By James Mottram
From Fast Company to Crash, David Cronenberg’s auto fixation is well known. The day before FilmInk met the director during The 2012 Cannes Film Festival, there was a rumour doing the rounds that the silver-haired Canadian was refusing to conduct interviews in the afternoon, so he could free up time to watch the qualifying laps of the Formula 1 Grand Prix in Monaco. The rumour, however, was wholly false, and the filmmaker was thankfully more than happy to talk with FilmInk about his 2012 vehicle-driven vehicle, Cosmopolis.
Based on Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, the film stars Twilight’s Robert Pattinson as Eric Packer, a Wall Street billionaire who could teach Edward Cullen a thing or two when it comes to blood-sucking. Set across one day in Manhattan, the eccentric Packer decides to travel across the city in his hi-tech white stretch limo “to get a haircut.” But with a presidential motorcade, a rap star’s funeral procession, and rioting anti-capitalist protestors reducing his journey to a slow crawl along 47th Street, Packer remains ensconced in his mobile cocoon. “I love the idea of the limousine as an environment,” said Cronenberg in a rooftop restaurant overlooking the Côte d’Azur. “This character has created a world for himself inside the limo. He has total control there, and he’s also isolated himself. It gives him freedom, but it also imprisons him. It’s like a coffin. He has disconnected himself from the city; you can’t hear the city, you can barely see the city, and he forces everybody to come to him – for sex, for discussion, for business.” Even, in one scene with his doctor, for an extended prostate examination.
For Cronenberg, setting a film almost exclusively in a car was a big challenge – particularly when the episodic narrative sees Packer usher characters into his car like a king might receive courtiers, only for them never to return. “I love the risk,” the director told FilmInk. “The fact that it was extreme was part of what attracted me to it. It forces you to become inventive. What are you going to do inside this limo? What does it look like? What lens are you going to use, and how are you going to use it? That is exciting to me.”
The adaptation came to Cronenberg by way of veteran Portuguese producer, Pablo Branco, who knows DeLillo and acquired the rights to his book. “Pablo flew to Toronto,” recalled Cronenberg. “He said, ‘My son thinks that you are the right director for this project.’” Good call. As soon as Cronenberg read the novel, he was hooked. “I wrote the script in six days, because the book was so cinematic – the dialogue was incredible. It was unusual for me to write a script that quickly. I didn’t change the dialogue. It’s almost all there exactly from the book.”
At the book/film’s centre is Eric Packer, a man for our economically ravaged times who, when we join his narrative, is aggressively speculating on Chinese currency. “He’s very naïve, and very young, but he knows how to manipulate money,” Cronenberg explained. “But he’s not aware of how destructive he is. You have a whole generation of young financers who think that they’re producing something real, but they’re not producing anything. They’re very rich, and they have money, but they don’t know what to do with the money because they have never developed culture or taste.”
Robert Pattinson was working on the final Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn, when he got the call from his agent that Cronenberg wanted him to play Packer. Reading the script, the actor was terrified. “I didn’t really understand it,” he admitted to FilmInk at The Cannes Film Festival. “The potential for failure was quite high! I said that I’d call him back the next day, and I kept putting it off, trying to think about how I could say, ‘No!’ Then I realised that I’d have to call Cronenberg up and say, ‘I’m not good enough to do it, and I’m too much of a pussy.’ I didn’t want to make that phone call!”
Pattinson was in good company. No slouch herself, British star Samantha Morton, who plays Packer’s chief of theory, Vija Kinsky, felt equally intimidated. “It was a very, very hard part, and I did it because I was so frightened of it,” the actress told FilmInk. “I thought, ‘I don’t know if I can do that or if I’m capable of it.’” According to Pattinson, even Cronenberg admitted, during their second phone call, that he was at a loss to explain the meanings behind the script. “He was like, ‘I don’t understand what it’s about either, but it’s juicy, right?’”
It was this cloud of unknowing, however, that excited the director during the shoot. “I realised as we kept shooting, after the first week, that David would zero in on the times when I was really feeling lost,” Pattinson explained. “Sometimes you get to a point where you’re not thinking about it, and you’re not trying to make a scene go in a particular direction – and every single time, David was like, ‘That was the one!’ And if I made any attempt to actually act – to try and have an idea and accomplish that idea – he was like, ‘No! That was shit!’”
Even the more experienced actors found the shoot for Cosmopolis bizarre. Juliette Binoche, who has known Cronenberg socially for years, was delighted to finally get to work with him. “It’s a very Cronenberg scene. I couldn’t be in a more Cronenberg scene!” the French legend laughed. “In one scene, I’m going through so many layers, of men and women.” It’s not quite the role that you’d expect from the elegant Oscar winner from The English Patient, who plays Didi Fancher, an art dealer who begins her scene, in the limo, riding Packer with wild sexual abandon. “It’s a big challenge to have a whole film in a car,” Binoche said. “It was so interesting. I could do anything that I wanted, so it was great. And yet it was a very cold experience at the same time. There was just one assistant, taking care of the focus, and the DP was outside, dealing with his camera near David. So we had a voice telling us, ‘Let’s do another take’, in a surgeon-like way. So I was alone with Robert, in the limo, surrounded by green screen. It felt very much like coming out of a world.”
With a cast that includes other Cronenberg virgins, such as Jay Baruchel, Mathieu Amalric and Paul Giamatti, the director recalled one former collaborator, Sarah Gadon. The 25-year-old Canadian had just finished playing Emma Jung, wife to the Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, in Cronenberg’s 2011 film, A Dangerous Method, when she got the call to play Packer’s ice-cool spouse, Elise Shifrin. As demure as she is distant, like Packer, Elise talks in a very detached, stylised manner – a trait that Gadon puts down to her “pseudo-intellectual” literary aspirations. “She’s constantly pontificating through poetry, and that’s how she communicates,” the actress explained. “That was part of the brilliance of choosing to cast Eric and Elise so young. If they were older, they should know better. But there’s something hilarious about the two of them going on and on in this ridiculous way. They’re so alienated from their environments that they can’t even make a basic human connection. David intentionally was creating a lot of distance between the audience and the characters on screen.”
Truly a part of the Cronenberg family – Gadon was also in town to promote Antiviral, the debut feature by the director’s son, Brandon Cronenberg, in which she stars – the blonde rising starlet felt that Cannes was the perfect environment to unveil Cosmopolis. “It’s so brilliant to me that here you get that 1% of the population that put a tuxedo or a ball gown on to go see a movie, and this is where David chooses to release a film about the 1%.” So was the irony lost on them? “Let’s hope not,” she replied.
Then again, life was imitating art all the way through the shoot. “When I started working on this, which was before I made A Dangerous Method, the book wasn’t really a prophecy,” Cronenberg smiled. “But by the time that we started to make the movie, it was like a documentary. We were shooting scenes of anti-capitalist riots on the streets of New York, and then in the newspaper that night, we’re reading about the Occupy Wall Street protests.”
Likewise, in one of the film’s darkly comic moments, Packer gets hit by a pie thrown by Amalric’s anarchist – an act that was echoed at the time when News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch was attacked by a protestor wielding a plate of shaving foam. The way that Cronenberg sees it, people like Packer and Murdoch don’t see themselves as capitalist villains. “Many of these people are not aware. Rupert Murdoch probably thinks that he’s a fine guy! He doesn’t know why somebody put a pie in his face.” Maybe if he watched Cosmopolis, he would…
Cosmopolis is available now through FilmInk’s new VOD service. Click here for more information.
