David Cronenberg remembers the time Oliver Stone asked him, “David, does it bother you to be such a marginal filmmaker?”
To
which Cronenberg, one of Canada’s most admired and famous directors,
replied, “Well, Oliver, it depends. How big of an audience do you need?”
Therein
lies the secret to Cronenberg’s success. Cosmopolis, his new movie
opening Friday, is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel about a young
billionaire named Eric Packer who spends a day in his limo riding around
New York City in search of a haircut.
There is practically no
traditional plot in Cosmopolis. More than half the movie takes place
inside the limo, where Eric has meetings with his staff, gets a checkup
from his doctor (“Your prostate is asymmetrical”) and even has sex.
Although Eric is played by Robert Pattinson, the hugely popular star of
the Twilight series, Cosmopolis is a tough sell for the multiplex crowd —
a rigorous, challenging and oddly hypnotic movie filled with dense,
jargon-heavy dialogue.
At 69, Cronenberg continues to make his heady movies the hard way.
“When
you’re a filmmaker, you spend a year and a half of your life — maybe
more — putting these things together: You have to get your financing in
place and you go after actors who will reject you,” he says. “It’s a
difficult process. So the movie has to really excite and intrigue me and
make me feel like I’m going to discover something by making it,” he
says.
“Naturally, you have to tailor the budget to suit the
subject matter. No one is going to spend $200 million on Cosmopolis. But
if you’re realistic about expectations and the size of your audience,
and you’re willing to work for not that much money, you can come up with
very interesting things.”
Cosmopolis’
$20 million price tag still seems high for such an outside-the-box
movie, but Cronenberg offset the risk to financiers by casting
Pattinson, who appears in every scene. (Colin Farrell was originally set
to play Eric, but had to back out due to scheduling conflicts.)
“I
got the script out of the blue and was offered the role, which was a
little shocking,” Pattinson says. “Usually, the movies I am offered
straight-up are terrible. This script felt so original, it was almost
gleaming.
“I knew there was a movie to be made here. I was just
worried that I might not be the one to pull it off. I kept thinking
‘There are tons of people better than me for this job!’ It took me a
while to make peace with that.”
Cosmopolis offered Pattinson the
opportunity to try a kind of minimalist acting he hadn’t done before.
Eric Packer is a detached, aloof man who rarely expresses what he’s
feeling. On the page, DeLillo makes us privy to his thoughts and
interior monologue; on screen, Pattinson uses small gestures, the
faintest trace of a smile or a frown and the hardening of a stare to
convey his inner state.
“At the start of the movie, I am wearing
this dark, blank suit,” he says. “I am wearing completely blacked-out
sunglasses and I’m standing still, not moving. Every tool actors use for
their performance has been taken away from me,” he says.
“But I
felt secure because I knew David was watching me — really watching me —
and that gives you confidence. Most of the time on movie sets, I
question whether the director is even paying attention to what I’m
doing.”
Pattinson’s legion of Twilight fans will be befuddled by
this coldly fascinating movie, but Cronenberg has built a sufficient
following to ensure an audience for the strange brew.
Not
everyone will like it, of course. There isn’t a Cronenberg fan on the
planet who could honestly say he loves all of the director’s movies. And
that’s a testament to the risks he’s taken from the beginning of his
37-year career.
(...)
For Cronenberg, too, the inspiration to adapt Cosmopolis sprang not from grand themes but subtle detail.
“I
was simply taken by the dialogue. It’s a bit like David Mamet or Harold
Pinter, because it’s realistic on one level — it sounds like the way
people speak — but it’s also very stylized. When I transcribed it into
screenplay form, it gave the movie an incredible cohesion and resonance.
That’s when I asked myself, ‘Is this a movie?’ And I thought, ‘Yes.
It’s a really interesting movie.’ ”
Nearly all of the dialogue is
lifted from the book, which meant the actors had to sound natural while
saying lines like, “We’re all young and smart and were raised by
wolves. But the phenomenon of reputation is a delicate thing. A person
rises on a word and falls on a syllable.”
For Pattinson, the unusual cadences and word choices felt liberating.
“I
felt a physical connection with the writing — I thought it was so good —
and I wanted to read it aloud as soon as I got the script, just to see
how it sounded. It is so perfectly written. I loved the fact that I
didn’t need to put my personal stamp on it as an actor. I just had to
perform it in the truest way possible.”
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