Eastern Promises

[MacGuffin]

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?"

[MacGuffin]

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."

[Pubrick]

mortensen for '07 oscars/xaxies.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[w/o horse]

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.

[last days of gerry the elephant]

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.

[Sal]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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.

[MacGuffin]

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."

[SiliasRuby]

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

[MacGuffin]

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.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

This movie was well paced; badass.

[w/o horse]

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.

[Pozer]

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

[Fernando]

i loved it.  mac & w/o said it perfectly.

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