English. During filming, he used worry beads made in prison from melted-down plastic cigarette lighters and decorated his trailer with copies of Russian icons.

Mortensen's work ultimately became the foundation for the role, prompting some changes in the script and even guiding Cronenberg's direction. The actor credits Cronenberg with granting him the creative freedom to push his characters into surprising places. Cronenberg said he couldn't work any other way.

"I really invented myself as a director," Cronenberg said. "A lot of directors are very territorial and they don't really want to hear anything from other people, especially actors."

"They don't want to admit they don't know something," Mortensen said.

"It's a matter of control and fear," Cronenberg concluded. Instead, he asks actors to "come play in my sandbox."

"Once you accept that childlike-ness," he said, "everything else becomes more clear."

Mortensen's 360-degree nudity in the fight scene is a prime example of how their relationship aided the film. Despite its complexity -- hand-to-hand combat among three guys in a compact and very slippery space -- they rehearsed only a few hours and then captured the fight in just two days.

"I knew I was in good hands as far as the director went," Mortensen said. "It wasn't an exploitation. . . . After that fight, my character knows everything's different. There wasn't any other way to do it. So let's get on with it. The sooner we got it over with, the quicker I could heal."

"The makeup guy would say, 'Have you seen how swollen Viggo's knees are?' " added Cronenberg. "I said, 'No. Don't tell me that.' "

Recalling his vigorous and bruising staircase sex scene in "A History of Violence," Mortensen quipped, "It's revenge for Maria Bello."

mortensen for '07 oscars/xaxies.

RUSSIAN TO JUDGMENT
Source: Time.com

Cronenberg made his name in the 70s as the perpetrator of cleverly icky films — Shivers, Rabid, The Brood — that found an adult outlet for the fears at the root of the horror genre. His 1986 remake of The Fly still stands as an eloquent treatise on man's determination to cope with a degenerative disease: cancer, AIDS or, in this case, a slavering, 6ft.-tall insect.

Two years ago, Cronenberg's lagging career got a boost with A History of Violence, a project, based on a graphic novel, that this total filmmaker joined as director only. The tale of a small-town businessman (Viggo Mortensen) whom some visiting thugs say is a mob enforcer back in the big city, and the effect this has on his family, A History of Violence earned a heap of critics' prizes and two Oscar nominations. Now Cronenberg is, for the moment, a helmer for hire. His new film, which opens this Friday in some U.S. cities, was written by Steve Knight, author of the multi-ethnic London underworld drama Dirty Pretty Things, and it has a lot in common with that movie and with A History of Violence.

As in Dirty Pretty Things, this film is set in immigrant London — this time, members of the Russian diaspora, some honest, most not. And like A History of Violence, it's about a mysterious gunman (Mortensen again) and his connection with an ordinary family drawn into the web of mob intrigue. Anna (Naomi Watts) is a half-Russian midwife who's come into possession of a diary whose secrets could bring down the gang empire run by restaurateur Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl). She makes the mistake of giving the diary, which she can't read, to Semyon, and he assigns Nikolai (Mortensen), a hit man new to the gang, to keep an eye and a heavy hand on the midwife.

Eastern Promises (a flaccid title for such a taut film) has some sensational set pieces: a barber-shop murder in the first few minutes, and a long, brutal fight in a bathhouse between Mortensen and two thugs; they're armed, he's naked. But at heart it's a two-family drama, one being Anna's sensible English aunt (Sinead Cusack) and crabby Russian uncle (Jerzy Skolimowski), the other Semyon and his son Kirill (Vincent Cassel). Kirill is like a mutant Corleone: he has Sonny's hair-trigger impulses and Fredo's drug-addled weak streak, stemming from a need to be respected by his father and from Kirill's realization that he's not measuring up — that Nikolai may be usurping his spot as No. 1 Son.

The movie doesn't rise above its genre conventions so much as it burrows into them, finding complexities and contradictions in the standard tropes. You'll learn plenty about the perils of disappointing a strong patriarch, not to mention the iconography of Russian gangland tattoos. Cronenberg orchestrates all this, and his dedicated cast, to turn out an exercise that is brisk, dark, compelling ... everything but Canadian.

I was all pumped because I knew LA would be in the limited release.  And it did come here, but only to the $14 theater.  Fuck that.

Spoiler alert (kinda). Read at your own risk.

This was such a disappointment for me. I've always appreciated Cronenberg's work, and the ambiance he seems to create with slow-paced story telling and unsettling scores (as seen more recently in A History of Violence). It is unfortunate to say that he had lost it all with Eastern Promises. For the little parts in the film that do portray that Cronenberg-esque, they are just too forced. It becomes too artificial when in the past it was all but artificial (especially in communicating that human quality, body, and flesh). So specific examples of what bothered me... The story wraps around the diary and narration of one 14-year old Russian prostitute, which often becomes unnecessary and rather annoying. It hardly ever suggests anything new but keeps regurgitating that same lines over and over as if we are meant to have added sympathy for this character because we just hear it more and more vividly as the story goes on "I was 14, I was beaten, I was raped, I was lonely". The forced esque I speak of is more so referred to the 'provocative' scenes as opposed to the violence.

For once, Cronenberg accomplished something right in the film and it is the violence. He's got that much down, and I do credit that. But unfortunately the action/violence wasn't the majority of the film (which is a shame since the story does revolve around the Russian mob. He could have gone more 'torture-gruesome' but doesn't expand that horizon of the film). The scenes that seemed rather forced, from the top of my head, were the Mortensen-hooker sex scene and Mortensen fighting naked. I was never 'uncomfortable' watching either scene, they really just seemed too cut and paste, especially for how Cronenberg managed to lead the audience up to something so profound before. But not to say that Mortensen had done a bad job conveying his character. This was not the case, he is simply the most enjoyable to watch in the film and will be one of the few elements keeping you awake.

How do I sum this up? I am not sure. Overall Eastern Promises is like a film I've seen before from Cronenberg, which is wrong in itself. I've never seen Cronenberg shy away before from exploring new territory in his film. But what was more unfortunate is everything that he had lost in this film. The story not only relies on character narrative to carry you from scene to scene, but in doing so, it looses so much of that nauseating atmosphere that Cronenberg has vividly used to communicate both his characters and story in his previous works. Having resulted to a more 'Hollywood' form of storytelling, the plot becomes too predictable. Of course, that would be the easiest way to loose interest from your audience. Having said all this, I am now going to retreat in denial and put on my criterion copy of Videodrome.

Quote from: Losing the Horse: on September 15, 2007, 01:02:08 AM
I was all pumped because I knew LA would be in the limited release.  And it did come here, but only to the $14 theater.  Fuck that.

I got in free 'cause I have a free pass from the Galleria. They are opening a new Arclight over there and on their last day your movie tickets were good for a free arclight showing until october.

On the subject of Eastern Promises, I thought it was a more sedated turn for Cronenberg but one that felt less pulpy and more serious than "History." I know some people complained about the playful quality to that movie so those people should be satisfied here. Personally I thought this film did a lot with very little, and I'd credit Mortensen's performance and Cronenberg's direction for that. The script felt very middle-of-the-road to me. It didn't stand out in any particular way structurally and as the poster above mentioned a few scenes felt forced without a lot of logical motivation. With a lesser director those issues would have been glaring problems. But ultimately I have to give it to Cronenberg again. He has particular fascinations and interests that he explores with a grace and efficiency that's really compelling. It makes this film engrossing even during moments of the story that would otherwise have a hard time pulling you in.

David Cronenberg Makes Eastern Promises
Source: ComingSoon

Almost exactly two years after turning a new corner in his prestigious career with A History of Violence, director David Cronenberg is back with an equally violent look at similar themes in Eastern Promises. His "History" star, Viggo Mortensen, returns as Nikolai Luzhin, the driver for a Russian mobster in London, who must decide whether to help an innocent midwife (played by Naomi Watts) in her search for those responsible for beating a young girl who died while giving birth to a baby, even though her incriminating info might put his own rise through the ranks at risk.

ComingSoon.net had a chance to talk to Cronenberg in his native Toronto, where the film premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, much like many of Cronenberg's past offerings.

ComingSoon.net: When you get a script like this one from Steven Knight, how much of the fight or sex scenes do you expect to be fleshed-out ahead of time in the script or is that stuff you like to be able to play with?
David Cronenberg: I don't mind however much detail anybody wants to put in the script, but really, it would be an 800 page script. I mean it would be a novel if you really described enough that you could just make the movie from the script without any discussion. A script is actually not a blueprint. I mean you can build a house from a blueprint. You cannot build a movie from a script directly that way, and I think those rascally lazy writers--of course, Steve is one of them--they know that. The research, for example, that Steve did was not that deep. I don't say that there was a flaw at all. He doesn't want to interrupt his flow to do that. If he were a novelist, he'd either do the research himself or have researchers and it would take him 5 years to write the novel. You're not going to do that with the script, because he knows that once we start making the movie, we'll have 150 crew members who are dedicated, obsessive, and very talented and will go and dig into all of those things that are mentioned in the movie. One person will be obsessing about watches and one about clothes and "What will these guys drive?" He doesn't have to do that, so he can do the broad strokes to get the idea out there and then he knows that later everybody else is going to do that other work. As a screenwriter myself, I've done the same thing. You do enough to seduce the reader into the world, so that he understands...he gets the texture of it, the feel of it, but there's a lot of work that has to go into it. Carol Spiers spent a lot of time building that restaurant, and that's all her research. Yes, it filters through me because she asks me if I like the colors and if there's this restaurant we could base it on? I'm involved in all of that, but it really is her talent and her diligence and her research and her crew. She has her own crew that goes and figures all that stuff out. The same with the fight scene. You know, two guys with knives comes in, they fight and in fact in the original script, they weren't killed and I said, "You know, they have to die, because there's no way that he could just punch them." It didn't feel realistic to me the way he had it. I don't know if he's confessed these things to you, but the script changed a lot in the work that we did, but he was great. I mean he's a wonderful collaborator and he was very excited about the stuff that I came up with, and in fact, that Viggo came up with, too. About the tattooing, for example, that was in the script, but it wasn't as deep and it wasn't as central a metaphor as it later became. It was Viggo finding these books called "Russian Criminal Tattoo" which are fantastic and a documentary called "The Mark of Caïn" which was made by a friend of his named Alix Lambert that we really understood this sub-culture of tattooing and Russian prisons and how it went back to Czarist days before the Soviet Union and how it evolved and how it emerges and how it shifted, fantastic stuff and very exciting and I sent this to Steve and said, "When you see this, when we do our next re-write, you're going to want to incorporate this, big time, into the script because it's fantastic material." No writer could not be excited by that, and he was. I could go on, but the fight scene took weeks to choreograph, took two days to shoot and took him 10 minutes to write.

CS: How long ago did you actually find the script, and at what point did you know that you wanted Viggo to play the part of Nikolai?
Cronenberg: Well, it doesn't always happen this way, but when I was reading the script, several actors started to emerge in my mind. Viggo was the first one, Armin Mueller-Stahl and Vincent Cassell, they started to float up and it's all intuition. I think of all the aspects of directing that people don't quite understand, casting is the most crucial one. I've even had people say, "Did you choose any of these actors?" and I say, "Yeah, all of them." Yes, you can have a script come to you with an actor so called "attached", as Ralph Fiennes was attached to "Spider" but then at that point, you say, "No, I can't do this movie with him because he's wrong" or you say "Well, that's great. Saves me the trouble of thinking of Ralph for this because I thought he was perfect." So, Viggo... a director has a relationship with actors that's quite strange in the sense that after they're gone from the set, you're still with them, because you're editing them and you're watching their face everyday for hours, macroscopically. You're observing every little gesture, and every facial gesture and every intonation of their voice and choosing the right takes. Sometimes, you take sound from one take and put it to the mouth of the visual other take. I really thought he looked so Russian, he looks very Slavic the cheekbones and everything. That was even before I ever even had the script. Those things plus the fact that I know that Viggo has a wonderful musical ear, as a musician and composer himself, but also for languages, because he speaks several languages as you know, and he did wonderful subtle accent stuff in "History of Violence", very subtle. I was confident too that he could do what was needed, which was I didn't want this to be a really fake-y Russian accent with somebody fumbling through the Russian. I wanted somebody who could really do it. We've all seen wonderful actors do terrible accents. It's a separate skill from acting in a way. You need a musical ear to do accents, and I was really sure Viggo could do that.

CS: You read the script while you were editing "A History of Violence"?
Cronenberg: No, no it was after, well after. I think. I'm pretty sure.

CS: How does the collaboration differ with you and Viggo this time compared to the last? Did it evolve in a different way because this is the second film you've done together
Cronenberg: It's like working with the crew I've worked with. Some of my crew members that I work with have been for literally 30 years. You can start at such a higher level, because you know each other. There's none of that figuring each other out, and understanding each other and getting the signals right and all of that. Now you know all that and you have that respect for each other, and you know what you can do. You know what's asking too much and not too much, and so I felt that we start just at a much higher platform and could leap from that even further than we had gone before. But it was just as much fun, it was a really great shoot. It was hard, but it was great.

CS: His performance is incredible because it's not caricature at all.
Cronenberg: Yeah, I think Viggo is a very underrated actor. He's a star, because of one of his least interesting roles really, which was very visual, but in acting terms not the most challenging role. In "Lord of the Rings" I mean. He's extremely subtle and in the days where Jack Nicolson (going) over the top everybody raves, a subtle performer like Viggo can get lost in the shuffle. As I said, I knew he was good when I did "History of Violence" but then at the end of it, I thought he was great. To me, that's a big difference.

CS: Can you talk about working with Naomi on her character?
Cronenberg: Yeah, I mean the thing about Naomi, is she is so real. She's stunning on set. She's effortlessly real which is the hardest trick for an actor is to be real. It sounds like an obvious thing, but if you'd ever tried it, you know it's not. And she loved this character who was really, she is us. We are introduced to this sort of insular world through her eyes and there is a contrast there between her English life, which is very white bread and very drab and kind of dull, and then she suddenly comes into this world represented by the restaurant that's full of color and vivacity and children and music and exotic food. We spent a lot of time getting the food exactly right, I can tell you. That's supposed to be us, so she really brings us into the movie but then of course, she's discovering her own heritage as well, because she's kind of put that on the back burner for various reasons. Her father has died, and she still rides his motorcycle. That's another thing about this Steve Knight script. He had the bike being a Royal Enfield, which is an English bike. I said, "Steve, that's wrong. It's the Russian father's bike. It represents him, it's got to be a Russian bike." But he's not a biker and I am, so I knew about that.

CS: Both of your last two films seem to be about the effect of violence on the notion of family, so why is that an interesting theme to you?
Cronenberg: Well, I don't really think in terms of themes. I can suddenly play the role of critic of my own work--I mean, analyst--and make those connections and so on, but creatively, you don't work from that. I don't really think of that theme, for example. I'm thinking of these characters and the narrative that's happening and I'm either finding it very provocative and interesting and absorbing and maybe disturbing, but I'm not really connecting it cerebrally in that way. I can give you an answer, but I'm totally faking it, you know? Your answer to that question would be absolutely as valid as mine. I don't think that I'm particularly thinking about families threatened by violence abstracted from the general discussion of violence that is very ongoing. I lived through the Vietnam era too. I was a kid then, but it's all seems horribly familiar to me in many ways and what's happening in the world. You incorporate those things. You feel the vibes. It's not really analytical because at the same time, you're making an entertainment. I mean this isn't a lecture on violence, but it's a very powerful way of exploring it. For me, making a movie is a voyage of discovery. I'm still constantly trying to figure out what existence is and what it means and the sense of meaning that one has or doesn't have and how is it created and all of those things, and also, you never make a movie in a vacuum. In a way, filmmakers, we're like the amphibians of the world, we're like the frogs with the thin skin that takes in everything, every pollutant in the atmosphere goes right through the skin of a frog because they breathe through their skin, and that's what we do, so whatever's around and even in terms of global economy, I mean movies live and die by financing and then suddenly something happens to the market in Germany, it goes belly up, and suddenly you can't get your movie financed anymore even though you're not directly connected with it. There is the vibe ya know, but you can't creatively use it analytically, let's put it that way.

CS: There seems to be a sense of timelessness to the movie where we really don't know when it is or what else is going on in the world. Was that a conscience decision?
Cronenberg: Although, you certainly hear Kiril say, "I've got a shipment coming from Kabul." Yes, it's very insular. It's a very existentialist exercise. How do you create your own reality? Because there is no one reality that holds for every person or every culture. It's all different and suddenly you get these multiple realities represented by these multiple cultures because London is a multi-cultural city. Toronto considers itself the same, very different from the American melting pot theory where everybody comes, gives up their own values to become an American, that's not the way it works there or here. Probably not in America either, but that was the theory. You have all these cultures that are very insular, they're bringing with them animosities and hostilities from there own countries that go back thousands of years and that's pretty insular. There's a weird desire to encapsulate and to cocoon yourself and yet, it's like criminal globalization. They have to collaborate with each other to do business, but they never trust each other and there's always the possibility of violence hovering just on the edge.

CS: When we spoke two years ago, I asked you about remakes, because at the time there were a lot of horror remakes, and you had made "The Fly," which was a beloved horror remake. How do you feel about them remaking your old movies like "Scanners"?
Cronenberg:I don't know if they've really done it yet.

CS: I know there's a writer working on a script.
Cronenberg: It doesn't mean it's gotten made though.

CS: The reason I asked was because I wondered whether you'd be interested in revisiting a movie you had done previously with the experience you've gained since making it?
Cronenberg: Yeah, but to do a remake of your own movie seems to me the most bizarre thing. In fact, speaking of Naomi, she had just done that with (Michael) Haneke. She just made "Funny Games," which is a film he had done before and he's remade it in English. It's weird to me, remade his own movie recently, shot for shot which is very strange I think. But no, I would never want to go back and do my own stuff. I often get scripts, and I sent my agent an email recently saying, "This script you sent me. I did this 35 years ago and when I did it, it was the first time, so why would l want to do it again?" No, I'd be horribly bored. It's not interesting to me.

CS: Nothing you'd want to change or stuff in the past you'd look back at now, "Ya know if I did this way..."
Cronenberg: I don't look at it.

CS: But then redoing "The Fly" as an opera...
Cronenberg: But that's very different, because opera is not a director's medium. I mean for me that's really a Howard Shore project. Howard has already written the music and David Henry Hwang, who wrote "M Butterfly" has written the libretto, and I'm just there to try and mess it up. But really, opera is a composer's medium as far as I'm concerned, and so I'm really just there to help get that happening and it's such a different act for me. It's very different from movies as you can imagine, very different, so you don't have the control. I mean for example, speaking of casting, I can't cast an opera. I can cast the way they look, but they all sound amazing to me and I don't have the sensitivity for operatic voices that they say, "Well, he's okay for one or two performances, but he could never do eight performances a week." That's not acting that's singing, that's really very different, so it's completely different from doing a movie remake.

CS: Where is that premiering?
Cronenberg: It's at Le Chatelet in Paris July 2008, and then it should be at L.A. Opera September '08.

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David Cronenberg, Dead Serious
All That Blood in His Films? Director Says It Flows From a Nonviolent Message
Source: Washington Post

When David Cronenberg brings violence to the screen, it feels like something directed at our moral consciences as much as at the dead, bleeding bodies sprawled in front of us.

His is not the popcorn exhilaration of "The Bourne Ultimatum," with punch-shoot-run fast editing. Or the adrenaline buzz in the campy gore-a-thons of Quentin Tarantino. With Cronenberg . . . well, let's just say, don't read on if you're not prepared for gore, even gore with a message at its center.

In his new film, "Eastern Promises," about nefarious doings within the Russian underworld of London, an assassin's attempt to slit a man's throat isn't quick and clean. He has to saw and saw until the blade, finally, cuts through to the jugular. In his 2005 "A History of Violence," Cronenberg ends a hero's triumphant gun battle not with reaction shots of admiring onlookers, but with a gruesome close-up of his shooting victim's bloody, shattered head. And in his 1981 film, "Scanners," a person's head literally explodes in a mushroom cloud -- the image rendered more disgusting than cinematically spectacular.

His brand of violence is apparent in virtually all of his 17 features, which include "The Dead Zone," "The Fly," "Dead Ringers" and "Naked Lunch." (The plot of his 1996 film, "Crash," even examines violence as sexual stimulant; its characters not only restage accidents for pleasure, they caress and fondle each other's gruesome scars and stitch marks during sex.)

What makes these scenes different is that they resonate beyond simple grotesquerie and plot development. They give a quite literal lesson, albeit gruesome and backhanded, about the sanctity and preciousness of life. The uncomfortable timbre of Cronenberg's violence makes us realize how insulated we are from reality in other films. And how most Hollywood movies have conditioned us to the A-B-C response to violence: fear, shock, relief.

The violence in action-oriented movies such as "The Bourne Ultimatum" is "impressionistic, there's almost no physicality to it," says Cronenberg, 64, in Washington recently to promote his new film. "It's easy to lose sight of the fact we're talking about the destruction of a body and a unique human, whose experiences are never to be replicated again. I want the audience to take it as seriously as I do. It's not just an aesthetic thing. . . . It's a tragedy, on some level, that they should feel, and I think the only way they can feel it is emotionally and physically."

Which is why, in "Eastern Promises," Cronenberg emphasizes the onus of severing a human throat -- an idea that occurred to him after watching a terrorist beheading video. The would-be assassin in Cronenberg's movie is "not very experienced at this," he explains. He discovers the human body is "a complex thing with sinews, muscles and tendons. It resists destruction to the last drop of blood. So it's not a nice clean cut. It's messy and horrifying for him -- and us."

Cronenberg concentrates his fullest attention on moments that other directors might gloss over. In places they edit for viewing speed or audience squeamishness, he keeps the cameras rolling. In Cronenberg's hands, a bathhouse battle between Viggo Mortensen, playing a Russian hit man, and two Chechen killers in "Eastern Promises" becomes a sensual, bloody treatise on the inefficiency and horror of real fighting--not the slick action sequence we'd normally find in a conventional crime picture.

Shunning professional stuntmen ("They have a routine that's too inside the box"), the Canadian director insisted Mortensen and his fellow performers create a fight that looked like "hard physical labor. It doesn't go smoothly, and things don't quite connect and things are missed, and you screw up, and all of those things should be in there."

On-screen, the scene seems to run for an eternity, as Mortensen's character -- caught unarmed and nude -- fights for his life, sustaining painful slashes and stabs from his opponents' carpet knives. After the gruesome conclusion, we have a new, palpable appreciation for the sheer grunt work of killing -- and dying.

The scene is designed to "get right under your skin and make you feel vulnerable," says Stephan Dupuis, the makeup artist who created and monitored Mortensen's extensive body tattoos and the fake flesh used to hide the blood bags. Cronenberg's passion for physiology -- whether it's severed necks or Jeff Goldblum's oozing flesh in 1986's "The Fly" -- is the underlying theme in all his films, says Dupuis, who won an Oscar for his work on "Fly."

Earlier in his career, Cronenberg found himself labeled the "king of venereal horror" and associated in press reports with horror-meisters such as George A. Romero ("Night of the Living Dead") and John Carpenter ("Halloween"). Cronenberg says he has not watched the grisly "Saw" or "Hostel" films, which he describes as nothing more than "torture movies" -- a theme he explored in his 1983 film, "Videodrome," in which a sleazy cable television owner (James Woods) broadcasts a pirated video of torture and mutilation, only to discover the violence on it is not staged. Cronenberg's work is different, in that instead of shock for shock's value, he's using the form subversively against itself, to promote nonviolence.

A conversation with Cronenberg about his use of violence quickly veers to talk of "body consciousness," which, for him, started at the age of 10, when he says he stopped believing in God. "To accept the body is to accept death, and people will do anything to avoid that reality," he says, in a voice almost as soft and evenly measured as that of HAL, the disembodied computer voice in "2001: A Space Odyssey." Art and religion, he declares, are just some of the ways that humankind attempts to "minimize the reality of the body, to say, well, your body can die but you'll still be alive or whatever. Or that this artist is immortal. Well, he's not immortal, you know" -- he interjects a momentary, ironic laugh here -- "he's dead."

Perhaps surprisingly, it was a western, "Shane," that first influenced his body-based approach to screen violence and filmmaking in general, he says. Watching the 1953 film as a boy, he recalls seeing Jack Wilson -- the heavy played by Jack Palance -- fire a bullet into a rancher that visibly propelled the victim through the air.

"Before that, in the westerns I'd seen, people would go bang-bang and other people would just fall down," Cronenberg says. "This was the first time I'd seen that effect -- the idea a bullet could lift you off the ground and blow you away. That really was horrifying, and suddenly this had an impact. You really felt the death of that person as a physical thing."

The filmmaker is "unafraid of intimacy with violence and sex," says Holly Hunter, who played one of the characters in "Crash." "He takes you on the inside track of it, which is nothing to do with slickness or glamour, and it can actually be quite blasphemous and macabre. . . . There's a coolness to David's movies -- cool in temperature, I mean -- and in that way, they're not pornographic or thrill-seeking."

Told of Hunter's comment, Cronenberg responds: "I think people are curious, drawn, attracted, repelled and afraid, all at the same time, about violence, and they're right. There's an eroticism involved, certainly in 'Crash,' and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on. It was pretty obvious to me, though [the terrorists] would be in total denial about that. There are strange, perverse elements to violence."

Ultimately, Cronenberg says, he hopes his message reaches beyond movie audiences.

"There are so many ways to make murder abstract -- or killing, if you don't want to call it murder, or war. You can go to statistics. . . . You've got language, which is always a great curtain, such as 'collateral damage' and all these other euphemisms for ripping bodies apart, throwing heads around. But if the bodily consequences of war were the first thing you thought of, war wouldn't happen."

This is extremely good. Slow and methodical, unlike any gangster film I've seen in a while. Check it's very well done, and completely cronenburg

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: DAVID CRONENBERG (EASTERN PROMISES)
Source: CHUD

Eight AM on a Sunday morning is not the ideal time to do a phone interview. But I'd been pestering Focus Features for a chance to talk to David Cronenberg since well before the Toronto Fest started, and when they kindly hooked me up with a one on one towards the end of my time there, I wasn't able to do it because of scheduling problems.

So when Focus called last week and offered this Sunday breakfast interview, I had to say yes. Never mind that we were having a party at my house Saturday night (my birthday party, no less, so I couldn't well skip it) meaning I'd have to work to stay sober to be up in time for the call. As it turned out, the party was done at about five and I stayed up waiting for Cronenberg's call. When he rang at eight, I was stupid and exhausted and he, as it turned out, had a cold.

Therefore, this isn't quite the ideal conversation with Cronenberg about Eastern Promises, the license of success and torture porn. We only had a few minutes and I could easily have followed up with those three subjects to fill an hour, not to mention all the other topics that come to mind when you're on the phone with a filmmaker like Cronenberg. Even so, he was in a good mood. You can't necessarily tell from the transcription, but throughout, Cronenberg was chuckling and joking.

Waiting for your call, I was watching Kirby Dick's movie This Film Is Not Yet Rated, and that got me wondering if you had problems with the MPAA approving Eastern Promises for an R.

No, it got an R rating very quickly, actually.

Do you think the success of A History Of Violence helped with that? It seems like there could be a bias based on success that could affect the rating.

I don't really think so, no. I haven't had a film that gave me some trouble since...well Crash was NC-17, but we understood that. Earlier on Videodrome was one where I had to make some cuts I wasn't too happy about. But since then I haven't had a problem at all. With A History of Violence I understand there was a lot of discussion, but you hear that sort of thing second or third hand. With this movie, I don't know that there was any particular contentious moment, and we submitted it as I wanted it to be and it was accepted.

Have there been other positive effects from the success of History in a general sense? There's always a public idea that success translates to a license to work with more freedom.

That license does not exist. There is no such thing as a license to do whatever you want. Talk to Marty Scorsese about it, or even Spielberg. Don't forget, it's not as if History made two hundred million. It didn't. I have found that everyone is very pragmatic. There are some crazed moments, but they do read your script. Let's put it this way, let's say I'd done History then wanted to do Spider for twenty-five million. I wouldn't have gotten it made! For example, after I did The Fly, which was a huge hit and my biggest hit when you correct for inflation, I still couldn't get Dead Ringers made. In other words, people read that [script] and say, gee, why don't you make something more like The Fly? So it's not like there's some magic where everyone is hypnotized by your last success and you can command them to do whatever you want. I wish that could happen, but it never does. People are pretty pragmatic and they can see what a project is.

Now, having said that, I can definitely say that I have gotten phone calls from various things that I would not have had after Spider. There are some things I was interested in after I'd done Spider and studios were not interested in me because they just looked at the last film I did and thought it was too weird, too obscure, too uncommercial. So after History, those people would now return my phone calls, and that's something. It's true, I'm in my 'hot' ten minutes right now. We'll see what happens in the next ten minutes! So it has made a bit of a difference, definitely.

I understand that the Eastern Promises script is significantly different now from what it was when you received it. Can you hit on the most crucial differences?

Well, unfortunately to do that, I'd have to give a lot of the movie away. The ending was totally different.

But in general, I'll just say that it was definitely a first draft that had never got a chance to be evolved, and Steve was really excited to get me involved, because most studios or producers don't want to spend money on a script unless there's a director involved. That script had languished at BBC Films for some years, and Steve was excited to have a collaborator; there was no ego involved. As a first draft, he had maybe gone off in five different directions at once, because there are various possibilities and he sort of tried them out all at once in the script. I was able to say, no, reading this objectively I can see that this is the way to go and not that way.

[There's some conversation in between here that he wanted off the record, so we end up jumping to a vague discussion of the ending of Eastern Promises...]

I think that Steve has a tendency to fall in love with his characters, and then he has difficulty hurting them. That happened in Dirty Pretty Things, he wanted them to be happy ever after. I don't have that problem. I'm happy to hurt them. I felt then, that this is kind of a half-happy ending. It's a mixed ending, sort of bittersweet for Anna and Nikolai. It's an ambiguous ending that way, which to me is kind of the way it works in life. I don't really think that I'm imposing a pessimism or a negativity on my films...I think my films are pretty realistic that way. It's rare that we score a total victory in our lives, so I think this is accessible but realistic.

So the ending that was might have been too easy...

Yes, and it depends on your approach as a filmmaker. There was a time when, for example, poetry was meant to present a beautiful, ideal world. If presenting is something idealistic and comforting is your approach to filmmaking and you're not looking for hard realism or a realistic reflection of life as it's lived, you're looking for life as we wish it were. I don't think that's a bad approach at all, it's just not my approach.

There's a reveal in the film which some audiences see as a twist, but I got the sense that wasn't the tactic you were trying to employ.

Well, I've had all kinds of responses. I've had people say they didn't see it coming, but it's not presented as a massive 'oh my god!' kind of twist. In a way it's set up rather well. You begin to see that this man is more tender or sensitive than you would expect from a guy like that. So from his character as it is, it's not a total shock. Nothing in the story is presented as the twist of all twists, by any means, it just rolls along. Some people are surprised by it, some people aren't, and either way it's OK with me. If I'd presented it as...well, if it were like the revelation at the end of The Crying Game and it didn't work, then yes, that would be bad and would mean the movie didn't work. But it just rolls along, in the sense that everybody in the movie has secrets, everybody is guarding something, everyone is trying to manipulate everyone else, including Anna and this is just more of that.

A twist like that in The Crying Game doesn't seem like a storytelling tactic you've ever been interested in.

It's because it beomces a one-trick pony. It becomes a joke with a punchline. If you're after more complex things, then that's a completely different structure and approach to what you're doing. I don't want to be boring, and I don't want to be totally predicatable. But I am working, in this film in particular, within a genre, which is crime/gangster. And playing with genre there are conventions, people come to it with expectations and you want them to have those because it gives you some strength and some structure but at the same time if you only follow the conventions like A, B, C, D you're predictable and boring. So you have to confound expectations rather than just satisfying every one of them.

I'm curious to hear your take on the term 'torture porn', which has become a popular tag of late.

It's interesting, since I alluded to it in Videodrome almost thirty years ago with a TV show presenting torture as entertainment. But I haven't seen these films, Saw and Hostel, so I'm speaking out of a certain ignorance, please let people know that. But I think people see horror to confront fears in a safe way, and we are living in a very strange time when you can see snuff porn on your computer any time of the day or night in the comfort of your home. So if you want beheadings, throat cuttings, people being stoned to death, you can see it for real. That is being used for political propaganda, but also for North Americans, who are confronting seeing soldiers and citizens being beheaded you could make a case for that having something to do with the success of these movies. It's just a theory, of course, but I think it's a solid one.

I know you have to run -- quickly, can you comment on the rumors that you might be involved with HBO's show Preacher?

Yeah, I have no idea where that comes from, it's a complete falsity. I've never seen it, I haven't been approached about it, I don't know anything about it.

This movie was well paced; badass.

I walked out thinking a)  that Cronenberg should return to bodily horror b) perhaps this is what it's like when a director attempts to try new things and the ardent fans dismiss the material for reasons of betrayal c)  they were really good performances of the kind that crawl under the skin and of the kind that stay there, so I found myself thinking about the characters by virtue of excellent performances.  How strong the film works from a storytelling element is dependent upon your ability to be drawn into characters, so though I felt like there was an object plot and three acts and the like, and from that vista was disappointed, but it is actually a character study.  Supportive evidence of this comes from Cronenberg, in MacGuffin's previous post d)  The film is a success, more so than A History of Violence, and has a lot to do with Cronenberg's major concerns if lacking normally recurring images and themes.

The first film of 2007 to really capture me.

i loved it.  mac & w/o said it perfectly.  slightly above bourne ulti as best of the year for me (soooo faaaar - muahahaha).

Quote from: pozer on October 04, 2007, 12:46:25 PM
i loved it.  mac & w/o said it perfectly.

Where did mac review it? Maybe you meant either sal or overmeunderyou.

think it's because i read something about mac in w/o's post, but did mean sal.  and while were at it silias too.  i felt a bit unfulfilled in the end, but then realized long after that it was in fact still there under my skin.   

Didn't really care for this at all, except the scene in the steam room is one of the most terrifying things I've ever seen. I felt like my life was in danger.

Gentleman's relish
Syphilitic parasites, eroticised car crashes and invading maggots - David Cronenberg's films drip with sex and violence. His latest, Eastern Promises, is no exception. Simon Hattenstone encounters the man even Martin Scorsese said he was too terrified to meet
Source: The Guardian

David Cronenberg doesn't get it. Why do people think he's weird? OK, so he makes films in which men mutate into diseased flies, women give birth to giant slugs, car crashes are eroticised, lovers penetrate vulva-like scars, game-players plug umbilical cords into their spines and syphilitic parasites go on the rampage. What's so damned unusual about that?

He seems shocked, outraged even, that viewers might be shocked and outraged by his films. After all, he says, they simply deal with the matter of life.

We meet in France, a country that celebrates him as one of the great contemporary auteurs. He sits straight in his chair, talks with professorial restraint and drills you with pure blue eyes. "I can't imagine how people are not amazed by life and what it is and how it works," he says. "How does an insect work? Does it have a brain, and how can it be so small, and how can they do such amazing things? I find that fascinating. It always amuses me that people fantasise about alien life forms on other planets, and meanwhile we have the most alien life forms you could imagine right on this planet. Weird people are people who don't want to explore and dissect and hypothesise 'what-if' questions."

His vision is singular. What lies behind it? Yes, many of us are interested in the detritus of the human body, the physicality of existence, the possibilities of evolution, but few of us have explored them so explicitly. What inspired his love of blood and gore? He drills me with the eyes again. "On the contrary, I wonder why you wouldn't be interested in that, and you're suggesting, in a way, that most people wouldn't."

Cronenberg has been making his existential horror movies for close on 40 years now. He is the master of his own genre - sometimes referred to as body horror or venereal horror. In his first films, Stereo (1969) and Crimes Of The Future (1970), he explores themes that are to emerge again and again through his body of work - diseased bodies, dissection, telepathy, sexual obsession, the growth of extracurricular organs and consciousness. Cronenberg has often been accused of misanthropy and, in particular, misogyny, but the director insists that he is merely shining a light on the human condition.

He has always been fascinated by, and fearful of, human beings invaded by foreign bodies. Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977) are cautionary tales in which scientists modify the human body to disastrous effect. When in Rabid Marilyn Chambers grows a blood-sucking penis in her armpit, you just know things aren't going to turn out well. In later films, Cronenberg manages to combine schlocky splatterfest with downbeat naturalism, and has successfully adapted novels that were previously thought unfilmable - notably JG Ballard's Crash and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Burroughs' acid-trip masterpiece was perfect Cronenberg territory - as with so many of his films, you can't tell whether the action is happening in the "real" world or simply in the protagonist's head. Cronenberg the philosopher forces us to ask if there is a difference between the two.

His new film, Eastern Promises, about Russian gangsters in London, starts with three of the bloodiest scenes you are likely to see in the movies - a throat-cutting, the shooting of a heavily pregnant woman and a birth. The film is beautifully shot, pacy and overripe with carnage. In his previous movie, the impressive A History Of Violence, a man's face is blown away and Cronenberg's camera focuses unapologetically (some might say gleefully) on the end result - a nauseating stew of tissue, blood and bone. So often he weaves together a rich, complex story, only to resolve it with a bloodbath - it reminds me of those Monty Python sketches that concluded with 16-tonne weights crashing down because they couldn't think of a proper ending. In both films, the protagonist, wonderfully played by Viggo Mortensen, is not who or what he appears to be. Whereas in earlier films, human beings were invaded by alien bodies, in these two films whole communities (quiet towns, urbane cities) are invaded by an alien body.

Cronenberg, now 64, has lived in the quiet, urbane city of Toronto all his life. He was born to secular Jewish parents - dad a writer, mum a musician. His upbringing was liberal and intellectually stimulating - he says he was never bored, despite growing up in the bland, closeted early 50s.

I tell him that when I told friends I was going to see him, most wanted to know the same thing: what was he like as a child? "Pretty ordinary, really," he says, volunteering no details and strangling the topic at birth. On other occasions, he has suggested he wasn't quite such a regular kid. "When I grew up," he said in the book Cronenberg On Cronenberg, "most other kids weren't into watching praying mantises eating grasshoppers."

By the age of 12, he was writing fiction. Not quite horror stories, but sufficiently sinister to surprise his classmates. "I wrote a story where Death was one of the characters. A girl said that sounds as if it was written by a 90-year-old man. I took that as a kind of compliment, you know, because it was very dark and very serious."

Cronenberg's parents were atheists who encouraged him to experiment spiritually, convinced that sooner or later he'd find his own path to godlessness. And he did. This lack of belief, which became a belief system in itself, informs so much of his work: the primacy of the body, the finality of death, the lack of consolation. "It was apparent to me that religion was an invented thing," he says, "a wish-fulfilment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously."

Cronenberg became more and more interested in science. At the university of Toronto, he began studying organic chemistry before swapping to literature. He dreamed of being another Isaac Asimov - a research scientist who could also turn his hand to fiction. "It didn't take me long to realise I didn't have the patience or temperament to do years of research. I'd rather just invent it."

So he did. "When I made Rabid, I invented stem cell research, basically. I posited the possibility of a neutral kind of tissue that would read its context if it were applied to someone as a transplant." So, if he had patented his ideas rather than simply turned them into movies... He finishes my sentence for me. "I could have been truly wealthy. People like to think of [his 1983 film] Videodrome as an anticipation of the internet." Cronenberg has never been backward in coming forward. Part of him still wants to be feted as a novelist. He says that screenplays are just technical accomplishments, and lack the beauty and depth of great fiction. He quotes Ingmar Bergman as another film-maker who felt film was second division. Ironically, it was Bergman, alongside Fellini and Kurosawa, who finally convinced Cronenberg that movies could be art. "They are still my touchstones."

As a film-maker, Cronenberg has often been bracketed with David Lynch - same first name, similar peak of white hair, and a not dissimilar strain of cinematic madness. When I mention this to Cronenberg, he seems to take umbrage. It's not that he dislikes Lynch's work (he's a fan, especially of Eraserhead), just that he thinks they are almost opposites. "Yeahhhhh," he says, meaning no. "He's got a very Jimmy Stewart aspect to him, which I definitely don't have. He likes the dreamlike surreal thing. I like to have the appearance of a rigorous kind of logic - a rationality, and from that I subvert it."

Many of his films originate with the what-if premise. "I think I'm just plugging into the zeitgeist and playing with that and examining it, because that's how I explore things. My movies are really me talking to myself about things, and saying, well, what about video games - for example, in Existenz: wouldn't a gamer want to plug directly into his nervous system? Well, let's just imagine he could. And then, when gamers see it, they say, 'Absolutely, I would do that.' "

You do love exploring your orifices, don't you? "Well, maybe not as much as Marilyn Chambers," he says, referring to the porn star he cast in Rabid. His face is expressionless, his voice a languid monotone. I'm not sure whether he's smiling inside. Or smirking. Or frowning. It's almost impossible to read him. He's extremely gentle, but cold gentle. At times, I sense a twinkle in the eye, but I'm not sure it's a benign twinkle. He admits he is taken with orifices. "Yeah, well, that's me. It's a creative thing. I'm thinking Darwin, evolution, and seeing the incredible life forms, and thinking humans could have developed in very different ways and still have been humans. And let me take on the role of the evolutionary force and see what we could be. In fact, a lot of those movies you're talking about are about evolution. It's really about how we have seized control over our own evolution." He points to his ears. "Look, I'm wearing hearing aids now. My eyes are lasered. I used to wear glasses for distance, I don't have to now - we are derailing evolution."

The image that stays with me from 1999's Existenz is the bioport, the spinal orifice, that Cronenberg creates for the game-player - in a moment of libidinous madness, Jude Law penetrates Jennifer Jason Leigh's bioport with his tongue rather than the game. It's disturbing in the way only Cronenberg can be - a nauseating scar and erotic accessory at the same time. I tell him it doesn't seem right - I watch it and find it a turn-on. "Well, of course. An orifice is an orifice. The sexual aspects of it are pretty obvious and the psychology of orifices does involve sexuality of every kind. Every orifice has come to have its sexual use, including ears, noses and everything else. So why would this new orifice not have its sexual aspect? Of course it does. So, to me, I'm just revealing things that are there to be revealed."

That's the role of the artist, he says - to lift a veil, to force us to look at things that are hidden or repressed; things we don't want to look at, or think we don't want to look at.

The film critic Alexander Walker famously condemned Crash, about a group of people turned on by car crashes, as being "beyond depravity". What did Walker mean by that? "I have no idea what he meant by that." He starts clinically to deconstruct Walker's comments. "I know what the words mean. Does he mean the people in the movie are operating beyond the bounds of depravity - in other words, they're extremely depraved? Did he mean I, as a film-maker, was operating beyond the bounds of depravity? You know, he [Walker] did get hit by a car at one point and he sent a message through someone who was interviewing me to say that he found that it was not at all erotic. He wanted me to know getting hit by a car was not an erotic experience. I said to the guy interviewing me, tell him to wait, he'll gradually realise, it'll grow on him." He almost smiles, and says he wears "beyond depravity" as a badge of honour. "I was pretty proud of that, and quoted it many, many times."

Crash, released in 1996, is the most obvious example of how his movies force us to examine, as voyeurs, unpalatable desires. "Can I ask something I've wanted to ask since seeing Crash?" I say. He nods. "It appalled me but it kind of excited me in a weird way, too, and I was driving away from the cinema in a medium-sized Volvo, and I saw a Mini and I..."

"You had the urge..."

"Yep."

"Of course you did."

"Is that wrong?"

"No, no, it is so right. Well, what would have been wrong is if you had actually done it."

For a moment I feel as if I'm with a degenerate version of Dr Frasier Crane. "I was just behind, and I wanted to give it a tap-tap-tap," I say. "And I'm not a violent man, Dr Cronenberg."

"Yes, yes, so you say."

Cronenberg has always loved his cars, and for many years he raced them. He once crashed a Ferrari into a concrete wall and escaped unhurt. Apart from that, he appears to have lived a sedate life in Toronto. He has been married to his second wife, Caroline Zeifman (who worked as a production assistant on Rabid), for close on 30 years, and has three children in their 20s and 30s. Did they never watch his movies and say to him, "Blimey, Dad, you're such a perv!"

"Well, first of all, they haven't seen all of my movies," he says, po-faced. "But, no, I have a great relationship with them."

Has he always been obsessed with the relationship between sex and violence? Now he does take umbrage. "I know it's convenient to portray me as obsessed, but I'm not obsessed. I'm not an obsessive person at all. Obsession is a different thing."

OK, you're certainly very interested in sex and violence? "I wish I could be the first to say I made that connection but, you know, 5,000 years ago... I think there's violence involved in all sexuality and I think there is sexuality involved in all violence."

He refers me to the throat-cutting scene in Eastern Promises and explains how its inspiration is rooted in the modern fundamentalist world. "You watch a beheading by several priests all shouting and it looks absolutely like a gay gang rite. I think there's a huge homoerotic element - not necessarily homoerotic, when you're stoning a woman to death, there's a heteroerotic element, too - in that that's very disturbing. I think those people doing that would be shocked that you would suggest such a thing, but to me it's obvious. And I think it needs to be addressed. I don't think you can cover it up with religiosity and self-righteousness because you're actually beheading this person whose arms are tied behind his back and he's on the floor, and you're sitting on top of him. What is that? It's very perversely sexual. I think it's evident."

Cronenberg has never belonged to the elliptical school of film-makers. If there's an eye-gouging in the script, we can be sure we'll get to see it. His movies would sometimes benefit from suggesting more and showing less. You seem to do violence with such relish, I say. "That might be you projecting on to me. No, no, there's a cinematic joy because I'm creating something that looks real and it's horrific." Hmm. "In A History Of Violence," he continues, "I'm saying you shoot somebody in the head, you've done a lot of damage to a human being by doing that, and I don't want to let the audience off the hook. If they enjoy that, then fine, that's good, then they should know that about themselves; that they might not mind shooting a bad guy in the head, even if it was pretty horrific and disgusting and repulsive and hard to look at. When I showed that movie in the States, some journalists said, 'No, that's great, I love that, good for him.'" Funny, everybody gets off on Cronenberg's sex and violence except him.

There is an old story that, after watching Cronenberg's early films, Martin Scorsese said he was terrified of meeting him. I ask if it's true. "He did say that, yes, because he saw Shivers and Rabid. When he told me that, I said, Marty, the guy who made Taxi Driver is afraid to meet me! I'm afraid to meet you!" Did he like the idea that Scorsese was scared of him? "I did, but it's kind of weird because I expect straight citizens to confuse the artist with his art - they think if you make violent films you must be a violent person. What bothered me was that another film-maker could make the same mistake."

The night before we met I had watched 1986's The Fly. As litres of bilious green gunk poured out of Jeff Goldblum's exploding fly-man, I thought I was going to vomit. Has he ever been sick watching his own films? "No, but I can certainly understand why others have. The problem for me is I can't really watch my movies as movies. It takes so much effort to get those effects to work, you're doing so many shots, that it's impossible for me to watch my movies the way you would."

Cronenberg, who has made guest appearances in his own films, often gets wonderful performances from his actors. Goldblum as the naive, love-struck scientist in The Fly; Jeremy Irons as twin gynaecologists in Dead Ringers; Jennifer Jason Leigh as the computer game inventor in Existenz; Holly Hunter and James Spader as the automobile fetishists in Crash; and, perhaps most memorably, Viggo Mortensen in his two most recent films, A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises.

Why do such fine actors want to work with him? "I guess the reputation finally gets around." What reputation? "I think it's a reputation for observing actors. You'd be surprised by how many directors don't really watch their actors and pay attention to them. They cast them, let them do their thing, then worry about the lighting and the angle. Actors want to be observed; they don't want to act in a vacuum. There is a great potential for humiliation of all kinds on a film, with crews as well, and it's pretty Canadian and mushy of me, but I think that affection, love and respect really work much better." So you're a softy at heart? "Totally. I'm a complete softy."

Mortensen's characters in A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises couldn't be more different, but they are both classic Cronenberg creations - men with secrets leading double lives, and probably no longer aware that they are doing so. JG Ballard has said, "All of Cronenberg's films... are concerned with two questions: who are we, and what is the real nature of consciousness?"

Critics have suggested his last two films - thrillers rather than horror movies - show a move towards the mainstream. Cronenberg says he's heard it all before and refuses to see a pattern in his evolution as a film-maker. "The Dead Zone was based on a bestselling novel, so people were saying, 'Ah, now Cronenberg has left the horror stuff' and then the next movie I did was The Fly, which is extremely violent and gory because it was a sci-fi horror film."

He has a point. The plots in A History Of Violence and Eastern Promises might be more accessible than those in earlier films, but the lives portrayed are as bleak and twisted as ever. Is he a pessimist? He looks startled, almost hurt, that anyone could suggest such a thing. No, he says, no, no, no, no. Just because he shows the world in all its visceral horror doesn't mean that he's devoid of hope. Far from it - not in a world that's brimming with syphilitic maggots and erotic barbarism. "I don't think you could make movies out of pessimism. It's so hard to make a movie, you have to have real energy. If you are a really truly enthusiastic depressive, you cannot make art. You really can't. It's too hard. And just the act of making a movie is an optimistic thing. You are assuming that there is a future, that people will be interested, that people will come to your movie. That requires optimism."

he should research hookers more. hes interested in the brain of an insect, psychology of a drug addict, of a schizo, of MACHINES...

but doesnt know shit about women

Viggo is awesome and I have a man crush on him. I'm no homo, but theres something about him that makes me want to jerk him off (in a straight way)

It's unfortunate that this movie was so disappointing because Viggo's performance was really awesome. I hope him and Cronenberg make alot more movies together because they are a perfect pair.

Cronenbergs gore was always something I thought was unique, but it doesn't have that uniqueness here. It's just gory.

And when did Naomi Watts get so ugly? She could use some braces or some invisalign.

6.9/10.

I kust saw it and my first impression is a "damn good yet not great flick". As posted before, it has some amazing and strong performances, the pace is quite good and nobody shoots violence the way Cronenbeg does. It's scary and makes you cringe and that's how it should be donem with all the blood and scars right there. Yet, something about the storytelling didn't feel quite right to me. Maybe the ending didn't please me that much, and I'd loved it to go about 2 hours and some more development of some of the characters. Yet, as a character study, it works fine. And Cronenberg does his best to always be fascinating. I mean, even the food here helps tell the damn story.

Top 10 of the year? I'll have to think about it and give it more time to grow on me. Even re-watch it maybe...

This film, like A History of Violence hinges on Viggo's performance, despite it being Naomi Watt's character that pursues the films central mystery. What surprised me most about this film was that amidst the mob violence there was a pretty great romantic sub plot, trying to get out. I suppose it's pretty easy to warm to this notion as relief from the grimness of the violence and sex trafficking but I think it played really well.

Viggo is an understated hero in this film. You root for him in the same way you root for Cary Grant's Devlin in Notorious. The film has that same level of danger sinisterness as Notorious but unlike Devlin, Viggo's character can't be the knight in shining armour. The last shot of the film is something that has stuck with me and is certainly one of the most perfect endings to a film I've seen lately.

Quote from: ElPandaRoyalI mean, even the food here helps tell the damn story.

Yes! The restaurant scenes were fascinating. Last time I was that interested in the food in a film was Goodfellas. What is it with the mafia and their food?

Quote from: Redlum on November 30, 2007, 05:08:25 PMWhat is it with the mafia and their food?

They don't want to get wacked on an empty stomach.

Heart disease is the second biggest cause of death for mafiosos.

David Cronenberg 'Promises' There's No Master Plan
Source: MTV

Not many directors catch their second wind at age 62; not many directors could yield such diverse flicks as "A History of Violence," "The Fly" and "Naked Lunch." Then again, not many directors are on the same level as David Cronenberg.

With the awards-season momentum of "Eastern Promises" continuing to grow as it debuts on DVD, we caught up with the iconic auteur to get his thoughts on neck-slicing, the perceived stages of his back catalog, and whether he and James Woods predicted the Internet way back in 1983.

MTV: David, some people are calling "Promises" an unofficial sequel to "A History of Violence." Was that your intention?

DAVID CRONENBERG: Well, I can see why they would. It's actually sort of like a mirror image in a way, because of the nature of concealed identity. In one case, you have a bad man who appears to be good; in the other one, you have a good man who appears to be bad.

MTV: Would you like to see them linked together in the years to come?

DC: I can see how they might be fun on a double-bill together. But really, it's just by accident. There were several other projects that came my way, and I almost did one or two of those, but that didn't happen. It wasn't planned, let's put it that way.

MTV: Your fans have elaborate theories on how "Shivers" and "Rabid" came from a period when you were obsessed with scientists modifying human bodies, "Scanners" and "Videodrome" are linked in their personal chaos plotlines, and "The Fly" and "Dead Ringers" are about scientists instead using themselves as guinea pigs. Do you go through periods, like a painter?

DC: I don't, no. It's interesting: It's a different part of your brain that you use when you're being analytical about, let's say, any artistic work. I can be articulate about that. At one point I thought I might have a career as an academic, teaching at a university. So I can do that; I can be a critic. I can be an analyst of my own work. But when I'm doing that, I am using a different part of my brain than when I direct. I sometimes have to remind critics, and film journalists, not to confuse their process with mine. In other words, what they're saying is not necessarily wrong, but it's not what I use to make a movie.

MTV: So, you shut off that part of your brain?

DC: It doesn't really help me in trying to make "Eastern Promises," to look at how it might connect to the characters in "A History of Violence." That doesn't help me at all. It wouldn't help Viggo [Mortensen], nobody. Creatively, it's not fruitful. After the fact, analytically, it can be very interesting to take that approach. But I take it as a compliment, because it means that the films are interesting enough and complex enough and have enough texture that they can support that kind of analysis.

MTV: In your early movies, you depended more on gore. Do those old muscles allow you to be more accurate than most directors when you need to, say, portray a man in "Promises" getting his throat slit?

DC: Well, you'll have to tell me about "Sweeney Todd." I haven't seen it yet, but I have a feeling there are a few throat cuttings in that one, too. All of my experience making movies has helped me make other movies.

MTV: But your violence still feels more real than virtually anyone else's.

DC: You can see somebody getting their throat cut on your computer, any time of the day or night that you want; that's a new thing. It's true that most people maybe won't look for that - but it's there, it's accessible. And that's unique now. That has never happened before, in the history of the world ... I think we're in different times now. Everything's shifted slightly.

MTV: In that whole voyeuristic, snuff-film regard, did "Videodrome" predict where we are now with the Internet?

DC: People have been saying that movie was prophetic; they've been saying it for years. It seems that that continues. I think people see the "Videodrome" interactivity as being in anticipation of the Internet, and I suppose, in a metaphorical way, it really was.

i saw this yesterday and it was pretty much great: i laughed, i was shocked, tha fight scene is easily one of the best cinema moments of 2007. Naomi looks great in those jeans and boots. Viggo is fucking amazing, every single moment and line is delivered with mastery. Cassel is one of those actors who sholuld be winning awards every time too.

My only beef was the vo narration. What the fuck was that? Lame, lame, lame. Didn't anyone realized hat it was unintentionally funny and overtly sentimental? Why, if they took so much trouble so everyone sounded right with their accents and lots of the dialogues is atually spoken in russian did they do that with that particular voice??? It nearly ruined everything.

This had to be one of the blandest movies of the year. A large cliche about old gangster movies is that the protaganist would be a member of the mob who had a heart but was stuck in a bad predicament he couldn't escape. Is Eastern Promises different at all? The only difference is in the cultural footnotes about Russian mafia, but so what? They take up so little of the movie and the violence withstanding, this movie is nothing more than bad melodrama. There is even a subplot involving an orphaned child. C'mon. I think if this film didn't have the actors and director it did and had none of the style nods it would have been seen as a bad film and disregarded. I wanted to disregard the film but I had say something because of all the praise.

i didnt saw anything new under the sun either, but the execution (for the most part) is great. viggo's performance alone is worth the viewing. as i said, the only real problem for me was the voice over.

Quote from: Alexandro on January 18, 2008, 01:02:39 PM
viggo's performance alone is worth the viewing.

His performance isn't anything. His character is quiet and meticulous and is able to have the same the look and manner through out the whole film. Because he doesn't come off as cocky and overblown as Vincent Cassel's character he is able to carry himself the same way when he starts to change and show his sensibilities. I think Mortenson and the writers focused on his physical look before trying to dig at his personality. Vincent Cassel's character is the one with the most variety but it's also underwritten.

What GT said about the film being a culturally heightened extension of the traditional good guy caught in a bad situation story never even occurred to me, which is funny because it's the plot you know.  And I never even thought about how ham fisted the third act twist was, and I never even considered that Mortenson's own rape might be rationally excused (or that any rape could).  Because it's been a long time since I considered the plot elements of any of Cronenberg's films.  Maybe I tried to back at Shivers or The Brood but there wasn't much point.  Which is my point.  Because Eastern Promises obviously isn't a morality play, and it obviously doesn't have a moral polarity.

I stand by my judgement of Viggo's performance being great. This could have gone terribly wrong. It could have been a complete caricature. But he becomes the character and behaves perfectly like his character. Even when he's completely silent you get a sense of who this guy is, and not necessarily as the film progresses and the screenplay gives him room for that, he achieves this pretty much from the start, cause he has his character digested and ready to go.

(KINDA SPOILERS)

It seemed to me Viggo's character wasn't precisely a nice guy in a bad predicament. Wasn't he all, in the end, about becoming the boss one way or another? I mean was he really acting on decency? It didn't seem to me that way.  

(END OF KINDA SPOILERS)

I'm sure the film is richer than what we've been claiming at this point. Cronenberg deserves more credit than this. However I can't forgive him for that stupid voice over, which was others have pointed out, was unnecessarily melodramatic and unintentionally funny.

OK, he's not the simple nice guy, but he is the one who extends himself to seemingly having a conscience. That's still a cliche that goes outside the standard thug who has no interest for outside people. I thought the film was pretty standard for following cliche protocol.

Quote from: The Gold Trumpet on January 21, 2008, 06:36:16 PM
OK, he's not the simple nice guy, but he is the one who extends himself to seemingly having a conscience. That's still a cliche that goes outside the standard thug who has no interest for outside people. I thought the film was pretty standard for following cliche protocol.

I sort of agree. I enjoy the movie as I do every other Cronenberg movie, but this one doesn't have all the intelligence in its underlying execution as do his others, particularly in comparison to A History of Violence. AHOV was riddled with cliches but in that Cronenberg was making broad statements about human nature, both within the simple parameters of the story and within the larger context of the audience watching the movie. By using a pantheon of archetypal film characters and narratives in juxtaposition with scenes like the violent sex scene he forced the viewer to confront the split between fascination and disgust, to consider his role as a viewer of such scenes in the movies (where violence is not always so direct). Here it just feels like Cronenberg wanted to make an well-crafted hit. So in that sense it was a disappointment for me, for while it was enjoyable enough I didn't personally get anything else out of it.

Or like it doesn't matter what the fuck kind of story you give Cronenberg because he's still going to make it about human ugliness and what he used to do is make films about what the human body could become and now he's making movies about what the human body is + + now in Eastern Promises he's become more talented at disguising his voice (which is also his vision), something I think began at Spider and has progressed.  This is the solid point that I believe I am 100% right on:  Eastern Promises has all the elements of a great Cronenberg film (it being a great Cronenberg film) and, and to me the conversation taking place only reinforces this, it's the unification of all his devices.  AKA you have to actually break this one down and think about what Cronenberg is trying to say.  Everyone here is surely familiar with the Lynchian tactic of taking care of the audience to allow room for self-indulgence, and how Lynch broke down that wall in Indland Empire, which was completely self-indulgent, and brilliant, but not incredibly rewatchable, well instead of retreating into familiar territory and magnifying statements from his past Cronenberg is a filmmaker who's actually developing his themes while creating films that have ostensibly become less of what he is.  I think the corny way of saying this is that films operates on two different levels.

And no one should be surprised I gush at this prospect if they can remember that Squid and the Whale thread.

Quote from: w/o horse on January 22, 2008, 02:57:18 PM
Or like it doesn't matter what the fuck kind of story you give Cronenberg because he's still going to make it about human ugliness and what he used to do is make films about what the human body could become and now he's making movies about what the human body is + + now in Eastern Promises he's become more talented at disguising his voice (which is also his vision), something I think began at Spider and has progressed.

I'm trying to understand this. Because Cronenberg takes a typical story and makes it his own we should compliment him on his achievement? I don't think so. Cronenberg adapts the story to fit his personality, I guess, but he doesn't change the story to truly look different than most other violent films. The cliches and standard devices of plot still overcrowd any chances for good introspection.

Quote from: w/o horse on January 22, 2008, 02:57:18 PM
This is the solid point that I believe I am 100% right on:  Eastern Promises has all the elements of a great Cronenberg film (it being a great Cronenberg film) and, and to me the conversation taking place only reinforces this, it's the unification of all his devices.  AKA you have to actually break this one down and think about what Cronenberg is trying to say.  Everyone here is surely familiar with the Lynchian tactic of taking care of the audience to allow room for self-indulgence, and how Lynch broke down that wall in Indland Empire, which was completely self-indulgent, and brilliant, but not incredibly rewatchable, well instead of retreating into familiar territory and magnifying statements from his past Cronenberg is a filmmaker who's actually developing his themes while creating films that have ostensibly become less of what he is.  I think the corny way of saying this is that films operates on two different levels.

I think you're operating on the point of rationalization. Eastern Promises has a story that is more familiar to general audiences. Filmmakers shouldn't be complimented for being able to marry their personality to the most standard material. If they do try to do this it should be to challenge the standard norms instead of make their personality and intelligence low grade enough to fit within (as is the case with Eastern Promises) a melodrama.

Challenge the standard norm?  Is that really so fucking necessary?  I very much enjoy the essay in the Criterion edition of Shoot the Piano Player in which Kent Jones talks about how during the time Godard and Truffout were the most popular arthouse filmmakers Godard was seen as the more challenging artist, how he was so keen on having like a political agenda and disrupting the image of his nation's ethos and doing etc iconoclast things but how now looking back it's harder to find a way to relate to those Godard films and a lot of it feels jejune or contrived or just frankly embarassing and then there was Truffout who was doing a very different thing.  What Truffout was doing was crafting films, at the time seen as bourgeoisie, because they lacked the qualities mentioned that Godard possessed, but nevertheless crafting films that existed less within their time.  And I think it'd be difficult for anybody to actually make the argument that Godard's films have aged better than Truffout's.

Cronenberg is doing a very Hollywood thing oh yes.  He's not bucking the system in any way.  He's become more like a demented Golden Age director, taking material and brandishing it with his voice.  From a creative standpoint I think that's much much more taxing than the self-indulgence you crave (which is terribly reactionary).

Quote from: w/o horse on January 22, 2008, 02:57:18 PM
Or like it doesn't matter what the fuck kind of story you give Cronenberg because he's still going to make it about human ugliness and what he used to do is make films about what the human body could become and now he's making movies about what the human body is + + now in Eastern Promises he's become more talented at disguising his voice (which is also his vision), something I think began at Spider and has progressed.  This is the solid point that I believe I am 100% right on:  Eastern Promises has all the elements of a great Cronenberg film (it being a great Cronenberg film) and, and to me the conversation taking place only reinforces this, it's the unification of all his devices.  AKA you have to actually break this one down and think about what Cronenberg is trying to say.  Everyone here is surely familiar with the Lynchian tactic of taking care of the audience to allow room for self-indulgence, and how Lynch broke down that wall in Indland Empire, which was completely self-indulgent, and brilliant, but not incredibly rewatchable, well instead of retreating into familiar territory and magnifying statements from his past Cronenberg is a filmmaker who's actually developing his themes while creating films that have ostensibly become less of what he is.  I think the corny way of saying this is that films operates on two different levels.

And no one should be surprised I gush at this prospect if they can remember that Squid and the Whale thread.

That's the thing, though. I don't think his themes really developed much at all from A History of Violence to Eastern Promises. I think he basically used the same ideas in the crafting of the different levels, as you say. So while I love AHOV for the reasons I mentioned (and the same reasons you like Eastern Promises), Eastern Promises is just a repeat for me. Years ahead when we're all talking about Cronenberg's body of work I don't think we'll be saying Eastern Promises is a great progression of ideas, but more a progression of craft. He's becoming more adept at creating a transparent narrative, for better or worse.

Quote from: w/o horse on January 22, 2008, 03:33:19 PM
From a creative standpoint I think that's much much more taxing than the self-indulgence you crave (which is terribly reactionary).

First off, I would never call that as what I want. I've never said it and don't intend to. I doubt many people would equate "challenging norms" and "self indulgence" to be the same thing.

Quote from: w/o horse on January 22, 2008, 03:33:19 PM
Challenge the standard norm?  Is that really so fucking necessary?  I very much enjoy the essay in the Criterion edition of Shoot the Piano Player in which Kent Jones talks about how during the time Godard and Truffout were the most popular arthouse filmmakers Godard was seen as the more challenging artist, how he was so keen on having like a political agenda and disrupting the image of his nation's ethos and doing etc iconoclast things but how now looking back it's harder to find a way to relate to those Godard films and a lot of it feels jejune or contrived or just frankly embarassing and then there was Truffout who was doing a very different thing.  What Truffout was doing was crafting films, at the time seen as bourgeoisie, because they lacked the qualities mentioned that Godard possessed, but nevertheless crafting films that existed less within their time.  And I think it'd be difficult for anybody to actually make the argument that Godard's films have aged better than Truffout's.

Kent Jones has little right to speak for everyone. Regardless of my own personal feelings, Jean Luc Godard is considered by far the more influential filmmaker of the two. Breathless is considered the first modernist film and many of the attributes in his films are seen in a lot films made today. I'd agree that Truffaut's first three films are influential, but he became an everyman filmmaker afterwards. He has little legacy to give to today's filmmakers because his works became so identifiable with everyone else's after. The criticism of him was that he was making films to just make films. Stanley Kauffmann once said, "When Francios Truffaut has an idea, he makes a film. And sometimes when he doesn't have an idea, he makes a film anyways."

I put to the question to you, what major filmmaker had a career of both challenging films and standard films and saw their best film made within the latter department? I can't think of any. Stanley Kubrick topped out with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Orson Welles with Citizen Kane. Few people consider Elephant Man or Dune to be David Lynch's best as most people don't think the same of Intolerable Cruelty or The Ladykillers for the Coen Brothers. There may be a few exceptions, but I think it's a good rule that is mostly accurate.

Well you see, I love The Lady from Shanghai.

Watched this last night. Was slightly disappointed. Was hoping for Viggo to just blow me away, but he didn't... Naomi Watts was fine (was actually thinking - does The Painted Veil count as 2007 - cos she was better in that). Don't really have that much to say. Was perfectly good film, if quite predictable. I wanted it to be much better than it was.