CRASH
David Cronenberg revisits his most controversial film, CRASH
The Cronenberg one with all the car rumpy-pumpy.
BY THE TIME HE MADE CRASH IN 1995, David Cronenberg was more than used to his films provoking reactions as visceral and extreme as any of the seamy goings-on up on the screen. His earliest films, Rabid, Shivers and The Brood, had established him as being at the forefront of what became known as ‘body horror’ (a lazy label he has been trying, with limited success, to shed for the subsequent five decades). The Fly in 1986 had harnessed his trademark extremist imagery in the cause of a commercial horror flick, but one still bearing the unmistakable interest in technology’s power to transform us.
M. Butterfly (1993) had seemed to be a move away from the perverse imagery of his early films. But Crash was a thunderingly confrontational return to his old stomping ground. A surprisingly faithful adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel about a group of alienated characters seeking meaning and a kind of ecstatic sexual transendence amidst the wreckage of automobile pile-ups, it featured some of the most alarmingly strange sex ever put on screen.
The brouhaha that erupted on its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival in 1996 took
even the director by surprise. Furious tabloid campaigns were launched against it in both the US and London, where Westminster City Council banned the film (which had been passed uncut by the BBFC), meaning curious Londoners had, as is often the case, to take a trip on the Northern Line to Camden in order to be corrupted.
Twenty-five years later, and with a sparkling 4K restoration on the horizon, we talked to the director about what is still his most controversial, and challenging, film.
How has the experience of revisiting Crash been?
Well, I’m not really revisiting it. I’m really at some distance. The closest I got to experiencing it was at the Venice Film Festival where we first screened the 4K version. That was terrific, I must say. Because it never looked better and it never sounded better because they had done a 5.1 surround sound version of it, whereas the original was only stereo. It was terrific.
When you watched it again was there anything that surprised you about it?
I don’t rewatch my movies except under these circumstances, so I was kind of forced to watch it. And of course, I wasn’t watching it as someone seeing it in a theatre. I was watching it for details and corrections and stuff. But it did strike me how strange the movie is. It really does summon up a strange emotional and visual tone. I was kind of impressed in the creation of the ambience, I have to say [laughs]. One of the differences I noticed from Ballard’s novel was the beauty. The actors were beautiful and the colours were beautiful and sensual and sensuous. And that wasn’t entirely deliberate on my part. Ballard’s novel is very clinical and cold. But that difference evolved as I was making the movie. So, there is a sensuality to it which there isn’t quite in the Ballard novel. And I was newly impressed by the performances of my actors. Of course, when you’re working with them every day it’s business as usual, you’re involved in the details and so on, but looking at it from this distance, there were some absolutely terrific performances, by everybody. Very extreme and very difficult.
You ask your actors to appear in some of the strangest, most extreme sex scenes ever put on screen. How did you go about casting it?
I knew upfront that I simply had to have actors who were not afraid. That they were willing to go the distance with the project. Of course, they knew what the movie was, but sometimes when you’re on the set and it’s time to actually do the acting, carry out the performance, sometimes you get some reluctance, some fear in your actors. Some vulnerability or insecurity that emerges. And I had none of that. They were just terrific.
These days you’d presumably have to hire an intimacy coordinator.
Yeah, well, I’d like to have someone coordinating my intimacy. In the era of Covid, I could use one [laughs]. Well, I haven’t had to deal with that on the set. What you did have were the actors’ unions. If there were complaints or worries, which with a movie with this much nudity was a possibility, then it would have been an actor representative who would have come on the set to discuss it. But we didn’t have anything like that. It just wasn’t an issue. I had no idea what it would be like to work with an intimacy coordinator. I’ve never done it.
James Spader is perfect. He’s got this blankly angelic face, with a huge amount going on behind the eyes.
Yes. Yes, absolutely. And, not inconsequentially, the body for the film. This was the other thing. There’s a lot of nudity in the film, so suddenly you’re casting bodies as well as faces and voices. We began with Spader, and the first actor in determines a lot. With James, and underlying the success of the movie, was his total lack of fear. He was not afraid to have this strange homosexual scene, have this strange sex with other characters. He would go all the way with me. I didn’t have to convince him to do things, I didn’t have to coax him out of the trailer because he was afraid of doing something. And that also meant that lack of fear transmits to other actors. If he’s not afraid then they’re not afraid.
When did you first read Ballard?
I had actually not read any Ballard until I read Crash. I was really repulsed by the novel when I first read it, and I didn’t finish it. And I told [legendary producer] Jeremy Thomas, who had suggested that we do it, I just said: “You know, I can’t get into this, I just don’t understand it.” And then it took me about a year before I picked it up again, and it was completely different; I suddenly completely understood it. I don’t know whether the first read had sort of prepared my nervous system for the second read. Maybe the antibodies were there. But somehow I was inoculated against the cytokine storm. So it took a while. Ballard is like that. But as a person he’s completely different, I loved him. We got along really well. He was just the most gentle, sweet, kind, supportive person. Somebody who you really loved to have dinner with or hang out with. I know that he could be very forceful when he was attacked but I just found him to be a lovely man.
Did you have any conversations with him about the screenplay?
We had many conversations. But we didn’t have conversations about it before I wrote it. But I sent him the screenplay. After that, we talked about it. He loved the screenplay, he was very happy with it. There was no pretence on his part that he was a screenwriter or an aficionado of movies because he didn’t feel [there] was something that he could add that was missing. He was basically a cheerleader after that. But obviously a very knowledgeable one.
You took it to Cannes, and then the trouble started...
I think there would have been trouble wherever we had screened it. But I have to say, I was blissfully naive and unaware. The novel had come out in 1973 and we were shooting in 1995. And so I thought the novel was well established and well known, and Ballard was well established and well known. People weren’t yelling at him! No-one was burning his books! So this was just an interpretation of his novel. I didn’t think beyond that in terms of people freaking out. But of course, they did.
How did you feel about the chaos that erupted in Cannes?
It was pretty entertaining. It’s exciting, you know. The worst thing is when your movie is there and nobody cares. We had 300 journalists yelling at
us in the press screening. It was exciting and stimulating, and yes, people walked out. I was quite certain that they would. I recently read an interview with Rob Pattinson. He said that when we were screening Cosmopolis at Cannes, he asked me how it would do and I said: “Oh, I expect there’ll be a fair number of walkouts.” He was completely shocked at this. He never expected that. And he was also shocked at how casual I was about it. But I’d been through it so many times before, I just knew. And I told him, “By the way, the seats in the theatre make big clacking noises when people walk out. So you’ll know when people are walking out. They won’t be quiet!”
Do you think you could get Crash made today?
I think it would be really difficult to get it made today. You know, it’s still banned in Westminster. I just think right now, and there have been many moments when I’ve said things along the lines of what I’m going to say, which is that we seem to be going through a period of great fear and conservatism and political correctness and that’s very hard when you’re trying to finance a film that is extreme and subversive and dark. And so I think Crash would be a hard, hard sell today.
Videodrome is emerging as the most prescient of your movies.
Well, it seems strangely, yes. As I’ve often said, prophecy is not my job. It was only in a way accidental that that element has come out of that movie. I was really being playful and inventive and absorbing what I thought the zeitgeist was at the time. I often think that an artist has very sensitive antennae, that most people don’t have, or have but don’t pay attention to. But if you’re an artist you do pay attention and they do bring you things from out of the zeitgeist. So I was really thinking that that movie was totally of its time. But you often hit a stream that flows towards the future. That seems to have happened with Videodrome.
Social media is apparently physically reconfiguring young people’s brains much like the signal in Videodrome.
I think everybody’s brain is now being reconfigured by the internet in one way or another. There are no two ways about it.
It’s been six years since your last film, Maps To The Stars. Why nothing since?
Well, some personal upheavals and turmoils, you know. My wife died three years ago. We had been together for 43 years. I had spent a year-and-ahalf taking care of her. And after that, I really didn’t have the heart to do anything else. But gradually I started to write again and at the moment I have three original scripts that could potentially get made. They have producers attached to them.
It’s been an incredible achievement to make all your films on your own terms.
Yes. I’m stubborn, you know. I won’t say that there haven’t been some moments where,
I won’t say I was desperate, but that I needed money. After I did Spider, all of us who worked on that film, including Ralph Fiennes and Miranda Richardson, we got no money. We had to forego our salaries. After that, I really needed some money. So I needed to find a project that was financed. And that led me to A History Of Violence. But it’s one thing to do a movie because you need money, and another to do a movie only because you need money. So I managed there to make a movie that I was very happy to make. That’s the trick. Even The Fly was that. It came after I had done 12 versions of Total Recall, and it fell apart. I had to do something where I could actually be paid. And it ended up being The Fly.
If you didn’t make another film, would you be content?
Yes. I actually thought Cosmopolis would be my last movie, and then Maps To The Stars, which I’d been trying to get together for ten years, came together, so I thought I would do that. Then I thought that Maps would be my last movie. I said in Venice that if I don’t get to make another movie I would be okay with that. And many people said: “No, no! That would be terrible!” Which was very sweet. But no, I would be fine.
And now that your son Brandon is a director he can carry on the old family firm: Cronenberg & Son...
Yes, but it’s not Cronenberg & Son. I prefer Cronenberg & Cronenberg. We’re two barrels of the same shotgun.