by Gill Pringle at Cinemacon, Las Vegas
Taking to the stage at Caesars Palace’s Coliseum in Las Vegas, he quipped about how it was his first time in this city of gambling and decadence, joking how it seemed like an appropriate place to “launch our attack on the world” with his highly anticipated return to the horror genre.
It’s been eight years since the 79-year-old Canadian director’s last film, Maps to the Stars, and many thought he had retired. But now, the auteur is back with Crimes of the Future, a screenplay he first wrote 20 years ago (a reworking of one of his first features made in 1970 with the same title) and imagined was irrelevant until his friend, producer Robert Lantos urged him to dust off the script claiming it was even more relevant today.
Talking about how he originally set the story in Toronto, Cronenberg reveals that the film was actually shot in Athens last year. “I was very lucky to end up shooting the film in Athens and it was very exciting to have a production in an ancient city. Toronto was old but it’s not 3000 years old. The texture of the city and the feeling of the Mediterranean and so on, very much absorbed into the film,” explained the director whose other films include Crash, A History of Violence and A Dangerous Method.
Starring Kristen Stewart, Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux, Crimes of the Future takes a deep dive into the not-so-distant future in which humankind is learning to adapt to its synthetic surroundings. This evolution moves humans beyond their natural state and into a metamorphosis, which alters their biological makeup.
Crimes of the Future marks Cronenberg’s first directorial effort from his own original screenplay since 1999’s eXistenZ.
Producer Robert Lantos told FilmInk: “To work with David Cronenberg is to embark on a journey exploring terrain where no one has gone before.
“Each of our collaborations has been an exhilarating adventure and David’s unwavering vision is what real cinema is all about.”
The new trailer features moody lighting and a woman with a rainbow circle on her stomach, standing next to a futuristic operating table. If audiences quickly grasped that Crimes of the Future is about body modification as a form of art, then Viggo Mortensen sums it up by saying “I don’t like what’s happening with the body, in particular what’s happening with my body, which is why I keep cutting it up.”
Cronenberg has always been fascinated with body horror and how we try to control our lives through changing our forms, with Crimes of the Future evolving from themes already explored in his films Videodrome and eXistenZ, including “key references” to his previous films.
In the trailer, we see Kristen Stewart’s character, an investigator from the National Organ Registry, examining a human body, then immediately shows Lea Seydoux’s character, who is Mortensen’s character’s partner, cutting open someone’s stomach and placing her mouth against the cut, highlighting the very real differences between their characters and the opposing forces in Cronenberg’s bizarre vision of the future.
Describing his enduring friendship with Cronenberg, producer Lantos goes on to talk about how they first met at Cannes’ famed Croisette in 1975.
“He was there with his film Shivers and I was there trying to figure it all out, getting rights to film that I saw. We actually first collaborated many years later, when my former company Alliance distributed Naked Lunch and later we made Crash, which was loved by some and equally reviled by others. Since then, we’ve made several films and Crimes of the Future is our fourth collaboration. Each one has been a memorable roller coaster ride and I can guarantee you that this one will be no exception,” he says.
Crimes of the Future is in cinemas August 18 and August (Melbourne)
