As you might expect of a filmmaker best known for horror movies, David Cronenberg is a nocturnal creature. When he isn't busy shooting movies he's usually working on scripts. He writes deep into the night. He doesn't get out of bed until 2:30pm, he says. That's why he isn't quite fully awake at 9am when a journalist comes calling at his hotel suite.
"Let's be gentle with each other," he says.
Gentle?
PHOTO: AP
Cronenberg's new movie about the Russian mafia includes throat slashings, sexual slavery, dismemberment, an imperiled infant and a marathon fight to the death between a naked Viggo Mortensen and three knife-wielding thugs.
Mortensen and Naomi Watts accompanied Cronenberg to the Toronto International Film Festival to promote the movie, Eastern Promises. It's Mortensen's second film in a row with Cronenberg (A History of Violence is the other). He plays a gangster in both of them, which raises the question: Is Cronenberg following in Martin Scorsese's footsteps, with Mortensen as his Robert De Niro?
Hardly. The director says he chose to do the London-set Eastern Promises because it was available and he liked the script.
"If I had had a terrific horror script, I wouldn't have turned my back on it," he says.
"Marty Scorsese says people think he can pick anything he wants to direct at any time, and nobody can do that," Cronenberg says.
The white-haired, 64-year-old Cronenberg is soft-spoken, professorial, with an easy, disarming sense of humor.
You'd hardly think upon meeting him that this is the man responsible for unnerving psychological horror movies full of deviant sex, deadly obsessions, exploding heads and clinical depictions of gore.
The truth is that all of his films defy categorization. His horror movies weren't made to scare people, just as his science-fiction movies (eXistenZ, Naked Lunch, Videodrome) don't fit the dictionary definition of speculative explorations into the effects of science on society.
The genres his work fell into weren't important to him. They were vehicles he used to explore ideas. He wrote his early movies as well as directed them, and he hasn't stopped writing, though his recent movies were based on other people's scripts.
"As you gain momentum in your career, it's hard to take two years off to write an original script, at the end of which you might find that you don't like the script," he says. "It happens. Or maybe you'll like it, but you can't get it financed.
He mentions Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma as two other writer-directors who rarely write their own scripts today.
Although Eastern Promises wasn't written by him, it looks like it will do well commercially.
Cronenberg acknowledges that now he'll likely be grouped in with "the guys who do mob drama," but he says he tried steadfastly to ignore what's been done in the genre.
It shows. Eastern Promises, doesn't feel like any gangster movie you've seen. That's partly because of Steve Knight's script. As Knight showed in Dirty Pretty Things, he's an ace chronicler both of immigrant life in London and of that city's criminal underworld. His stories have layers you don't expect to find in crime dramas.
Cronenberg's direction also sets the film apart.
Knight explains how the director filmed scenes described in the script in ways the writer didn't expect.
The godfather of the piece, a nasty mob patriarch played by Armin Mueller-Stahl, plays the violin for a child at one point. Instead of only filming a snippet, Cronenberg's camera lingers, suggesting unexpected depths to this man by his gentleness and sophistication.
Cronenberg also let his camera linger during grisly scenes that Knight only suggested in the script.
"Some of the scenes surprised me," says Watts, hastening to add that she doesn't consider the violence gratuitous "though there is an abundance of it."
Mortensen, in a separate talk with reporters, disagrees.
"The body count in both movies (Eastern Promises and A History of Violence) is far less than in The Departed, the Bourne movies or The Godfather," he says.
The difference is that Cronenberg wants you to see and consider what most other filmmakers either prettify, gloss over or make exciting.
Mortensen calls it a more responsible depiction of violence.
"I think it's responsible because he's honest about it," he says. "It's not pretty."
Cronenberg says he's disturbed by what he calls "murder porn" on the Internet, particularly referring to beheadings committed by Islamic extremists - "things that people can see at any moment of any day on the Internet that weren't available before.
"I was very seriously thinking of that," he says, when he filmed the throat slashings. "It was not an homage but a reference," made appropriate by a sub-theme of the movie: in a city such as London, invisible subcultures exist and motives for acts committed within them may be unfathomable to those on the outside.
"The violence in the Bourne movies is very impressionistic," Cronenberg says. "There's a lot of motion and quick cutting - you don't see much."
But Cronenberg says the destruction of human life is not to be taken lightly.
"I take it seriously and I want the audience to take it seriously and not have it become something whimsical ... and not have it happen off screen."
The violent scene that will be most discussed goes on for more than four minutes - Cronenberg says he didn't precisely time it.
"I told my stunt coordinator that I want it to be physiologically correct," he says of the scene, which involves a naked Mortensen.
"I wanted to see how it really would happen," Cronenberg continues. "Killing is hard work. It's messy. It's not elegant. It's not ballet.
"It's people struggling for their lives."
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