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David Cronenberg Inteview
Before his Hollywood return-de-force with Eastern Promises and A History Of Violence I got to talk to one of my favourite directors David Cronenberg about his then new film Spider.
By Dylan Behan.
It's eerily suitable that myself and three fellow hipster journalists are interviewing David Cronenberg via videoconference. Cronenberg is after all, the director whose explorations of the merging between technology and evolution has manifested itself in, amongst other things, reality-altering hallucinogenic videotapes (Videodrome), biological existential videogames (eXistenZ), mutated talking typewriters (Naked Lunch) and more famously, virally infected exploding heads (Scanners).
Chatting on a six foot wide video screen from the other side of the world (Toronto), the grey haired visceral wunderkind almost starts to resemble his own creation Brian O'Blivian - the televisual evangelist from Videodrome who only gives interviews via television screen.
But unlike O'Blivian however, Cronenberg is still very much with us, claiming he wants his epitaph to read "Why is the bastard still alive?", and his latest movie, Spider, is easily his most contemplative, sensitive and serious exploration of perception yet.
While avoiding a visceral or bionic focus for the film, Cronenberg still offers us a jarring, semi- hallucinogenic reality, justified, this time in the organically cerebral.
"The neurons in the brain are constantly growing and changing and shifting, and that is really what is what we are using to construct reality" he explains during one his lengthy insights. "Even the interior experiences, like memory, can cause your neural structure to change. So that's a kind of strange approach, from the inside out, to saying that everyone's reality is in fact different. We have the illusion that we are sharing the same reality, but we are not. Then, in dealing with a character like Spider... whose reality is obviously different from most peoples, it begins to illuminate the nature of reality even for people who do have a normal sense of reality."
Novelist Patrick McGrath, who was raised on the grounds of London's Broadmore prison for the Criminally Insane where his father worked as a medical superintendent, adapted his own book as a screenplay before Cronenberg even came aboard. The resulting collaboration was an enriching experience for both men.
"For me, it's not even an adaptation. I didn't really refer to the novel very much. Patrick had done such a terrific job of re-inventing his novel for the screen in his screenplay and the two Spiders were so different. I did work with Robert on the script, but primarily it was subtraction."
Such subtraction included, for the first time in one of his films, a total lack of special effects (thought not including Fienne's grimy nicotine stained make up). Funnily enough, McGrath's original screenplay included some oozing Cronenberg traits, only to be removed when David found them to feel too out of place. An example of which included a bleeding potato that suitably exploded during pre-production. "Never wear your best clothes to a special effects test," he jokes. "I've got old sneakers encrusted in blood."
Blood aside, the other major subtraction was Spider's voice over, found to be too articulate for such an unstable character. With Spider now muttering his way through the entire movie, Fiennes performance is even more eerily real. The source of the voice over, a secret journal kept in the protagonists room, remains intact, albeit in a different language.
"You can't photograph an abstract concept, so I needed something for Ralph to physically do to show that Spider was obsessive and secretive and paranoid... I still wanted to see him obsessively trying to capture his past and to organise his thoughts, and so I wanted Spider to be writing in the journal, but I don't want to be able to read what he is writing. So I asked Ralph Fiennes to invent his own hieroglyphics that he could write very fluently."
With Cronenberg and McGrath's treatment of schizophrenia poignantly and humanely handled, I'm not giving too much away by saying the film version has a more unresolved and up-beat ending than the novel, which alluded to Spider committing suicide. After publicly ridiculing Ron Howard's fairytale treatment of mental illness in A Beautiful Mind during a recent Village Voice interview, I asked why the film ended on a bit of an uncharacteristic note for the director.
"I think there might have been some influence from Catherine Bailey, the producer, who said to Patrick, I understand, 'You know we'll never finance this movie if after all we go through, Spider kills himself'.' So, I thought the ending of the screenplay worked very well."
Cronenberg adds that some realistic input for McGrath's novel came from within his psychiatrist family. "His father apparently said that people like Spider don't survive. And that's when Patrick decided that Spider should die at the end of the book. Now maybe in defiance of his father, when it came time to write the screenplay, he decided to change that, I don't know."
And after a number of appalling out-of-his-hands additions to the ever popular Scanners franchise, Cronenberg cynically adds: "Perhaps Spider will commit suicide in the sequel, Spider 2."
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Directors David Cronenberg Miranda July Walter Salles Guillermo Del Toro American Splendor Morgan Spurlock Tarnation's Jonathon Caouette What The Bleep...
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A haunting piece of isolated subjective reality, it lucidly depicts the inner journey of a recently de-institutionalised East London schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes), who, when relocated to a halfway house near his childhood home, has to mentally reconstruct his own volatile adolescent memories. Masterfully directed, the adult Spider literally wanders through his own delusional past, encountering his parents (Gabriel Byrne and Miranda Richardson), as well as the boyhood version of himself (Bradley Hall), witnessing as his shifting perceptions cause everything to go horribly wrong.