Darkness falls across the land...
Few events leave one as perplexed as listening to David Cronenberg speak. Any research done on this man and his body of work over the past thirty years suggest that caution should be exercised in dealing with a person who revels in darkness as much as this. A man who describes the AIDS virus as a triumph in disease evolution rather than the scourge of the world, I await a similar intensity in his demeanour as he walks into our conference in the basement of the Soho Hotel.
Then something happens that seems to catch everyone in the room off guard. He takes his seat next to a rather nervous Naomi Watts and the more comfortable Vincent Cassel, stars of his latest film Eastern Promises, and rolls off some quip about the mountain of dictaphones under his microphone. Nothing too special there to consider, but in an instant the image of this morbid goremonger vanishes and the expectation of the crowd is flattened.
This leaves a gulf that is filled with inane questions about Naomi’s recent pregnancy or the motorbike that she has to ride during the film and it seems that Cronenberg’s humour has left him sadly human. But as the course runs, a deeper sense of character emerges, unforced and with a fluidity of blood emerging from a wound (a metaphor he would no doubt approve of) as the oft-cited king of “body horror” blends discussion of beheadings with babies, slavery with cinema and truth with terror.
For the uninitiated, Cronenberg first came to prominence in the seventies with a number of films that would later come to be known under the genre umbrella of “body horror”, a subgenre in which the body undergoes some sort of transformation or infection, with Cronenberg famously stating that he wanted to show films from the point of view of the disease. The idea of a foreign organism crippling the sanctuary of the body from within was explored in Rabid, in which he cast a porn star as a crash victim who undergoes a skin graft that leaves his with anomalies resembling an anus and a phallus in her armpit, and his more commercially successful remake of the old Vincent Price B-movie, The Fly. Chances are there was a time at school when you heard of his film Crash as well, where autoeroticism derives new meaning as a group of thrill seekers take to causing car crashes to arouse themselves. Chances are there were a few red faces when people went out to rent the latest Paul Haggis film of the same name and didn’t read the back of the box carefully enough...
So is it all just controversy for the sake of controversy? Why is there such a darkness in his works and yet such joviality in his personal demeanour? He doesn’t hesitate in his response to this question: “It’s a kind of a balancing thing. Most artists are interested in exploring places that are not normally explored. It’s a matter of curiosity for one thing and I think there’s always this feeling that you will discover something really significant or profound about human nature, about yourself, the human condition, if you go to those places as opposed to the more mundane everyday places that we all know. I think an artist has a desire to uncover things that are hidden and you don’t want things to be hidden. You want to uncover what’s going on and so you dig after what’s really going on and that’s what leads you into dark places because when there’s no light, things happen that are hidden.”
Cronenberg’s latest two offerings, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, are not in quite the same visceral vein as many of his previous works, yet when viewed as a diptych prove to be a fascinating study of the violence that underpins society in various ways. Viggo Mortenson leads both pieces and acts as a visual link between the pair but Cronenberg’s directorial style leaves no doubt the two are connected more intrinsically. His framing of dramatic scenes is more tailored to observation than involvement or exaggeration as is commonplace with so many directors.
This feature of his films makes marketing tough, especially when the competition try to make trailers as dramatic as possible. The subject matter of Cronenberg’s film makes it easy to sensationalise them: A family man who foils an armed robbery and is then pursued by an organised crime unit forms the crux of History. But with the focus on story rather than dramatics, recent Cronenberg can be a disappointment for those who fancy a fast paced action flick. Italian arthouse master Fellini once proclaimed that his own style told “realistic stories in an unrealistic way”. Cronenberg, in this sense, is the opposite.
The intrigue of his character matches that of his stories however. Hearing him discuss the intimacy of a knife killing sends chills down your spine and his unapologetic frankness in comparing beheadings and bombings aligns his self-projection with that of his cinema. Until he makes another joke and we’re back to square one.
It is no surprise that someone so beguiling has been chosen to front the opening of London’s prestigious film festival. His eye for detail is truly artistic and when he speaks of his work, he does so with an authenticity that would place him above many of his contemporaries.
This isn’t the voice of a beginner trying to justify themselves through discussion of their “process”. Instead it is the voice of consummate professionalism. A voice with more sides to it than even his films can achieve.
