"I like the idea of Hollywood being incestuous, an enclosed ecosystem of ideas, with no oxygen, no new blood, everything recirculating and getting weaker... It was pleasing as a metaphor for what’s wrong with studio filmmaking.": David Cronenberg on Maps to the Stars

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.

David Cronenberg

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.

                        

A drive of the mind

A young man drifts through Manhattan in a very long, white, soundproof, touch screen-lined limousine, seemingly outfitted for every event save atomic holocaust. He’s not going to office today, and why would he? The limo is everything. It’s his chamber of meditation, chamber of sexual transaction, chamber of commerce. He takes meetings in it. He drinks, pisses, gets his prostate checked in it. He watches the yuan plunge in it. He gets some stern financial advice from trusted colleagues in it— advice he does not take. He just wants a haircut. His name is Eric Packer. He’s handsome, powerful, a self-made billionaire, within the 1% of the 1%, Jay Gatsby meets Mark Zuckerberg, and over the course of Cosmopolis he’s going to let it all go, the money, the car, the marriage to a pretty poet, even the hair. An angry, violent mob fills the streets outside, throwing rats and protesting the failures of capitalism. But there’s only one man amongst them who can touch Eric, one man who constitutes his dumpy double, his sloppy shadow. He’s waiting for Eric and he’s got a gun and Eric seems to be slowly moving right to him, into the heart of darkness.

Directed and faithfully adapted from Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel by David Cronenberg, Cosmopolis is talky, idea-riddled, fantastic, at times awkward, at times very funny, mostly quite brilliant. The strength of the novel, far from DeLillo’s best but still crackling with the author’s characteristic flashes of insight and condensed lyricism, is the world that passes beyond the tinted windows of Eric’s roaming castle. DeLillo writes about crowds, American crowds, New York crowds, with rare powers of evocation. His Cosmopolis is drenched in sense of place. His Eric, on the other hand, feels interesting but wholly artificial, a collection of ideas sewn together into an executive golem. The thing about Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is that it completely reverses this emphasis. Cronenberg has never been a naturalist or documentarian. His best films are ablaze with ingenious artifice—it’s his way of getting at truths. Cronenberg’s New York is almost laughably unconvincing. It isn’t New York; it’s a New York state of mind. It’s very obviously Toronto. And it isn’t even Toronto. Or it’s the same Toronto of Videodrome. A meta-place. And an almost palpably dangerous place.

It’s too easy to dismiss Cosmopolis as preposterous and mannered (the dialogue remains the high modernist, tweaked vernacular of DeLillo-speak); you’ve got to just roll with it. The supporting cast makes this easy: Juliette Binoche, Mathieu Amalric, Paul Giamatti and most especially Samantha Morton absorb DeLillo’s cadences with perfect elegance and a cunning sense of how to flush out its sly humour. Even vampire heartthrob Robert Pattison is good as Eric, surprisingly unaffected, a cipher perhaps, but given his character’s transformation, his surrender to the existential, perhaps suicidal abyss, his deadpan seems appropriate. We need to identify with something blossoming virus-like in his psyche that can only gradually be revealed. He does eventually get that haircut, or anyway half a haircut, in the film’s most playful scene, which, not coincidentally, is also the only one with working-class guys in it. But the barber’s is the final stop en route to the underworld, where no amount of grooming can save you. 

Three fiery, famous lives, under-examined, overcooked, burnt to a crisp: Little Ashes

In 1933, while visiting Buenos Aires, the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca gave a lecture on the aesthetic properties of duende, a force that can be located in certain works of art or folkloric traditions, such as flamenco, yet resists clean, orderly explanation. It has something to do with the abyss, with a deeper sadness that speaks from experience, with a strangeness that shakes loose unexamined fragments from the firmament of the unconscious, with an inescapable connection to one’s roots, with a sensuality never entirely distanced from the diabolical, with earthiness and desire and death. (Trying to define duende can be a bit like trying to define film noir; sometimes it’s simply whatever makes something otherwise routine, such as a crime drama, or a poem mediating on loss, into something rich, chilling, and mysterious in ways that extend far beyond the solving of a mystery.) Little Ashes is a movie about García Lorca as his formative youthful encounters with filmmaker Luis Buñuel and painter Salvador Dalí, and, let me tell you, does it ever not have even a drop of duende.

Though made, perhaps, with commendable intentions, Little Ashes, written by Philippa Goslett and directed by Paul Morrison (Solomon and Gaenor), effectively takes three of the 20th century’s more incendiary artists and tames their shared youthful reveries into something grotesquely bland and safe, an assembly of biographical conjecture in which the term “outrageous” is most firmly kept within quotation marks, and annoying affection, rather than artistic revelation, is celebrated. It’s like the worst thing Christopher Hampton never wrote. More earnest and awkwardly acted even than the Hampton-scripted Arthur Rimbaud-Paul Verlaine movie Total Eclipse. It goes to show that there’s nothing, not surrealism nor sadism, not dada nor death metal, that cannot be appropriated and converted into stuffy museum pieces, sordid soap opera, or soul-deadening muzak. My recoil exacerbated by the fact that at least one of the three figures in Little Ashes is among the artists whose work I treasure more than any other, I’m fighting the temptation to call the movie an abomination, because that word just sounds a little too exciting to be applied to what’s found here.

It starts in 1922, when the soon-to-be dark luminaries García Lorca (Javier Beltrán), Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) and Dalí (Robert Pattinson) converge at university in Madrid. Much ostensibly iconoclastic wankerspeak about revising the values of art is tossed about in mealy-mouthed Castellano accents, since, unfortunately, the proceedings are largely to be spoken in English by one Spaniard and two Brits. Dalí upsets the status quo with his foppish ruffled shirts, giddy non sequiturs (“I would love an enema!”), and advanced talents, arousing the admiration of Buñuel and the erotic desire of García Lorca, whose quiet homosexual longings find an eager receptacle in Dalí’s sexual ambivalence and overriding urge to be adored.

The development of artistic vision in Little Ashes is largely reduced to shallow manifesto spouting. To be fair, the story’s emphasis is meant to be on the peculiar and fragile dynamic of the relationships, yet here too, despite a valiant and genuinely sexy supporting turn from Marina Gatell as the sole woman to intrude on this very male milieu, we’re asked to be satisfied with boilerplate conflicts that depend on our acceptance that Lorca was a sensitive saint cursed by an oppressive culture, Buñuel a belligerent homophobic thug with, most astonishingly, no sense of humour, and Dalí a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot. Now, I’m not trying to suggest that Dalí wasn’t, too a depressingly large extent, a poncy, profoundly pretentious idiot, since there’s an awful lot of evidence to support this characterization. But it is the most essential business of biopics to transcend the superficial depiction of their subjects, because otherwise what’s the point? I doubt that Little Ashes would have ever got any sort of theatrical release at all were it not for Twilight star Pattinson’s sudden stardom, but it surely won’t do his career any favours to be found hamming it up wincingly, playing a public figure all too large for life to begin with. Of the central trio only Beltrán can muster up any emotional integrity from the material, so Lorca, at least, might not be rolling in his grave.

Dalí, José Moreno Villa, Buñuel, García Lorca, José Rubio Sacristán