David Cronenberg, right, and Viggo Mortensen field questions at the Toronto film festival. Photo courtesy of Yahoo News.
Body horror – that’s the cinematic genre tag that’s often been slapped on filmmaker David Cronenberg, who brushes it off like so much splattered gray matter before confessing, “I’m happy that some people think I invented my own genre or something like that. It’s kind of flattering and it’s OK.”
The engaging Toronto director took some time recently at the Ritz-Carlton to debate the reasons why he took on his latest project, Eastern Promises, discuss the dangers of directing opera, and speculate on the Slavic looks of “No Ego Viggo” Mortensen. For the first part of Cronenberg’s interview, go to “Written on the skin.” (For more on Mortensen, see “You go, I go, we all go for Viggo.”
Bay Guardian: Eastern Promises doesn’t seem like an obvious film for you.
David Cronenberg: After the fact, everything is kind of obvious, but it never is when you’re thinking about it. It had been languishing at BBC Films for some time, and it just got sent to me. I was immediately interested because it was really good writing by Steve Knight who wrote Dirty Pretty Things for Stephen Frears.
I loved the textures in the script and the characters and the sort of betrayals and the enmities – it was all very rich material, and when I read it I thought, well, Viggo would be perfect for this role of Nikolai. I’d actually thought when doing A History of Violence that he had a really Slavic look, a really Russian look, you know. He’s half Danish so maybe that’s where that comes from, I don’t know. A director spends a lot of time looking at his actors’ faces – not just on the set but in the editing room. You’re looking for each nuance, each tone, so you get to know an actor very well in a way that most people don’t relate to other people. It’s an unusual relationship.
BG: It’s the second film you’ve made with Viggo Mortensen – that’s unusual for you.
DC: Totally unusual. The only other time [was Jeremy Irons] and I don’t think it was back to back either. I’ve gotten along very well with all my leading men and women frankly – Christopher Walken, James Woods, James Spader, Ralph Fiennes, and Jeff Goldblum – we’ve all at certain points tried to do things together. But it’s difficult in terms of scheduling and even though you might be friends with an actor he’s got to feel like he can say no to a role that he just doesn’t want to do. You don’t do each other a favor by doing something just for a friendship when in fact you don’t really like the project. Likewise, I wouldn’t do an actor a favor by miscasting him just because he’s a friend.