Good interview with David Cronenberg in Canada’s Toro Magazine, including a brief exchange on Crash -
What happens when you get an actor who says no to a piece of direction?
I’ve never had that.
There was a problem, wasn’t there, with Elias Koteas doing a gay scene in Crash?
Yeah. But he did it.
What happened there?
I don’t yell and scream. It’s just not my style. It’s always a seduction, always Machiavellian. The one thing I never do is yell. Except once. That was at James Woods [in Videodrome (1983)]. I said, “Will you just stop fucking around and just get out there and say the fucking lines!” You have to understand, though, that Woods is a very smart man, but he got to the point where he was exasperating, and he knew what I was saying when I said it. But with Elias it was odd. It wasn’t homophobia so much as a comment [James] Spader made triggered some cultural aversion to being perceived in a certain way. I think he was testing me to see if he could get out of it. I made him understand that the whole movie was blown if he didn’t do that scene.
The interview also reveals Cronenberg’s likely next project, Martin Amis’ London Fields, and a promising new attitude to critics -
“I’m not actually a violent person but I had to learn to kill with my bare hands to make this movie [A History of Violence ]. So I could now kill a critic, any critic, in seconds. It’d be so fast people wouldn’t know why he dropped to the ground. And I’m tempted to sometimes.”