COME OF AGE: An interview with Spider director David Cronenberg. By Warren Curry 2/24/03 Part 1 of 2

"I think the Hollywood version of respect is contempt, quite frankly," remarks director David Cronenberg while promoting his newest film, Spider, at a roundtable interview. Known early in his career as strictly a horror director, helming such low-budget fright fests as Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), Cronenberg quickly grew out of easy categorizations in the 80s and 90s, directing increasingly more complex and sophisticated films like Videodrome, The Dead Zone, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and now Spider.

While roundtable interviews can occasionally lapse into the world of the routine in quick fashion, such is not the case when Cronenberg is the subject. Well-rehearsed promotional sound bites are not the order of the day when the director opens his mouth, and there's something tangibly sincere and engaging about Cronenberg's distinctly intent answers.

Spider, starring Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson (in one of 2002's best performances), was released for a one-week Academy Award qualifying run in New York and Los Angeles last December. Sony Pictures Classics will re-open the film in those same two markets on February 28, 2003, before it expands to more cities nationwide. A haunting tale of a schizophrenic attempting to assemble the pieces of his nightmarish childhood, Spider shows Cronenberg, now in his 5th decade of filmmaking, at the top of his game.

This interview took place at the L.A. press day for Spider in late 2002. Read on (and be sure to make it to the end for some of the director's more spirited comments) …

(Note: This interview was conducted as part of a press roundtable, therefore not all questions were asked by CinemaSpeak.)

(Read Warren's review of Spider)

You became attached to this project later on, after some of the cast had been set.

Well, only Ralph (had been set).

Was that different for you?

Not really. From time to time I get sent scripts that have an actor attached, because actors tend to have a lot power, especially in Hollywood. Not so much in independent films, but they're still obviously important. If I hadn't wanted to do the movie with Ralph, I would've said, "I don't want to do the movie with Ralph." When I agreed to do it, it's just like I cast it. Ralph cast himself first by saying he wanted to do it. It's not different at all. It would be different if I felt that I was forced to work on a film with an actor I didn't want to work with, but I've never done that.

You've been quoted as saying that you make a movie to find out what it was that made you want to make the movie. What made you want to make this movie?

I'm only gradually, by doing these interviews (laughs), beginning to realize many things and it sounds like cynicism but it isn't really. There is truth in it because I'm forced, after the fact, to be articulate about things that were only intuitive. So much of moviemaking is intuitive, but when it all works together it seems you can then analyze it legitimately in a cerebral way and it all makes sense. For me, it's all very intuitive; it's not so intellectual to begin with. I knew from the beginning that I very much identified with Spider. I really felt a kinship with him, even though on the surface that might sound ludicrous, but it's not. I saw Spider not as a schizophrenic, and I'm not a schizophrenic, but as an emblem of a certain aspect of the human condition. That is to say, here's a man who is pared down to the bare essentials of existence. He has the clothes on his back, one suitcase and that's it. He doesn't have a network of friends, he doesn't have a place that he lives, he has no job -- all of the things that make up what we think of as a life. But what happens when you take all of that stuff away? What are you left with? Well, you've still got a human being functioning in society, sort of. I think it would only take a small thing, a medical thing; it could be a stroke, it could be a heart attack, it could be some physical thing that would happen to any one of us. Or it could be a financial upheaval or a mental upheaval or a political one…To me, Spider obviously had a lot of resonances and one of things that I can say I didn't notice until after was that, in a way, he's an archetype of an artist. He's writing, and he writes with great obsessiveness and passion, and he's trying to organize his experience and get it down on paper, but he's writing in a language that no one can understand, so this is kind of a nightmare version of an artist. That's your worst nightmare: that you'll be expressing things that have great meaning for you and absolutely no one else can understand them. That's one thing, to be very specific, that I realized only after I finished making the movie, but I'm sure that there was a subtext there that I responded to even before I thought of it consciously.

What leads you to want to make films of books that seem on the surface impossible to adapt to film?

Well in this case, fortunately for me because I'm really very lazy, it had already been done. What I read was the script and Patrick McGrath, who wrote the script based on his own book, had gone about 85% of the way to reinventing the book for the screen. The book is very different -- for one thing, in the book, Spider writes the book. The book is his journal and, of course, it's brilliantly written because Patrick's a wonderful writer, but that makes it very verbally adept, very self-conscious, very self-aware and very manipulative in a way that is completely not what Spider is on screen. There was still a little vestige of that in Patrick's first draft. He had some voiceover -- he had Spider writing in English in his journal and then he had him reading (in voiceover) other things from the journal, which in essence was him just reading stuff from the book. I immediately saw that it didn't work. I said to Patrick, "These are two different guys. There are two different Spiders. The Spider you created for the screen could not think this way. He not only couldn't say these things, because he's not that articulate, but he couldn't even think these complex things that you have Spider in the book saying." What I did to the script was really just subtract stuff that I thought didn't work, and it was Patrick's first draft so that's natural. The hard work of re-imagining for the screen, which you really have to do -- and I've said this before -- is that you have to betray the book in order to be faithful to the book. There's no direct translation possible. There's no language, there's no dictionary for that kind of translation because the two media are so different. You can do that internal monologue -- even bad novelists have no trouble doing internal monologue through a whole book, but you can't do it on film. It just isn't the same. Reading voiceover is kind of a cheat; it rarely works. As I was saying, I have to give the credit for the hard work, that first re-imagining, to Patrick.

You have a good reputation for casting. You seem to really understand the craft of acting. What in your background brought you to that? Were you an actor?

No, but as a kid I did do little dramas at my house and my sister was very into that. We'd do little Christmas plays and things like that. I remember playing the hunter in Little Red Riding Hood, where I jumped out at the end from behind our piano and shot the wolf. We would actually have kids in the neighborhood come and sit in seats and pay 10 cents to attend (laughs). This was my sister mostly doing this, who now does the costume design for my films. In high school I played Banquo in Macbeth and things like that, but I never really had serious acting experience, so when I first started to direct I was really coming to it from the point of view of the writer. Actors were difficult because they came from a completely different angle at things. Most directors to begin with are afraid of actors, I think, if they haven't been actors themselves. Especially on a low-budget film -- I'm not talking about theater -- because you have so much pressure on you that the actors are not aware of. Incredible time pressure and all kinds money pressure; all kinds of stuff, whereas the actor is primarily interested in his own character. It's not an ego thing -- that's his profession. He's there to protect his character and to make it interesting. So here you are as a young director and you've been told, this is on Shivers, "You have 15 minutes to do 4 pages of dialogue, then we go down to the underground garage and crash the cars, then we blow up the elevator, then we do the scene where the security guard is shot. Hurry up!" Here you have these actors who are all interested in the details of what they say and stuff, and I have 15 minutes to shoot this scene. I just want them to sit there and say the dialogue, but they're saying, "What if I go up and go to the window?" And I say, "No, you can't go to the window. We can't light the window. We don't have time." There's an interesting struggle there. Gradually, I realized through doing it, but at the same time I had a sense of what worked in terms of dialogue. That's like having an ear for music. If you don't have it, you really don't have it, there's no way to get it. If you can't sing, you can't sing. If you can sing a little you can get better, but if you're tone deaf, forget it. I felt that I did have an ear for dialogue and I could sense when things were wrong and I could choreograph things. Of course, until you do it, you don't know if you can do these things or not. I realized that I did like working with actors, actually much better than special effects. In fact, the hardest scene to do is two people in a room, not blowing up the Empire State building. The other thing is that in the low-budget horror, Fangoria world, people kind of like it if the acting is cheesy. I did some acting myself, which helped me to understand the things I've been saying.

Gabriel Byrne commented that making Spider, although he likes the movie, was just too much for him. Why would he say that?

He probably meant it. Artistically, we got along very well. He loves the movie and has said great things about it, and also he came to Toronto to be part of the presentation of the film, and I'm sure if he didn't like it, he wouldn't have been there. First of all September 11 happened while we were shooting and he had family in New York so that didn't help. Secondly, he said that it was the most difficult role he had ever played because ¾ of the time in the movie he is playing the fantasy of the main character and not the real character. The real character comes out in the scene in the shed where he says to the boy, "Why are you so angry with us?" If you saw this guy Bill (Byrne's character), you'd see a father who is not very well educated and is out of his depth in handling this incredibly difficult son, who is deranged for no reason and keeps saying, "Why have you murdered my mother and replaced her," and he doesn't know how to deal with it. But that is only one scene. In all the other scenes he's playing different levels of what Spider is seeing. He's not a real character at that point. Actors can't play concepts, just like you can't shoot an abstract concept. You have to shoot a thing that represents it, and actors have to play a character. The way that Miranda (Richardson) dealt with her three characters, as she said, was that she played everyone as if they were real. I let the structure of the movie show you that she was a fantasy. Gabriel couldn't do that because of the nature of that particular role. He was totally dependent on me in each scene telling him at what level to play that. Actors don't like that; they want control of their characters. I don't think it's because he didn't want to play a role that dealt with madness, in a movie that dealt with madness, because he's done it many times.

Click for Part Two

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