‘ We don’t need music here’
CRONENBERG
The music matches this mood, composed by Howard Shore, a long-time Cronenberg collaborator better known these days for his Oscar-winning work on The Lord of the Rings. “Howard had some John Ford DVDs and other westerns to listen to,” says Cronenberg, “and I think you can find some echoes of Aaron Copland, a real American landscape feel.”
It’s a sparse score. “Despite the fact that Lord of the Rings is pretty much wall-to-wall music, that was really [director] Peter Jackson’s style. But Howard, left to his own devices, is very capable of saying, ‘I don’t think we need music here.’
“Both of us don’t like the concept of music emphasizing what’s already there and just hammering you over the head. We think the music can do something quite different and add a whole layer of discourse. It’s almost like a parallel universe to the movie.”
If you do see the movie more than once, you’ll be in a parallel universe yourself, aware of the twists and perhaps even watching for signs of them before they happen. “ We’re really making two movies,” Cronenberg says. “ We’re making it for the first time people see it and we’re making it for the second time people see it. And there’s got to be stuff going on for those secondviewers.”
He’s not saying people will dash back to the theatre the next day. “But there was a period when movies were a consumer item — you eat them and they’re gone. But since DVDs I’ve noticed kids watch movies 20 times, 30 times; they have them going on in the background, and they’ll watch their favourite scenes. So it’s no longer an arrogant thing to think this movie is made to be seen more than once. In fact, it’s a necessary thing for a responsible moviemaker.”
And fear not, A History of Violence is also not this year’s Primer, the notoriously convoluted time-travel film that had some theatres selling two-for-one tickets to querulous patrons.
“It depends on what kind of movie you’re making,” the director says. “If you’re Alain Resnais and you’re making Last Year at Marienbad, you’re making a movie that you want to be enigmatic and perhaps not gettable the first time. But obviously this is not that.”
A History of Violence opens in Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver on Friday, and across Canada on Sept. 30.
National Post
cknight@ nationalpost. com