Pages tagged “david cronenberg”

Are you ready for The Fly: The Opera?

[Above (L-R): Director David Cronenberg, Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassel on the set of Eastern Promises]

David Cronenberg isn’t done writing his history of violence. Leaving a seemingly idyllic postcard Americana behind, the director found a different milieu for his latest film, Eastern Promises—a suspense-driven drama set in London’s once-obscure Russian underworld, where the trafficking of human beings is just another income stream.

Though it offers a more conventional narrative than most in Cronenberg’s transgressive body of work, the film is a natural follow-up to 2005’s A History of Violence, and not simply because it again features Viggo Mortensen as a tightly coiled killing machine with a shadowy identity. It’s not, the director insists, that he’s got a burning affinity for mob sagas. “That’s just accidental,” he explains in a conversation from his Toronto office. The attraction was at once more complex and incredibly simple.

“Part of it was my being intrigued by intense little subcultures that illustrate my existential thoughts that we really do create our own realities,” Cronenberg says. Ever the pragmatic outsider, despite the critical and commercial success of Violence, he’s quick to note an even greater imperative. “Also, it was ready to go. We found the financing. It’s nice in retrospect for people to see arcs and shifts from genre to genre, but it’s very difficult to get a movie made. When something intrigues you enough that you know you can live with it for two years and never get bored, you do it.”

The director also had Viggo. There was never a chance anyone else would be cast as Nikolai, the enigmatic driver for a kindly patriarch (Armin Mueller-Stahl) whose Trans-Siberian restaurant is the front for a thriving crime network: the London flagship of the Vory V Zakone, a fearsome and brutal Russian brotherhood of killers and thieves. The story turns on delicately attenuated shadings of character and deeply internalized psychologies that sustain a nervous edge throughout the film, something at which Mortensen proved expert as the Red State family guy with a hidden personality in Violence. As Nikolai, an aspiring mobster who contends, “I’m just a driver,” he has to navigate not only the homicidal subterfuge of his bosses, but his watchful affection for an interloping midwife (Naomi Watts)—a second-generation Russian drawn into his dark web when a Ukrainian teenager dies in childbirth, leaving behind a newborn and a diary packed with dangerous secrets.

“When you shoot with somebody on a movie, you spend a lot of time looking at the face of the lead actor,” Cronenberg says. “Not only on the set, but in the editing room. It occurred to me that Viggo had a Slavic look. There’s a Russian-ness to his face.” The half-Danish Mortensen, who is fluent in several languages, picked up Russian in six months, and invested himself in obsessive research. “He went to Russia, driving through Siberia completely on his own, chased by a farm dog,” Cronenberg says. Some of his associates were taken aback. “‘You mean he went alone!’” he says, jokingly, echoing apparent concern that Morensen might’ve been at risk.

Eastern Promises boasts a showstopping sequence that argues decisively for Mortensen’s survival skills. Set in a Russian steam bath, the scene is as intense as any in Violence, but offers a heightened degree of difficulty for the actor, who goes the full monty. “It was very important to me that Viggo was willing to do the scene naked,” Cronenberg says. “He was the one who broached the subject. You can imagine if I had to choreograph him with a towel, or not shoot below the waist!”

“He’s a real collaborator, not just an actor,” Cronenberg says. “And I treat him like that. When you shoot this kind of scene, you have to ask yourself, ‘How real should it be. Is this a Hollywood fight or a real fight? Is this a Bourne Identity kind of shoot, or do you want more continuity?’ The audience comes to a movie like this because they want to live someone else’s life for a while. This is happening to them.”

The 64-year-old director, who built his reputation on horror that pushed biological and psychological extremes, is matter-of-fact about shooting another original screenplay. Next year, Cronenberg will also try his hand at what, for him, is a new medium—an opera version of his 1986 remake of The Fly, co-produced by the Los Angeles Opera and the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris, is scheduled to premiere in July of 2008, in Paris. Cronenberg will direct the production, though he stresses that the work belongs much more to composer Howard Shore and librettist David Henry Hwang. “It’s unknown territory for me—a little scary,” he says. “But it’s a composer’s medium as far as I’m concerned. That’s my fallback.”

Sticking close by his Canadian base, Cronenberg has always maintained an off off-Hollywood working model: Indie before indie was cool. “I’m not like some of those directors who have five or six things going at one time,” he says. “You’re basically reinventing the film business every time you make a movie. How could Howard Hawks make 84 films? Well, it was more like TV then. The studio system made sure you could do that.”