Interview: David Cronenberg on Cosmopolis

The director on how he came to convince Robert Pattinson to star in his latest film, a surreal adaptation of Don DeLillo's infamous satire on modern capitalism.

43 comments

Just when you thought David Cronenberg couldn't surprise you, here comes Cosmopolis, a hallucinatory express ride into modern oblivion that's unlike anything in the director's already distinct body of work. Adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novella, the movie follows the surreal odyssey of Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), a 28-year-old billionaire fund manager cocooned in his stretch limousine as it crawls through a nightmare landscape of New York City on the verge of financial and social apocalypse. Ostensibly en route to get a haircut -- personal grooming being paramount as the world implodes -- Packer soon finds himself in a spiral of self-destruction, as Cronenberg orchestrates a rhythmic trance in which money, information and technology acquire a meaninglessness and only derailed acts of sex and violence appear real.

Perhaps the most fascinating element to Cosmopolis is the performance of its star, Robert Pattinson. Having previously stepped sideways from his teen-idol status to mixed effect, Pattinson here throws himself fearlessly into Cronenberg's world, delivering an unforgettable, almost alien-like portrait of a young man disconnected from reality and willfully engineering his own spectacular demise.

We had a chance to speak with Cronenberg earlier this week, during which he shared his thoughts about the film and how he came to cast Pattinson in particular.

Congratulations on Cosmopolis, David. It is a wonderfully strange film, even by your standards -- and I mean that in the most complimentary way.

David Cronenberg: [Laughs] Thanks.

I'm sure you're quite weary of answering this question, but we do need to get it out of the way...

Cronenberg: Sure.

Robert Pattinson. There were plenty of people who were a little surprised when you picked him for the role, but I have to say he gives a really sublime performance. You knew what you were doing, clearly -- so what was it that drew you to Robert?

Cronenberg: Well, casting always starts in a very pragmatic way. It's, "Is this guy the right age for the character?" "Does he have the right sort of physique, the right screen presence?" "Is he available, and if so, can you afford him? Does he want to do it?" You know, all of those things. But then you do your homework as a director, more specifically, and you watch stuff. I watched Little Ashes, in which Rob plays a young Salvador Dali; I watched Remember Me; I watched the first Twilight movie. And I watched -- interestingly enough, I suppose, because people wouldn't expect it -- but you watch interviews with the guy on YouTube, you know. I want to get an idea of his sense of humor, his sense of himself, the way he handles himself, his intelligence -- all of those things you can't really tell from watching an actor play a role in a movie. I suppose in the old days you meet the guy and hang out, and go to a bar or whatever -- [laughs] -- but these days nobody has time for that, or the money, and so you do it some other way. And once I'd done all that stuff, I thought, This is the guy I want. I thought, He'd be terrific and I actually think he's a very underrated actor -- and it would be my pleasure to prove that by casting him.

I think a lot of people will share that opinion after seeing the film. Was he difficult to get? I mean, he's clearly up for it, based on his performance, but how do you go about getting Robert Pattinson?

Cronenberg: Basically, I wrote the script before I went into production on A Dangerous Method, so Rob got the script about a year before we were really shooting. He's a very down to earth guy, and he was surprised that anybody would want him. [Laughs] It sounds odd, I know. Of course, he knows that his name adds value because of his star power, but he knew my movies, and he knew I was a serious director, and I think he was nervous, you know -- I think he was afraid, because he knew it was good. He immediately loved the script, especially because he thought it was very funny -- and the movie is funny; a lot of people maybe don't see that the first time around -- and the script was funny as well. But also he had seen enough of the now conventional stuff that he gets offered to see how different this was, and how it stood out -- and the quality of Don's writing, because the dialogue is really 100 per cent from the novel.

So I really had to convince him that I knew he was the right guy and that he could do it. And you'd be very surprised that a lot of actors, and very experienced ones, too -- not just young ones -- they worry that they don't want to wreck your movie. They don't want to be the bad thing in your movie that brings it down. They need to be convinced that they're good enough, especially if they know it's good. He said -- and I know this 'cause of interviews that we've done together, and I hear him saying these things -- that usually the dialogue is so bad that you, the actor, figure that you are responsible for trying to make it interesting, just by the way you spin it. But in this case the dialogue was great, and it's a completely reversed worry: "Am I good enough to get the best out of this?" So it took me about 10 days, and Rob said he was afraid to call me back because he's used to bullshitting directors, like all actors do -- but because I'd written the script he couldn't do that with me. [Laughs] You know, actors can really tie themselves in knots, when really he just should've said, "Yes, I'll do it."

Was there a point during shooting where he realized, "Hey, I am good enough for this," or did you have to encourage him constantly?

Cronenberg: No, it's not like he's so insecure or anything like that. I never saw any of that on the set. I know he was constantly checking himself out and wondering if it was good, but I didn't feel that he needed an inordinate amount of that kind of encouragement, really. We just did it. He could tell. The best way for an actor to tell, ultimately, is that it wasn't long before we were just doing one or two takes of everything -- and that means the actor knows it's working.

Well it appears that you've started something of a trend now David, because Werner Herzog has just cast him in his next film.

Cronenberg: Well that pleases me no end, and I think that obviously this is what Rob needs. They just need to see that he's really, really good and really, really subtle; and that he can do a lot of different stuff. Once you break through that barrier then I think there'll be no turning back.

Speaking of the dialogue in the film, this is the first screenplay that you've written yourself since eXistenZ [1999]. What was it that made you want to write this one? Was it that you felt an affinity with DeLillo's writing?

Cronenberg: I actually didn't think that I was writing the screenplay. What I was doing was, I thought: This dialogue is fantastic. I wonder what it's like when it's extracted from the other stuff in the novel, which is very literary and is sort of internal monologues and philosophical meditations inside Eric's head, stuff that you knew would not be on screen in a movie, because it's literary and it cannot be directly translated. So I thought, Let me just transcribe this dialogue, word for word, as it is, in sequence, and put it into a screenplay format with characters' names and so on -- and then I'll read it and see if it feels like a movie to me. And by the end of it -- and it was only six days later -- I read it, I had it done, and I said, "Yeah, actually, not only is it a movie, it's a good movie that I really want to do -- and here's the screenplay." Much to my surprise. So it was six days to write the screenplay, which I give all that credit to Don DeLillo, not to me. Every time you write a screenplay it's different. I'd never done that before.

So you were channeling DeLillo, so to speak?

Cronenberg: Sure, yes. Well it wasn't exactly channeling because it was a very direct relationship with the specifics of the book. Unlike Naked Lunch [1991], where I was sort of channeling Burroughs because what I was writing wasn't exactly Naked Lunch the novel but Naked Lunch: The Story of William Burroughs Writing the Novel, you know. That was different. That felt more like channeling. And I was inventing a lot dialogue for the movie Naked Lunch, although it feels very Burroughsian, because of the channeling. Here, it was not like that. This was very direct.