Cronenberg likes rhythm in ‘Cosmopolis’ dialogue
Fluctuations in the yuan are threatening his fortune, his new marriage is in trouble and someone is stalking him, but Eric Packer, the 28year-old billionaire portrayed by Robert Pattinson in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel “Cosmopolis,” doesn’t care.
Nor does he care about the presidential motorcade or the celebrity funeral or the protesters who are slowing Manhattan traffic to a crawl. Packer wants to get his hair cut across town, so the drama takes place largely within the confines of his stretch limousine. For Cronenberg, who made a funny-cars racing movie, 1979’s “Fast Company,” early in his career, who at one time wanted to make a drama set in the world of Formula One racing, and who more famously adapted J.G. Ballard’s “auto” erotic novel “Crash” in 1996, it is a return to a car as a central location, if not a fixation — not that he sees it that way.
“I gave my crew a couple of movies to watch,” he says during a recent phone call. “One was ‘Lebanon,’ which takes place entirely inside an Israeli tank, and ‘Das Boot,’ which takes place mostly inside a German submarine. In a way, the limo for Eric Packer is a tank and a submarine.
“It’s quite a different approach to cars than, let’s say, ‘Crash,’ quite different, even though there was a Lincoln in ‘Crash’ as well. It’s not that I have a particular attachment to Lincolns per se, but they have, over the years, taken on symbolism. They have symbolic value and you can’t deny it.”
The 69-year-old Toronto native’s first credited feature-length screenplay since 1999’s “eXistenZ” began as a writing exercise. He was a fan of DeLillo’s novel, but he wasn’t sure whether the book lent itself to a film. He began by simply transcribing the dialogue, filling in the action later. It was only when he
finished that he thought, “Yeah, it does feel like a movie.”
What sold him on “Cosmopolis” in the first place was less the story than DeLillo’s dialogue. Few novelists, he feels, have an ear for the way people speak. Their dialogue is literary, and can play well on the page but not onscreen. DeLillo has a rare gift.
‘The way people speak’
“I think of him in the way that I think of Harold Pinter,” Cronenberg says. “We can talk about Pinteresque dialogue, it’s very recognizable and yet it’s legitimately the way people speak in England, in his case, and in America, in New York, in DeLillo’s case. At the same time, it’s stylized as well and has a particular rhythm that comes from the writer’s sensibility. I was very attracted to that and I really felt, ‘Boy, I’d like to see this spoken by some really terrific actors. I wonder what it would be, what it would do, how it would sound, especially when they bat things back and forth like a tennis match.’ That was really the hook for me.”
The “Cosmopolis” ensemble includes Paul Giamatti, Juliette Binoche, Jay Baruchel, Kevin Durand, Sarah Gadon, Samantha Morton, Mathieu Amalric, Emily Hampshire, Philip Nozuka and rapper K’Naan, but the focus is always on Pattinson. In a role light-years away from the wan, romantic vampire that made him a star in the “Twilight” movies, the actor plays Packer as a remote mogul, an emotionally crabbed figure who has little understanding of normal life.
It is an attitude symbolized in one scene when he asks Binoche, his art dealer, to obtain Houston’s Rothko Chapel — not just the art within it, but the chapel itself. It will fit in his apartment and he is impervious to the fact that it is a place that was built for public enjoyment.
“The whole idea of money and ownership has become a sort of theoretical, abstract thing to him, and a game as well, and sort of a question of power,” Cronenberg says. “But at the same time, there’s something in the Rothko and in the chapel that he wants. Is it peace? Is he looking for some kind of serenity? Yet the only way he knows how to get it is to buy it. He doesn’t have any other mechanism for absorbing it.
“It’s interesting that for him, money is an abstraction,” he adds. “He lives in a bubble of abstraction. In a way, that’s what the car symbolizes, too. It’s kind of an echo chamber or something like that, a vacuum, a bell jar. The money has always been abstract to him after a certain point. It’s an abstraction. It’s not real. Here’s a guy who deals with billions of dollars and yet he doesn’t actually ever touch real money. He barely knows how to pay the bill. He doesn’t know how people talk to each other when they’re at a restaurant. He’s that disconnected.”
Cronenberg began working on “Cosmopolis” before the Occupy Wall Street movement started, and while he notes the differences between the movie protesters’ causes and the real ones, there are parallels. Real life and reel life echo each other in some weirdly coincidental ways that he finds “a little spooky.”
Prophetic plot
At the same time, history is finally catching up to DeLillo. On the book’s publication, some reviewers complained that both the mogul and the street protests that surround the limo seemed like something out of the past, not predictive of the future.
“We have to score a couple there for Don DeLillo, I think, over his reviewers,” says Cronenberg. “I don’t think, though, that Don was wanting to be a prophet. I understand that. I’ve gone through that myself with my movie ‘Videodrome,’ for example, which anticipated the Internet and a whole bunch of other things. That’s not the purpose in writing it. It’s really to try and encapsulate something that you feel, something your antenna has sensitized to and so on, and if it turns out to be prophecy, so be it.
“You’re an artist, you’re not a prophet, really, and I know that Don, his process began with just querying the limos. What an odd thing to want to have in the cramped streets of Manhattan. That was the beginning of it for him; where do these limos go at night?” Pam Grady is a freelance writer. E-mail: sadolphson@sfchronicle.com