Charting a constellation of
has-beens, hangers-on and hopefuls, of celebrity Caligaris, doting agents and
pre-pubescent divos, David Cronenberg’s Maps
to the Stars, written by Bruce Wagner,
is a caustic tour of Tinseltown, overflowing with cruelty, avarice and
panic. Yet it is not without pity. It’s depiction of Havana Segrand (a valiant Julianne
Moore) pays equal attention to the middle-aged actress’ solipsism and genuine
desperation. Above all, Maps
transmits sympathy for the tormented children of Stanford Weiss (John Cusack), a
motivational speaker and experimental therapist whose interrogatory methods
would not be out of place among the clinicians in Cronenberg’s The Brood. Weiss’ daughter Agatha (Mia
Wasikowska), a pyromaniac returning from prolonged exile, and son Benji (Evan
Bird), a child star and recovering addict, are both deeply disturbed and
capable of viciousness, yet Maps closes
on a note of solemn condolence for these star-crossed progeny who never had a
chance.
Infused with fecund themes of institutionalized
backstabbing, paranoid psychosis, persistent ghosts and bad biology, and
delivered with a clipped, elliptical rhythm and precisely honed mise en scène,
what impressed me most about Maps were
the things that Cronenberg and his regular collaborators (cinematographer Peter
Suschitzky, editor Ronald Sanders, composer Howard Shore) brought to Wagner’s
script, which Cronenberg has been trying to make for over a decade. As for the
script itself, the jokes are more brittle than funny, certain scenes whither
before they properly begin, and certain twists seem forced (see the sudden,
heavily telegraphed accidental execution of a household pet). Ideas feel
over-worked, dialogue over-written. Here’s Robert Pattinson’s chauffer/aspiring
actor-screenwriter: “I was thinking of converting [to Scientology]. Just as a
career move.” That second line is explanatory, and sort of kills the joke.
But I’d be lying if I didn’t confess that, for all my
reservations, Maps held me
spellbound. Few directors can captivate so consistently by simply taking
someone else’s material and making it utterly their own. But few directors are
as singular in their sensibility as Cronenberg, who’s rounding out a pretty
great year, one that’s included a new film, a major retrospective and
exhibition at Toronto’s TIFF Bell Lightbox, and the publication of his
excellent debut novel Consumed. So it
was a great pleasure, as always, to speak with Cronenberg, one of my favourite
living filmmakers (and a consistently engaged and intelligent interviewee), at
a Toronto restaurant last week. I had to share him with two other journalists,
but our talk, which I’ve edited down a great deal, was fluid and fun.
Our conversation begins when
one of my colleagues says he interviewed Cusack, and that Cusack described Maps to the Stars as a fever dream.
David Cronenberg: That’s
better than satire, which is the description most often used but one that Bruce
and I object to. I think the meaning of satire has been diluted. People these
days call anything that’s nasty and funny satire. But if you think of Jonathan
Swift, of A Modest Proposal and Gulliver’s Travels, those were real
satire, real attacks on society employing fantastical elements. Maps is too realistic to be satire.
Bruce claims that every conversation in the movie is something he’s heard, and
I believe him. Yet there’s a sense in which everyone in Hollywood is in a fever dream, some state of high
temperature, of agitation and anxiety. I think that’s an accurate appraisal.
JB: Perhaps something
else that removes Maps from the realm
of satire is the fact that its humour is undercut by desperation, sadness, rage
and loneliness, something emphasized in the way you continually isolate
characters in the frame, even in scenes with lots of dialogue.
DC: That’s exactly true.
It’s the absurdity of the human condition that’s the source of the humour. When
I was shooting, Julie Moore, being the intelligent, sensitive actress that she
is, immediately saw what I was doing. She said, “I see you’re isolating us all.
We’re all in our own little bubbles. I like the security of the frame on me.”
She understood that it was a subtle way of suggesting that these people, though
speaking to each other, are not really communicating. There are very few
two-shots. Most audiences won’t notice that but they’ll feel it, that the
characters never really seem to occupy the same space.
My other colleague asks if
the film’s depiction of Hollywood has prompted objections within the industry.
DC: The film hasn’t screened
yet in Hollywood, but I’m curious to see what happens there. I had a studio
head come up to me in Cannes, after we’d screened. He embraced me, and said,
“Your movie scared the shit out of me. I couldn’t sleep last night. The next
morning I went to a party at the Hotel du Cap, and all I could see were scenes
from your movie.” I don’t think there’ll be backlash. Most of the movie people
who’ve seen it say, “That’s my life.” History
of Violence is the closest I’ve ever come to making a studio picture, but,
believe me, I’ve seen and heard things as absurd and extreme as anything in Maps.
JB: You’ve mentioned the
importance of shooting in the States, but you shot Cosmopolis, which is such an emphatically New York narrative,
entirely in Toronto, creating an idea of New York. Could Maps not have been made here, creating an idea of Los Angeles?
DC: No. Because of the
veracity of it. It’s almost a docudrama. Whereas Cosmopolis was such an innately surreal, conceptual film. You hope
that there’s human reality in Cosmopolis,
but it’s buried deep. It’s very stylized. I wouldn’t have wanted to shoot in
New York. It would have been too real.
JB: A situation not unlike Naked Lunch.
DC: Right. We couldn't shoot
in Morocco because of the Gulf War, but I thought, this isn’t Morocco—this is
Interzone. So a stylized, drug-addled version of Morocco that could be created
in Toronto was actually better. No so with Maps.
You really need to shoot in the iconic Hollywood spots. At one point I said,
“I’m not doing any shots that don’t have palm trees.” [Laughs]
JB: Now that you’ve spent
several years writing your first novel, giving yourself the opportunity to
sculpt characters entirely on the page, has that changed how you direct actors?
DC: I don’t know yet. I was
writing Consumed between movies.
Which is difficult, by the way. I’d rather not do that again. Likewise it’s
impossible for me to know if I would have written a novel the same way had I
never directed a film. In writing the book I was very much wanting to visualize
the space the characters were in, how they moved around a room, how they were
physically. That was very important to me—and it felt like directing. Certainly
more like directing than screenwriting, where you don’t do any of that.
Screenplays are a pared-down, weird kind of writing where your prose style
doesn’t matter. All that matters is dialogue and narrative structure. Yet I
think I always had a very visual sense of bodies and how they occupy space and
relate to each other. I think that came before I made movies.
My colleague, the one who
interviewed Cusack, now talks about interviewing Pattinson. He says Pattinson told
him that Cronenberg might be retiring from movies.
DC: I tempt fate or the
Devil or whatever by saying this may be my last movie. I thought maybe Cosmopolis was going to be my last. Why?
I’ve no idea. Maps? I had lots of fun
doing it, lots of energy. You worry, “Am I getting too old? Is this too
stressful?” Abbas Kiarostami, who’s the same age as me, says it’s too hard,
that he can’t do it anymore. He’d rather just do his photographs. And he got me
thinking that maybe I’ll do that too. I’ll just write novels. But then my
accountant says no, I can’t afford to retire. You can’t make as much money
writing novels, unless you’re Stephen King. So where do I find myself now? I
don’t have a rule that says I’m not making more movies, but it would have to be
something very seductive to keep me from writing my second novel. Because
that’s what I’m doing right now.
JB: I’m relieved to hear
that, because something I like about your later work is this interesting
tension between the material, which for the most part hasn’t been obviously
“Cronenbergian,” and what we might construe as a “Cronenbergian” approach to it—the
way you make it your own. With Maps,
one thing that struck me as very in keeping with your interests in this sense
of biological determinism, this classical notion of incest as a catalyst for
tragedy.
DC: Incest wasn’t the major
attraction for me, though it makes perfect sense that you’d see that. As you
say, it has resonances of Greek tragedy, and also modern genetic tragedy. We
know now why incest is not a good idea. Culturally there’s resistance to
incest, but occasionally a culture can overcome that. That was the case with
the Egyptians, where a royal’s blood was so special that they couldn’t possibly
mate with a commoner, and thus had to marry a sibling or cousin to keep the
bloodline pure. They overcame the taboo and suffered for it, because there was
a lot of genetic weakness in the succession of Egyptian royals. So it’s good
trope. I like the idea of Hollywood being incestuous, an enclosed ecosystem of
ideas, with no oxygen, no new blood, everything recirculating and getting
weaker, as we see with sequel after sequel after sequel. It was pleasing as a
metaphor for what’s wrong with studio filmmaking.
JB: So what was the major attraction?
DC: Bruce Wagner. His
dialogue, his characters, the madness that’s so convincing. Very rare to find a
script with that much power just jumping off the page. And, as always, I had to
feel that no one else could do it, or would do it. And that was certainly the
case with Maps. [Laughs] Bruce couldn’t find
anybody else to do it.
