David Cronenberg on A Dangerous Method & the "Parallel Universe" of Oscar

Cronenberg hard at work on "A Dangerous Method"I met the great filmmaker David Cronenberg one morning this fall shortly before a screening of his latest work at the New York Film Festival. His new film A Dangerous Method, which just opened and will be expanding throughout the month in theaters, is a historical drama about the birth of psychoanalysis. In the film Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protege Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) are torn apart over idealogical differences and Jung's treatment of a young woman named Sabina (Keira Knightley).

Cronenberg in person was talkative, articulate and fascinating. He was even good natured about the sordid topic of Oscar (incredibly the reknowned auteur has never been nominated for an Oscar, a Golden Globe or even a DGA prize!).

His ease with conversation might surprise people who only know him through his often unsettling films. The night before our interview I'd been at a party and when I casually mentioned I'd be interviewing Cronenberg the next day I heard the strangest funniest responses: "Don't get in a car with him!" "Don't let him touch your portals!" and so on. Other amusing warnings followed as if he were a frightening character from his movies.

I relayed this to Cronenberg as icebreaker when we sat down...

Nathaniel: Do you find that people regularly have odd conceptions about you based on your films? 

DAVID CRONENBERG: Well, you know, I haven't done horror films for a long time so it's strange that it's sticky. I've talked about this before but Marty Scorsese told me he was terrified to meet me -- we did meet and became very good friends many years ago -- but he said he was terrified and then shocked to see that I looked like a Beverly Hills gynecologist. And I said 'You were afraid to meet me? You're the guy who made Taxi Driver?!'

a small sampling of his often deeply troubling films

It was a long time ago. But he had seen Shivers and Rabid and maybe The Brood and he found them incredibly overwhelming and terrifying. He of all people should know and I suppose if Marty could make the same mistake...

The relationship of an artist to his art is a complex one. It's not one to one. It's not like you make romantic comedies therefore you are romantic and fun. On the contrary we know that most comedians are really nastily, hostile, spiteful vindictive people.

Nathaniel: Does your work ever scare you then, when you see it back?

CRONENBERG: I don't normally watch it. I can't watch my movies as though they're movies. They're documentaries of what I was doing that day. I'm the last person to be able to tell you objectively what my movies do or don't do.

Nathaniel: As an auteur you obviously have had recurring thematic elements Do you think about your past work when you're working on something new?

CRONENBERG: No. I completely don't. That's why if someone should say, it has happened, that A Dangerous Method doesn't feel like a Cronenberg film. I don't know what they're talking about. I mean, I know what the cliches are. But to me, they don't realize that the first movie I made was about a psychiatrist and his patient. It was a short, my first film. So for me this is business as usual. To me that just reveals their ignorance. I'm not saying that in a vindictive way but it just means they don't really know my work or understand it. That's the way I feel.

Nathaniel: It's actually very much like your work in terms of the concerns. You've done a lot of films that had psycho-analytic elements. Did you ever worry that this was maybe too on the nose, given that? Like you're going back to the womb or the source of it all.

CRONENBERG: No, No. It's exciting to do that!

[MORE AFTER THE JUMP: including his collaboration with Viggo, awards season lottery tickets, and the modern trend of directors tinkering with their old movies.] 

Click to read more ...

Oscar Horrors: Be Impressed. Be Very Impressed with The Fly's makeup

Team Film Experience is celebrating the rare Oscar nominated and winning contributions to horror films. Today Craig buzzes in with the latest edition of Oscar Horrors.

Here Lies... the remnants of the Brundlefly that Chris Walas and Stephen Dupuis (who went on to win the Best Makeup Oscar) lovingly crafted for David Cronenberg’s 1986 re-masterpiece The Fly. I don’t think they were there at the ceremony to collect it but they had it teleported to them within seconds of their names being read out.

As we know from the film, Jeff Goldblum becomes attached to a pesky, common housefly at a genetic level: he metamorphoses in a major way. Like, bummer. It was Walas and Dupuis’ job to make this as grotesquely memorable as possible. It’s fair to say they succeeded.

Walas – whose company, ‘Chris Walas, Inc.’, received first credit at the end of the film – went on to direct the sequel (which Dupuis also worked on) three years later. The makeup was definitely on par – dare I suggest slightly better – with other 1980s horror face- and game-changers The Thing, The Elephant Man and An American Werewolf in London. It was designed backwards – from full-on diseased Brundlemess at the end to light touch-up with some Max Factor at the start – and roughly created in eight stages. In accordance with this, and Goldblum’s fate, I’ll stage my Fly makeup celebration in bits, beginning from just after Goldblum teleported...

Stage One: Jeff has some increased strength thanks to the insect genes fused irreversibly with his cells. He’s full of beans and nigh-on always up for a spot of sexytime with a curiously indifferent Geena Davis. His idea of foreplay is to strip down and perform a few snazzy gymnastic moves on a horizontal bar like he’s trying out for the Olympics. Geena looks bored but straddles Jeff anyway.

Brundle-to-fly count: Jeff is roughly, I’d say, between 79 and 99% pure Brundle.

Makeup Check: There’s some light sweating from all the showing off/, so Jeff’s probably been given a once-over with a gentle covering of antiperspirant foundation; Geena has an emergency rouging because she looked a peaky. Measle-like blemishes and some protruding prickles on the shoulder blades mean a de-glistening and a bristle snip for Jeff.

Stages Two through Five after the jump. [Spoiler: He's fucked!]

Click to read more ...

Enlinkened

TV|Line Madonna may be this year's halftime performer at the Superbowl
The Oreo Experience. An amusingly provocative (and depressing) look at fall movie trailers and what the white and black characters get to do in them. 
My New Plaid Pants on Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus... coming soon. I'll admit a lack of familiarity with this particular Shakespeare play, too. 
ioncinema Andrew Haigh, the writer/director of Weekend names his ten favorite films. I asked him a similar question (which I didn't include in the published interview) and he only mentioned three of these: Don't Look Now, Last Night and Some Like It Hot.

Natasha VC on best uses of music in a Martin Scorsese film
Movie|Line Netflix Ten Most Rented Movies. An Interesting and Irritating List.
Shock Till You Drop asks David Cronenberg about his future projects including sequels (?) to Eastern Promises and The Fly. I spoke with Cronenberg today (interview coming eventually) but I didn't have time to talk up future theoretical movies since my predilection is always towards actual existing movies. Crazy, I know. I feel so lonely sometimes since most people only seem to care about future movies... though obviously I would be quite happy to see either of those imaginary movies as I'm a fan of both originals.

New York Mag talks to Laura Dern (Enlightened) who is my new hero for saying this:

I’m becoming fluent in French so I can go to France and make French films when I’m 60."

I have been suggesting this to actresses since I started writing a decade ago and finally someone is smart enough to take my advice. (okay okay. Maybe Laura doesn't read The Film Experience but let me have my fantasies. Shut up!)

Finally, Sasha over at  Awards Daily sounds off on the old complaint/notion that talking Oscar sucks the air out of the film room... particularly during the fall when we should be talking about how good the movies are. I'm in complete agreement here about film advocacy being the thing people are missing when they bitch about the Oscars. I discovered my cinephilia through the Oscars (as have several other people I've been lucky enough to meet over the years through my writing). They're two separate things now -- as they should be but all things take time -- but I take no issue with them sharing space each year.

NYFF: 'A Dangerous Method' with Keira Unleashed

Kurt here. I'll admit I'm not as well-versed in the work of David Cronenberg as a 27-year-old cinephile should be, but I know enough to confidently conclude that A Dangerous Method, while every bit worth seeing, won't go down as a definitive entry in the Canadian maestro's oeuvre. A bubbling marriage of the sexual and the cerebral, the material surely speaks to Cronenberg's penchant for exploring the curious links between mind and body, but the resulting film doesn't haunt, nor does it even consistently provoke, short of whatever reactions are elicited from the recurring spanking of Keira Knightley's bum. A prestige piece through and through, A Dangerous Method is the intersection of a handful of prior collaborators, teaming Cronenberg with muse Viggo Mortensen, Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement screenwriter Christopher Hampton (who here adapts his own 2002 play, The Talking Cure), and Atonement leading lady Keira Knightley. It seems an almost experimental assemblage of talent, with Cronenberg's newfound Oscar-friendliness put into the mix with some very Oscary playmates. It could be grander, it could be harder, it could be better.

But damn, is it watchable, especially in regard to Knightley's performance as Sabina Spielrein, the unhinged, yet shrewd, Russian fetishist who ultimately comes between psych titans Sigmund Freud (Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). A violently screaming Sabina is the first thing you see after some ink-on-paper credits, and it's immediately arresting, if only because you've never seen Knightley so...loud. This is easily Knightley's most impassioned and most transformative performance, one that's sure to have Oscar calling in whatever category she lands in (note to voters: it's a leading role). For a long while, I was having a hard time deciding if her turn was too shrill or dead-on, but I'm leaning toward the latter, despite the lingering sense that she's operating on a wild plane independent of the film. Ably tackling a convincing accent, and looking even more gorgeously gaunt than usual, Knightley plays the sexually-scarred Sabina like a slinky Linda Blair, her deep, dark and gyrating confessions to Jung trickling out as if part of a deep-seated, slow-motion seizure that's long been brewing in her groin. It's uncomfortably compelling, and it gains interest as the film proceeds, as Sabina proves to be much more than her demons.

Mortensen also slips deep into his character, in a performance that's also likely to have at least some amount of gold thrown at it. Behind dark contacts and a good bit of facial hair, he steps into uncommon character-actor territory, to which his handsomely-aging face lends itself well (he's also best with the movie's easy, unassuming humor, which finds a mature, yet playful, way to fool with so much clinical sex talk). Faces, I'd say, are Cronenberg's greatest collective asset here, and one he exploits like a pro. I'm avoiding a great deal of plot, because I don't feel that gripping storytelling is the movie's strong suit. But the not-quite-million-dollar mugs of Knightley, Mortensen and Fassbender, all of whom have enough uncannily symmetrical beauty to ensnare you, but enough slightly-offbeat features to keep things interesting, are what hold you from moment-to-moment and stick with you when you leave. Fassbender, bless him, is clean-cut and awkwardly dashing, yet he shares Knightley's cadaverous look, his well-formed bones exceptionally pronounced. And Mortensen gets a lot of mileage out of those wrinkles, swapping out smolder for aloof wisdom.

Of the milieu on display, I found it most interesting to consider a group of characters evaluating their behaviors while Freudian explanations were still being established. Can we imagine a world without them now? Where motivations and actions aren't looked upon with some degree of id assessment? Such thoughts make A Dangerous Method feel important, at the very least in relation to the whole of 2011's output. What burrowed into my head, though, were those faces and that feral performance from Knightley. Getting in the spirit, I kept wondering what she drew from to get into character, what conscious and unconscious Knightley demons brought Sabina to life. Whatever the answer, it worked, as Knightley's method, pardon the pun, is a dangerous one indeed.

Previously on NYFF
The Loneliest Planet brushes against Nathaniel's skin.
Melancholia shows Michael the end of von Trier's world. 

Gotham Tributes: Charlize & Gary Aiming For Oscar

Another day, another "tribute" announcement as legions of luminaries ready themselves at the starting line waiting for that Oscar gun to sound. We've talked about this twice before (focusing on Streep & Spielberg) but "tributes" and "lifetime achievements" are as common during Oscar season as superheroes are during the summer. Even moreso! The Gotham Awards, which happen here in NYC in November, will be honoring four recipients: Director David Cronenberg, Actor Gary Oldman, CEO Tom Rothman and Actress Charlize Theron. 

Obviously Gary (never nominated) and Charlize (2 nominations, 1 win) are aiming for Lead Acting nominations for the spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and the comedy Young Adult respectively. Rothman, announced previously, is an industry power and you have to bow down to those men/women once in awhile. Meanwhile Cronenberg has A Dangerous Method to push. Though awards traction will be hard to come by for such a subtle and talky film, it's still worth campaigning for because here's the thing: If you're still fighting for your first nomination (insanity given that filmography!) you've got to lay plentiful groundwork and build momentum so that eventually they (awards groups) catch up. I don't mean to be morbid as I hope this is a long time away but can the 68 year old Cronenberg at least get an Honorary Oscar before he dies? I mean... The Fly, Dead Ringers, A History of Violence, etcetera...

The Gotham Awards, which celebrated their 20th anniversary last season, have definitely been picking up steam as a valuable Oscar stop, regularly giving boosts to smaller films like Winter's Bone, The Hurt Locker and Frozen River.

The "career tribute" portion of their ceremony has included at least one future Oscar nominee every year since 2004. With so little information (i.e. clips or photos) on Charlize's work in Young Adult, we have to assume that Gary Oldman is in the best position currently to continue that trend. But it would be awfully sweet to see Charlize Theron work a role worthy of her gifts again... and work it all the way to the shortlist.  She's one Oscar winner whose career, filmography, and popularity have never properly reflected her talent. I mean she even made the most of that way too standard role in North Country for which she received one of those disposable "after glow" nominations. 

For now, we have to just enjoy Charlize in her glamour spokesmodel roles and hope she finds a signature screen role while she's still in the age range in which that happens. Yes, yes, I hear your screams of "Monster (2003)!" But however strong that work was... it doesn't properly reflect Charliziciousness (Charlizionomy?) now does it. THIS does...

COMMENT ASSIGNMENT: (What? I'm bossy!)
If you were paying tribute to Cronenberg, Charlize, and Oldman and could only thank them for one thing, what would it be? Get as specific as such tributes should be!