A few words with David Cronenberg about "Cosmopolis"

David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson on the set of Cosmopolis.

The oth­er day I was allowed a few minutes on the phone with David Cronenberg, whose mas­ter­ful adapt­a­tion of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis was one of the best movies of the year, in my estim­a­tion. The DVD and Blu-ray edi­tions of the pic­ture come out on January first from Entertainment One. 

    SCR:
Watching the film, it kind of struck me as funny that it took you and Don
DeLillo so long to come togeth­er because there seemed to be so many very
dis­tinct affin­it­ies, par­tic­u­larly with the way you both use lan­guage.  I wondered if you could talk about
com­ing to this text and decid­ing that you were right to adapt it.

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, I had read quite a few things of Don’s and I did know
for example that his epic, Underworld,
had been bought, I think, by Scott Rudin and then nev­er made.  And that does­n’t sur­prise me, because
it’s—you know, you can make about 10 movies from that book.  So I guess it’s really a ques­tion of
which pro­ject, you know.  And I hadn’t
actu­ally read Cosmopolis, or even
heard of it for some reas­on, when Paulo Branco the Portuguese pro­du­cer, very
exper­i­enced, he’s done about 300 movies I think, came to Toronto and said, I
have the rights to this book, I’m in touch with Don DeLillo and I think you
should dir­ect this.  And so really
it was—when I read it, yeah, it was love at first sight.  I thought, I really need to—what I’m
going to do is I’m going to see if—I’m going to do a sort of pre­lim­in­ary kind
of rough screen­play from this book to see if I think it really is a movie.  Because there is a lot in the book and
in all of Don’s writ­ing that is not dir­ectly, you know, trans­lat­able to
cinema.  And that’s the case with
most nov­els.  People say to me, why
do you end up doing these unfil­mable nov­els?  And I say, oh, really, all nov­els are unfil­mable in essence,
because the two art forms are really quite dif­fer­ent.  And there are so many things you can do in a nov­el that you
simply can­’t do in movies and vice versa. 
And that was true of Cosmopolis.  There’s so much that’s
interi­or and meta­phys­ic­al and meta­phor­ic­al and all of that.  So I wanted to see if there was a movie
in there and I wrote—it was the dia­logue, exactly, that was the key to me.  And I tran­scribed all the dialogue,
just on its own, and put it into script form.  And said to myself, OK, is this a movie?  And I thought, yeah, it is a movie and
in fact it’s a movie I really want to make.  And it really lit­er­ally took me only 6 days to write the
screenplay.

     SCR:  I think people make a similar
mis­ap­pre­hen­sion about your work as they do with DeLillo’s; is they don’t see the
com­ic aspect of the lan­guage, this baroque deadpan.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.  It’s true. I
mean a lot of the reviews of the movie even were very sol­emn.  And I thought, well, there are a lot of
laughs in the book and the movie, and why aren’t they see­ing that?  Or respond­ing to it at least.  And of course, if you don’t do that,
then your per­cep­tion of the movie is going to be quite dis­tor­ted, I think.

     SCR:  And it gets even more heightened at the
end too, where the com­bin­a­tion of your visu­als and the dia­logue really catapult
you into Burroughs ter­rit­ory. And
I always thought in DeLillo’s work such as Great Jones Street there’s this streak of a Burroughs-type
con­scious­ness that is not his but that kind of enters from without and comments
on what’s going on.

     CRONENBERG:  Well, and of course Burroughs was
incred­ibly accur­ate with his dia­logue in a sim­il­ar way to Don.  That is to say, it is styl­ized but it’s
also real.  It really nails
some—the real­it­ies of American speech and the men­tal­ity that’s behind that speech
as well.  So it can be quite
dev­ast­at­ingly funny in a satir­ic­al say as well.

     SCR:  You’ve often spoken about how much you
rely on the pro­duc­tion design and oth­er aspects of the people you collaborate
with dur­ing the film mak­ing pro­cess because you don’t story­board and you don’t
have an idea of how to shoot until you’re actu­ally on the set.  But there’s some­thing in Cosmopolis that makes some of the angles and some of the
cuts—it’s a really refined mar­riage of the verbal con­tent and the visual
con­tent.  And I wondered the
extent, if at all, your work­ing meth­od has evolved over the years, wheth­er, as
you write or as you con­ceive, where you see the cuts, if at all.  If that’s changed at all.

     CRONENBERG:  It has changed.  I’m just more con­fid­ent basic­ally.  My dir­ect­or of pho­to­graphy, Peter
Suschitzky, says that I shoot very dif­fer­ently now than I did in 1988 when we
did our first movie togeth­er, Dead Ringers.  It’s just—I don’t—I just don’t shoot as much.  I just know bet­ter what I want and what
I need.  And that’s just
exper­i­ence.  I don’t think it’s
any­thing oth­er than that.  But it’s
always been the case—the reas­on that I don’t want to really think about
some­thing like story boards, unless it’s a very com­plex phys­ic­al action scene,
let’s say or spe­cial effects scene, I only—I’ve done a couple of story boards
for let’s say The Fly but not really since then, and that’s just a special
effects question—is because I want the visu­al aspects to come directly
organ­ic­ally out of the scene itself as it’s being played, by those particular
act­ors, as they speak that par­tic­u­lar dia­logue.  To me, the dia­logue in this movie really shapes the
visu­als.  Of course I’ve done
design things with the interi­or of the limo and all of that, and you do a lot
of stuff in prep that is the equi­val­ent in a way of story board­ing because
you’re set­ting your­self up for cer­tain angles and lenses and so on by the way
you design the set.  So there is
that prep.  But ulti­mately, I want
to hear the act­ors say­ing the dialogue. 
I want to see what they look like and I want to see what there is about
their face that pulls me to one side or the oth­er or dead on or above and what
lens I use.  It’s very intuitive
but to me it has to spring from the real­ity of that moment.  And so, in a strange way, des­pite the
fact, you know, the con­trol and as you call it, the refine­ment of the visuals
in the movie, there’s a doc­u­ment­ary ele­ment involved, a kind of spontaneous
doc­u­ment­ary ele­ment.  My cameraman
and I are really respond­ing to what’s right in front of us at that moment.

     SCR:  The extent to which this movie—it’s set
before 2001 and it’s set before 9/11 and that’s every­body’s reference
point.  But it’s writ­ten in 2006
and it seems to very accur­ately pre­dict 2008, among oth­er things.  And it almost—it seems to go hand in
hand with, say, the the­or­ist Slavoj Zizek’s for­mu­la­tion of cap­it­al­ism being the thing
that is eat­ing itself.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah.  Yeah.

     SCR:  A lot of people did­n’t see the irony or
the satir­ic­al pos­ture behind you and Pattinson ringing the bell at the New York
Stock Exchange. 

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah, I know, some people thought that
we were betray­ing the movie by doing that.  I thought, no, no, you’re really not get­ting it at all.  That was so per­fect.  I could­n’t believe when they were
ask­ing us.  But that was the
per­fect expres­sion of capitalism. 
They were lovely there. 
They were so excited, they love their Stock Exchange and, after all, we
were selling a movie and selling is what they know.  So it was all perfect. 
A cap­it­al­ist­ic enter­prise, and there we were.  Yeah, it’s inter­est­ing, because Don and I on pan­els, in a
way, that’s when I kind of learn some things about his atti­tudes to things that
I did­n’t really know or need to know but I’m curi­ous about.  We both don’t feel that being a prophet
is part of our job description. 
But if your anten­nae are sens­it­ive enough to what’s in the eth­er, you
will inev­it­ably anti­cip­ate some things that are just sort of accu­mu­lat­ing but
are not all that vis­ible.  And I
think that’s really the case here. 
As Don took pains to say, no, the book did­n’t begin with some grand,
gran­di­ose concept of com­ing to terms with fin­an­cial respons­ib­il­ity glob­ally and
all of that kind of thing.  It had
to do with limos.  It had to do
with who would want one of those in the streets of Manhattan and why would you
be in it, and who is it—and where do they go at night, and all of that kind of
stuff.  It begins with
details.  And it’s the same with a
film maker even more.  You cannot
film an abstract concept.  We’re in
the con­crete world, film makers. 

     SCR: I imagine—if you
pro­ceed from a point of view where you think you’re going to sum it all up,
that way lies madness. 

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah. 

     SCR:  But maybe there’s some retrospective
sat­is­fac­tion in look­ing at this and say­ing, well, whoa, we got it.  Artists often don’t even know that
they’re doing what they’re doing; then it comes out and they’ve done something
that is a summation. 

     CRONENBERG:  Sure.  Well, I mean, and then you do get the deli­cious moments on
the set, for example, when I got a text from Paul Giamatti who said, I can’t
believe Rupert Murdoch just got a pie in the face.  And we had not long before that shot the scene with the pie
in the face in the movie.  So the
res­on­ances were kind of sat­is­fy­ing, even though it did­n’t really change what we
were doing at all.  But it is
sat­is­fy­ing, that aspect of it. 

     SCR:  As much inven­tion as you have in the
pro­duc­tion design, and I wanted to ask about how you recre­ate the New York City
streets in shoot­ing, unless you are nit­pick­ing, and as a New Yorker I’d be in a
pos­i­tion to nit­pick, but unless you’re are very spe­cific­ally nit­pick­ing, it is
con­vin­cing jour­ney from 47^th Street and 1^st Avenue to 47^th Street and 11^th
Avenue.

     CRONENBERG:  Yeah, well I’m glad you say that
because I read some reviews that said they obvi­ously, you know, Toronto
shot.  And I thought, I don’t think
it’s that obvi­ous.  Because 47^th
Street now in par­tic­u­lar is not what it was when Don wrote his book.  A lot of those places that he mentions
aren’t there.  Even if I did shoot
on 47^th Street, I would have to invent some things because they’re just not
there any­more.  And weirdly enough,
the park­ing meters, the ones that deliv­er those little slips of paper, are
exactly the same brand and col­or and shape and everything else in Toronto, as
they are on 47^th Street.  We took
pains to try to not go crazy, because obvi­ously this isn’t Mean Streets or some­thing like that, but giv­en that you’re seeing
New York primar­ily through the win­dow, through the screens of the limo, I
thought it was not bad. We took pains to try and make it as much like New York
as we could.