LAST RESORT
Writer/director Brandon Cronenberg on his high-concept sci-fi horror.
Brandon Cronenberg started work on the screenplay for Infinity Pool the best part of a decade ago, but the idea has been haunting the fringes of his mind for much longer. The Antiviral and Possessor filmmaker had the embryonic concept that would form the backbone of the film, but he ended up pinning it to a much earlier memory.
‘It was a bit of a mash-up of ideas,’ he tells Teasers ahead of the film’s Sundance premiere. ‘I started by writing a short story that I have never finished.’ That short story (which nearly became a comic, in one iteration) would eventually form the basis of a crucial scene at the end of the first act of the movie.
‘And then as I was trying to expand it into a film, I kept remembering this vacation that I had many years ago, where I had been talked into going into an all-inclusive resort in the Dominican Republic,’ continues Cronenberg. ‘It was a very surreal experience because they would bus you in, in the middle of the night, so you wouldn’t see any of the country. They would drop you off in the resort compound, and the entire vacation was just in that resort compound. It was literally surrounded by a razor-wire fence that was lightly hidden by dried palm leaves.’
At the end of the stay, on the daytime bus back to the airport, Cronenberg was struck by the ‘shocking, grotesque contrast’ between the poverty-stricken area immediately outside the resort. ‘It’s also completely surreal, because you really haven’t, in any way, visited the country that you were just in.’
Elements of the experience would feed directly into the fictional setting of Li Tolqa, where author James (Alexander Skarsgård) and his wife, Em (Cleopatra Coleman), are holidaying. A run-in with Gabi (Mia Goth) and husband Alban (Jalil Lespert) leads to an off-resort excursion that ends in a man being mowed down in a fatal car accident - which feeds directly into that core concept from Cronenberg’s initial short story.
The Li Tolqan authorities offer James a choice – face the consequences himself, or undergo a cloning procedure and let his duplicate receive the punishment in his place. From there on out, things get extremely violent and freaky.
‘I really love magic-realism short stories where they’re rooted in a reality that’s almost real, but there’s just one absolutely absurd twist to them, and then, from that, things play out in a realistic way where everybody just accepts that this thing is real,’ says Cronenberg of his twisted high concept. ‘It doesn’t really make sense in the film why this one place has this technology, and how it works. It’s a little bit deliberately ludicrous. But from
‘There’s no limit to how extreme he’ll go in terms of uglifying himself!’ BRANDON CRONENBERG
that point onwards, it can play out as a sort of metaphorical tool.’
Skarsgård - also an exec producer - leans into the full-bore weirdness as James becomes involved in ever more unhinged acts. ‘He has this sort of fearlessness, when it comes to playing against his image,’ says Cronenberg. ‘That was perfect for this film because he can look at first like he’s just stepped out of a tourist brochure. But then there’s no limit to how extreme he’ll go in terms of contorting himself, uglifying himself!’
Goth continues her horror hot streak with an outsized turn as Gabi, whose initial appearance as a fawning fan of James’ book soon gives way to a darker role as an instigator of chaos. ‘Again, having that kind of fearless actor who’s willing to go to such extremes is useful in genre films,’ says Cronenberg. ‘But it’s also useful generally. Because you can always tone it down, but you can’t get somebody there if they’re shy about it.’
Nothing about Infinity Pool is toned down. An intimacy coordinator was on hand for the eye-opening orgy scene. ‘You sort of design these scenes in collaboration with [the actors] based on their comfort,’ explains Cronenberg. ‘I don’t usually rehearse, but we did do rehearsals for the orgy scene with the intimacy coordinator to set up specific configurations, to make sure we were working within everyone’s boundaries.’
The extreme violence is a very different proposition, says Cronenberg, who operates in a similar wheelhouse to his father, David. ‘It’s often more funny on set than people think,’ he laughs. ‘When you’re actually doing it, it’s sort of playing Halloween in a way. It’s fake blood everywhere. It’s these prosthetics. It can be uncomfortable for actors in the sense that they might be covered in fake blood, or [spending] extra time in the make-up chair. And so I do talk to them in advance about the fact that I like to do these things practically, and so there will be a certain amount of time in make-up.’
Cronenberg even committed to achieving the film’s hallucination scenes practically. ‘It involved just shooting and manipulating images, and creating hours and hours of strange footage,’ says the writer/director, who then embarked on a ‘very deranged editing process with my editor, James Vandewater. We were assembling it in individual frames at times.’ What’s true for James and Gabi is true for the audience: this is one hell of a trip.
INFINITY POOL OPENS IN CINEMAS ON 24 MARCH.