Transcribed by Mike Holliday
The following ‘Guardian Lecture’ took place on 10 November 1996 at the British Film Institute, London. The first U.K. screening of Crash had taken place the previous evening as part of the London Film Festival. The introduction and initial questions were provided by Chris Rodley. Unfortunately a number of the questions from the audience are inaudible on the recording.
RODLEY: You will have had to have been off the planet to not have been aware of some of the media circus around the film and tonight’s guests. It became apparent to me on Monday – some of you may have missed it – when our beloved, be-jumpered, TV film-critic Barry Norman announced that every film festival needs its scandal and that Crash was certainly that; and that, beyond that, the movie was indeed, in places, repellent. He didn’t follow that statement with his usual obligatory qualifier ‘… and why not?’Then on Friday the Telegraph announced that this depraved film was in fact getting distribution in this country and pointed out that the Vice-Chairman of Time Warner, Mr Ted Turner, had suddenly become aware that one of the independent companies that Time Warner had gobbled up (as they tend to do), Mainline Cinema, was intending to release the film in the States. He wanted to make it clear that that decision was made above his head, that he thought the film was appalling, and that he was very worried about what teenagers might think of it and might do when they saw it… all of this from the man who married Barbarella! Since then we’ve had lots of radio, national news on all channels, and apparently at the last minute some machinations at the Home Office to try and reconsider whether the film should have been even shown here last night – which it was, thank God.
In this country it all began back on June 6th when the London Evening Standard dedicated an entire page to an excoriating attack on the film, and everyone involved in it, by senior film critic Alexander Walker. That piece was keen to stress to us, lest we should have forgotten, that to be a victim of a car crash was not sexy, and many articles since then have stressed that similar thing. This leads me to wonder if certain critics, and maybe all censors and would-be censors (and even some politicians), seem to demonstrate that they have something very much in common with true psychotics – which is that they are seriously unable to differentiate between fantasy and reality, or between an imaginary life and a real life.
If that’s true, of course, then maybe certain film critics and certain politicians and all censors could be more dangerous than we might have thought, and society would be a safer and happier place if we locked them up instead of the kind of people who make movies like Crash. I’m convinced, myself, that most of those people are a good deal more dangerous than our two guests this evening. So, if you could put your plaster-casts together for – in strict alphabetical order -– the writer of the novel Crash, Mr J. G. Ballard, and the producer, director, and writer of the screenplay of the movie, Mr David Cronenberg.
CRONENBERG: Well, now that Chris has discussed the press, I would really like for us not to mention them one more time tonight. I think I’d like to just start by asking Jim a question. Someone who was talking to me about the film said ‘Why didn’t you call the main character in the movie David Cronenberg? Because that would have been the true equivalent of Ballard calling the main character in the book James Ballard.’ I said it had actually never occurred to me, but in a way you’re right and I’m not sure what that would have done to the film. Now, I’d just like to ask you what you would have thought if you had gotten the script and it would have said that?
BALLARD: I think you should have done. If only you’d consulted me on the script, you see, I would have been a big help there! Great movie makers, I’ve noticed (and I’ve worked with two) don’t tend to pay any attention to the authors of the original material, but this is one case, David, where you’ve missed out on immortality. But you’ve achieved it everywhere else… I’d just like to say what a brilliant film it is, an extraordinary film that I think people will realise is a landmark movie in every respect. I think it’s much more original than even you probably imagine.
CRONENBERG: Well that’s in a way why I wanted to talk about this particular issue, because it’d be interesting to see what you feel the differences are between the book and the movie and what that represents. In your infamous preface to the French edition, you said, amongst other things (and this has been really grabbed onto by the group of people who I said we would never mention) that you felt that the book was in some ways a cautionary tale. They love that phrase, and I do feel that, like with everything else, the press has really been taking everything out of the context and using it for their own particular purposes. What did you mean by that? Let’s just get right out there – what did you mean when you said the book was a cautionary tale? How literally did you mean that?
BALLARD: It has to be a cautionary tale. If not, it’s a psychopathic statement. When I was writing the book I certainly didn’t think of it as a cautionary tale. I was exploring the apparent links in what I sensed in the very early 1970s in the sort-of popular sensorium between violence and sexuality and, in particular, between the car and sexuality. I was just running-down a particular glimpse that I’d had of this hare that was running a long way ahead of me. Looking back, though, it seems to me that the book is a cautionary tale where the writer or the film-maker plays devil’s advocate and completely adopts what seems to be an insane or perverse logic in order to make a larger point. Swift did it in A Modest Proposal, and film-makers like Kubrick did it in Dr Strangelove.
CRONENBERG: So you’re saying that the cautionary tale aspect was not felt by you as an initial structure or reason for doing it? Because some people would like to interpret that as meaning that you wrote this as a kind of a fable warning people against this and that – which I feel diminishes what the book does and the scope of the book. If it’s only something that says ‘Don’t do this. Kids, do not do this at home, what you read in this book, or see in this movie’… and that’s obviously not how it arose.
BALLARD: No. The book appears to give the impression – and to some extent the film does too – that car crashes are sexually fulfilling. I’ve never said that car crashes are sexually fulfilling; I’ve been in a car crash and it did nothing for my libido. What I was saying was that the idea of the car crash is sexually exciting or intriguing. And by sex I mean all those aggressive sexual energies that impel some young men to chase women drivers who dare to overtake them. The notion that the idea of a car crash is sexually exciting is much more disturbing in a way because it asks much greater questions about who we are. If thinking about car crashes excites us, there’s something very strange going on in the human psyche – and that appears to be confirmed by the entertainment culture in which we live, which is saturated and has been for the last 30 or 40 years.
CRONENBERG: I had the experience of someone saying to me, ‘You know, the car crashes in your movie are not very realistic.’ I said ‘Really, what do you mean?’ He said ‘Well, there’s no slow motion; you’re not seeing it from five different angles.’ I said ‘Have you ever been in a car crash?’ He said ‘No.’ So, obviously his understanding of the reality of a car crash was totally formed by Hollywood and that was his new reality, so all I had to do was not use slow motion and we were in another world.
In the same vein, people like to talk about the book being the first techno-porn novel, and that also leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding, especially when that phrase is just taken out of context. You didn’t say ‘techno-porn’ …
BALLARD: Yes, this was 1973. I said I like to think of Crash as the first pornographic novel based on technology. Of course pornography then had very different connotations: then, it really just meant explicit sexuality, which was a new card in fiction and the movies, even in the early 1970s. There was very little explicit sex in the novel then. The Last Exit from Brooklyn trial and the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial here were only just over; people don’t realise that the sort of explicit sexual description you get in novels today, or in films for that matter, didn’t exist then. Now the word pornography has become all things to all people. It’s one of those happily undefined words like fascism that anybody can use for whatever purposes they want.
CRONENBERG: Yes – the pornography of war, the pornography of racism, the pornography of poverty …
BALLARD: Generally things you disapprove of, especially paedophile sex and SM and pornography that abuses women and so on – I wasn’t thinking of that sort of thing.
CRONENBERG: Eventually we’ll get the pornography of pornography, I’m waiting for that.
BALLARD: Could be your next movie.
CRONENBERG: I think we have our hands full with this one.
BALLARD: You’ve already made your next movie – it’s called Crash.
CRONENBERG: You’re right. … Well, what next?
RODLEY: I was interested in the pornography business, because in a sense it’s been used very easily over the film. Have you ever been asked to make a clear case against Crash being labelled pornographic?
CRONENBERG: Well first of all, I’m not against pornography, in fact. So I hate being put in a position where I have to defend the film against being pornographic because the assumption has to be that if it were, that would be a bad thing. However, just for the sake of accuracy, for ‘pornography’ to mean anything it has to have a very specific definition, and I go back to the Greek roots – pornographia – it means writing about prostitutes, it was originally writing or art of any kind that was meant solely for the purpose of sexual arousal. It had no other purpose, that was what it was for. So the porn films that one sees are pornography because that’s what they’re for, they don’t make any pretensions to do anything else. On that level, obviously, Crash is not pornography – in fact people complain, they say “Gee, there’s a lot of sex in it and I wasn’t turned on.’ Well, part of that was the point, and part of that was the situation of the characters. Now, of course I would like by the end of the film that your feeling for what was erotic and what was not might well have shifted – because that’s what the book did.
The book at first I found to be very cold and clinical and all the descriptions of sex were very medical, there were no passion words, no street sex words, it was all ‘anus’ and ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ and all that stuff, which is normally a turn off. But by the end of the book these words, along with the words like ‘nacelle’ and ‘speedometer’, were starting to get very sexy, and I thought ‘he’s really done something to my head here’. And so in that sense I would say you were successful even in those terms, because it was techno-porn, it was arousing… it obviously wasn’t only for that purpose though, and that’s a whole other discussion. It was erotic, let’s put it that way.
BALLARD: I think it’s true to say that when you first came across the book and thought about filming it, you were very reluctant, you didn’t care for the book.
CRONENBERG: That’s true.
BALLARD: You’ve produced a brilliant film, but going back five to ten years …
CRONENBERG: More like ten, yes.
BALLARD: … you found the book hard going and didn’t really want to film it. Now, what changed your mind?
CRONENBERG: I can only analyse it after the fact. It’s similar to you thinking about the cautionary tale after the fact, seeing that that was what it must be, even though at the time you wouldn’t have labelled it that. The book just started a process in me that was continuing, and I didn’t realise how much it had changed until maybe two years after I’d read the book. Jeremy Thomas and I had been finishing Naked Lunch and he said to me ‘Is there anything that you want to do, is there anything that you’re passionate about that we should work together and do another movie?’ I said, ‘Yes, we should do Crash’, then I said to myself ‘Why did I say that?’ – I completely surprised myself. Of course, Jeremy ran with it, he said ‘I know Ballard, I’ll introduce you. I’ve already optioned the book in the past’ and he got very excited. But I was still left saying ‘Why did I say that?’ The only thing I could come up with was that the book had started a process in me that I could only complete by making the film of it, because that is my means of exploring my reactions to things and my understanding of my own life and all that. I still don’t really have a better explanation for it.
In the making of the movie, I felt that I got much closer to the book than I’d ever been before, and it didn’t matter whether I liked it or not. It was beyond liking or not liking, it had become necessary – I needed the book somehow, and at that point it was a very powerful part of my nervous system.
BALLARD: Only a year or two beforehand you’d filmed another very difficult book, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch; almost unfilmable, the novel is really just a series of cabaret turns. It was remarkable the way you overlaid the chronology of Burroughs’s life onto this series of cabaret turns that is the Naked Lunch. In a way it’s to your credit that having tackled one monster of a problem in Naked Lunch, you went on to another monster.
CRONENBERG: I thought it would be a similar process. What I’m always struck by so strongly when faced by an adaptation (and I’ve done three, I’ve done Stephen King’s Dead Zone, Naked Lunch and Crash, and then Butterfly, which was a play – which is another story.) To me, in fact, all books are unfilmable; the old joke is ‘How do you film a book? You put it there, you get some lights, and you shoot it.’ That is about as accurate as any other description of it, because you have to reinvent them for the screen, and hope that somehow there are legitimate connections between what you’ve done and the book.
But I did think that I would be faced with making a construct the way I had done with Naked Lunch, so I might have come to Shepperton and talked to you about your past and your childhood and things, like I did with Burroughs, and take things from other works and so on, which is also what I’d done with Naked Lunch. But in fact when I started to work on the script, it just distilled into the script almost instantaneously. It was actually very easy for me to write, which revealed to me that the book was in some way innately cinematic – much more than Naked Lunch ever was. You can see the obvious things – that it has characters who continue from beginning to end, that it’s written in the first person and so you have that continuity of at least a consciousness from beginning to end, which Naked Lunch doesn’t, and there is a plot that develops – even though it’s a strange plot. All of those things made it a much easier adaptation than Naked Lunch was for me.
BALLARD: In a way – this isn’t a criticism at all – I wish you’d been able to persuade Elizabeth Taylor to play herself. She appears in the novel as a target…
CRONENBERG: This is where Jim says ‘sayonara’ to reality. First of all, Liz is about sixty-five; for most of the people who would come to see this movie Liz Taylor is a matronly lady who does AIDS benefits …
BALLARD: I know …
CRONENBERG: It’s worth discussing though, because it is many people’s favourite part of the book, but even Liz is not ‘Liz’ any more; she doesn’t mean what she meant, and the other thing was …
BALLARD: I was joking …
CRONENBERG: I know, but I’m serious …
BALLARD: Let me just say this – I think the film is better for not having Liz Taylor or a younger equivalent. If you’d introduced into the film …
CRONENBERG: But there isn’t really an equivalent of Liz Taylor, because things have changed …
BALLARD: If you’d introduced a fictional famous actress to become a target, in the way that Dean and Mansfield and Camus are targets, I don’t think it would have worked. I think you’ve extracted the purest essence of Crash by dropping the Elizabeth Taylor notion, actually.
CRONENBERG: The other thing was that I really worried that it would diminish Vaughan as a character because he would become a celebrity stalker. There wasn’t that category in the early 1970s and it’s since become a category; it would be very easy to dismiss Vaughan as a psychotic who is a celebrity stalker, and therefore the other interesting aspects of him would fade into insignificance. You can see what the press would say about that.
BALLARD: The other problem is that the film already contains a number of stars; it contains Holly Hunter, Rosanna Arquette, James Spader. A fictional movie star would be clashing with the real movie stars playing ordinary people. You would have had a confusion of levels.
CRONENBERG: Yes. James Dean was the safest bet: he was dead, his lawyers were dead … fantastic! But I did feel the need for a Hollywood icon at the centre of the movie because that was the part of the Elizabeth Taylor thing that was critical and I think it would have damaged the film if that hadn’t been there. Not as a character but as an icon.
BALLARD: Yes, Dean lies in the archaeology of 20th century psychopathology, doesn’t he? This young star who willed his own death in his Porsche.
I went to the Cannes Film Festival with David and the cast, to the premiere there. I met the cast, and worked very closely with them during the four or five days of publicity, and what impressed me was these very successful Hollywood stars in at least three cases – all of them, in fact, all five of the main actors – were deeply involved with the film. This wasn’t just a job. Listening in on the interviews they were conducting, Holly Hunter was fighting her corner – feisty little lady. When these rather bored, but rather cruel, journalists from major news agencies and the like were trying to pick her off, she snapped back at them hard. The same was true of Rosanna Arquette, Deborah Unger, Koteas, Spader – they were all deeply involved in the film, and this was some time after…
But I’m interested in how you managed to involve them so passionately in this – lets face it, at first sight, rather perverse drama?
CRONENBERG: It was actually drugs and hypnotism. Works every time. I’ve found that that’s the best way to deal with actors… Well, of course they had to want to do it, there’s no way that you can drag somebody into a movie like this kicking and screaming, or with the lure of money – which we did not have, everybody in fact worked for a lot less than they normally do. It really is like trying to find the right kids to play in your sand box. I mean it is very playful; there is that element – you are dressing up in funny clothes and calling each other funny names and putting on make-up. And the set for Crash was very funny, very warm, very relaxed, very enthusiastic. You can’t really tell from a film… I’ve heard that Ingmar Bergman sets were a riot: Cries and Whispers – fun! But I believe it, because you need the balance: the intensity’s there in front of the camera, and then the humour and the warmth and all of that is everywhere else.
There were practical things too. I had a monitor that I used to tape everything we were doing, that was actually showing the image right through the camera (which is very common these days). But there are some directors who don’t allow the cast to watch those monitors, because they’re worried that they’ll become obsessed with looking at themselves and worrying about insignificant things. My technique was to get the best colour monitor that I could, tape everything, and show the actors everything. They had complete access to seeing what they looked like, what they sounded like, at all times. I don’t mean just for the sex scenes, but obviously it was particularly critical there, but for all of the scenes. There were no surprises; it was very collaborative, and they didn’t feel shut out or that there were any hidden agendas or anything like that. It’s also the way I have to work. I wouldn’t be good trying the Oliver Stone thing, I just would be bad at it. So I can’t take much credit for this, it’s the natural way it worked. With these particular actors that was the way to go and it worked beautifully; they were there from the first day.
BALLARD: I got the impression at Cannes that they were still in the movie, actually, that they were still playing their role.
CRONENBERG: They do have trouble separating.
BALLARD: I didn’t want any of them to get into a car behind a wheel.
CRONENBERG: I think they wanted to do Crashes, the sequel.
RODLEY: It sounds very playful and easy, but presumably some of those scenes one’s talking about several takes.
CRONENBERG: Oh, many takes.
RODLEY: For example, the scene where Deborah Unger and James Spader are evoking Vaughan, during that sex scene.
CRONENBERG: It’s gruelling, actually … in the sense that I feel that the characters in the movie ultimately go beyond sex. Certainly, the best ‘walk-out’ moment in the film is when Vaughan and Ballard kiss, because a lot of young men leave at that point. I think it’s because they’ve invested so much of their heterosexual sexuality in this stud James Spader – if they’re seeing the movie that way, anyway – and then suddenly he’s having sex with a man, they can’t deal with it, they walk out.
In a way, I’m saying that the characters are moving beyond sexuality, beyond sex, beyond gender, to some other thing, which they don’t totally achieve by the end of the movie, but that seems to be where they’re going, that’s part of their experiment, that’s part of their escape and their freedom. And in a way that happens on the set. It begins with nudity, what position shall we be in, you have to choreograph it, you have to figure it out. Five hours later, you’re worrying about the continuity of the hair on the pillow and you’re worried about getting the make-up on the pillow, and it’s beyond sex, believe me, and is into some other strange movie thing. And it’s very gruelling, and the art is to make it look like it was one take that you just happened to get and it was fantastic, but of course it takes hours and hours – some of those scenes took days to shoot. They were my special effects scenes, really.
BALLARD: I think one of the greatest scenes in the film, and I think it’s one of the greatest scenes in the entire output of the cinema in this century, is the car-wash scene. I strongly urge those of you who haven’t seen the film to see it and to concentrate in particular on that brilliant scene. Sound is used in a way that I’d never known before in almost any kind of film. I was saying to Dave half-an-hour ago that except for The Tell Tale Heart, an early 1930s film based on an Edgar Allen Poe story where the heart-beat mysteriously from this body buried under the floorboards begins to dominate the life of the character, apart from that film there’s no film I know where sound has played such a role… those whirling rollers hitting the glass and all that foam, it is an extraordinary combination of all the effects that the cinema is capable of. It’s a virtuoso piece of film making… All the rest you could have dropped, actually!
CRONENBERG: Well, I do have it playing constantly on my wall of the living room at home. It’s also the longest car-wash scene in history, I think I can vouch for that. When Ted Turner, for example, says ‘I rue the day when teenagers will start to do copycat things based on Crash’, I’m thinking ‘They’re going to take long car-washes with their girlfriends; that is going to be scary.’
RODLEY: You mentioned that you met with Burroughs when you were doing Naked Lunch and talked about his life. That reminds me of Crash because you didn’t talk in that way to each other, but you had actually said at one time that it was your most autobiographical novel. I wonder if you could elaborate?
CRONENBERG: The first thing that struck me when I started to read the book was that the main character was called James Ballard. This is very unusual, especially when it’s that book. It does lead one to say ‘Did you live this? How accurate is this?’
BALLARD: Not literally, but in the mind of course. I chose to call the narrator in my novel Crash by my own name simply because these were my fantasies. I mean I was writing the book in the first person and I thought ‘Do I invent a character called David Alexander or whatever?’ No, why invent a character whose working his way through this extraordinary landscape when I can simply use my own name and give this novel what I think is a degree of honesty that would be absent otherwise? I mean by the same token in a way you should have called the character David Cronenberg. Of course, you don’t have first-person narration in films. Unless you’d used a voiceover which I would have rather liked actually. But I know, it’s so old-fashioned.
CRONENBERG: It never works. That’s the usual cop-out when somebody is doing a movie of a book, and then they feel that they haven’t got the book so they get [somebody] to read the book. I really didn’t feel it worked in Apocalypse Now. There are one or two where it can work because it’s used perhaps in an ironic way; there’s a voiceover in the movie Badlands which I think works very well.
BALLARD: It worked in classic films of the 1940s and 1950s, didn’t it? Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Without the voiceovers they would be very alienating movies. Shakespeare used the voiceover: it’s called the soliloquy. If you look at Hamlet or Macbeth, most of the characters are extremely unpleasant; if you look at Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard or Badlands, the characters are all extremely unpleasant, yet the voiceover bridges the gap between audience and characters. I think you’re right that using a voiceover in your film of Crash would have spoilt the film because in a way it would have said we need to bridge a gap.
Where David’s film is so original is that it introduces this extremely threatening subject matter but doesn’t distance it in any way. If you think of films like Blue Velvet – brilliant film, a masterpiece in its own way – it’s far more violent than Crash and there’s perverse sex in it which is at least as perverse as anything in Crash. Reservoir Dogs is another extremely violent and crude and brutal film, much more likely to incite young men to dangerous behaviour than anything in Crash. But in both those films there’s a distance: you watch them and you think this is all happening to these perverted nightclub singers and gangsters.
In Crash there is no distance, the characters are you in the audience, there’s no way you can escape. When I wrote Crash 23 years ago people interviewed me at the time thinking ‘What is this book?’ And I said I wanted to write a book where the reader had nowhere to hide. And I think the filmgoer watching David’s film has nowhere to hide. The people on screen are the people in the audience. You may say ‘For God’s sake, that’s all rubbish. I don’t get turned on by the idea of car crashes.’
CRONENBERG: Or you might say ‘I’m not as cute as James Spader’, and you might be right.
BALLARD: But I think there’s no distance between the characters on screen. That’s what’s so frightening – and a voiceover would have used a bit of distance; it would have said, ‘I don’t want you to feel worried, you people in the audience, this is a strange film, but this is how it happened.’
CRONENBERG: After I screened the first cut of the film for one of the American distributor’s executives, he said, ‘I don’t know how people are going to access this film.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t either.’ And then he said, ‘I’m gonna make a suggestion now and I know you’re gonna hate it.’ I said ‘Voiceover, right?’ He said ‘Right, voiceover.’ What he really wanted was the voiceover to be a voice of comfort and to explain the film to everybody. That’s actually what he wanted. He was very insistent and it took quite a long time, until its success at Cannes, until it had some success in France – quite a lot, seven hundred thousand people saw it and no-one ran amok, and quite a few people managed to access it – that he began to relax. But until that point, he was very insulted that I wasn’t at least trying it. I knew it wouldn’t work. I said to him I actually don’t know what the voiceover should say: ‘When Vaughan appeared that evening, my heart raced. I was terrified.’ Or ‘the reason that I did this was…’. You can see all the silly things…
RODLEY: Obviously a lot of the criticisms that have arisen come out of a sort of moral outrage…
CRONENBERG: I don’t think it’s obvious; I think that’s the pretence. But I don’t think it’s real moral outrage at all. A lot of that outrage is from people who have not seen the film so how can they be outraged; really, how can they dare they say those things if they have not seen the film? They’re being outraged because other people are outraged and it all goes back of course to Alexander Walker who up until last week was probably the only one in Britain who had seen the film; it all came from his initial ‘Beyond The Bounds Of Depravity’. Even with that I had problems because if you’re beyond the bounds of depravity then you’re not within the country of depravity, you’re somewhere else, so he hasn’t really told us much.
BALLARD: The first reader of my publisher who came across Crash in 1972, the year before it was published, was the wife of a famous TV psychiatrist – and I think she had some sort of psychiatric training herself – (the first wife, I may say) and she said in her reader’s report to the publisher, ‘The author of this book is beyond psychiatric help.’ My reaction was: ‘Total artistic success.’ I feel the same about the reactions to your film.
CRONENBERG: In fact, you have been beyond psychiatric help, haven’t you? Which is fine – it means he’s healthy, no problem.
BALLARD: What David doesn’t realize is that the screening of Crash at the London Film Festival has coincided with this panic that the present Conservative regime feels in the face of almost certain electoral defeat next May. They’re climbing aboard every conceivable bandwagon, as they’ve done in their flustered state for the last couple of years: a child is savaged to death tragically by a pit bull and legislation is immediately cobbled together and enacted in a great flurry of moral righteousness to ban all aggressive dogs – rightly maybe; the tragedy of Dunblane where 16 small children are shot dead by this middle-aged paedophile a year ago – a ghastly crime and a terrible thing to happen to the children and their parents. A town councilor is quoted in one of the papers today as linking Crash, David’s film, in some way to Dunblane and the murder of a school master, Philip Lawrence, earlier this year tragically by one of his fifteen year old pupils on the street outside his school in North London.
The political parties are really in a degenerate state. You see this in the United States: no-one cares who’s elected president because it doesn’t really matter. We’re moving into the irrelevancy of politics; those who occupy the 650 seats or whatever in the House of Commons are desperate to seize the moral high ground; they’re climbing on every conceivable hobby-horse. Crash has suddenly got on to their radar screen and they’ve locked on to it. It’s a shame in a way because it has nothing to do with the film.
RODLEY: That doesn’t totally explain though why there was, I assume, less of an outrage when the book was published as opposed to the flak that the film might get. Is that to do with an assumption on behalf of the people who are guiding morals that less people read …
BALLARD: Yes, I think there’s no doubt about that. Cinema is the dominant form in which the twentieth-century imagination shapes itself. It’s even more powerful I think than television which on one level has a greater sort of daily influence. TV surrounds us like all those packets of cornflakes in the kitchen and the Mixmaster and the washing machine and the packet of Daz and so on, but film is where the twentieth-century imagination really expresses itself. I think the book, the novel, tragically, is moving towards irrelevance. People are not outraged by novels anymore, they were once but not now, film is the dominant medium. But we and the novel still supply a kind of … you can’t quite dispense with us yet!
CRONENBERG: The interesting thing for me is that the cinema has always been fed by literature, hugely, right from its inception, and writing is still a crucial part of film making. Whether it’s a novel or not, the writing is important – the written word is still there. When I began to make films, I had to write my own scripts because there was no other way to do it; I had no resources other than my writing. I was very arrogant and condescending in terms of adaptations… why someone has to use a book. I used to think about Kubrick going through book after book after book, looking for something that he could cling to, and I’d think ‘I don’t have that problem’ – and I didn’t.
But when I did The Dead Zone I was surprised to find that it didn’t feel that much different to me. Somehow in the process of making the film you kind of fuse with the material and it’s almost as though the book was a dream that you had. You wake up and have this dream called Crash. I don’t mean by saying that that I’m diminishing what the book is; obviously the movie wouldn’t exist if the book hadn’t existed. But somehow it feels as close to you, making the film, and I realize that it doesn’t really matter where it comes from, whether it’s a song or a play or a book, for the film maker – if it works, you’ve fused your own self with it and it feels all of a piece. So I’ve stopped worrying about that: am I going backwards by adapting something else, or should I not write something original? It seems to be irrelevant.
RODLEY: We now have some time for questions.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: What did you have to leave out of the film? With a two hour film or whatever you can’t put everything in. How did you make your decision about ‘I must put this in, I must leave this out’?
CRONENBERG: It’s a strange process. I didn’t re-read the book, I didn’t have the book open beside me, I didn’t have it marked up on the wall. In fact I wrote the script not having read the book for a couple of years. What you do is a kind of self-hypnosis with some mantras and other stuff and you just hope that the spirit of the book is there in you, and you start to write. Eventually you do go back and start to check how things were configured in the book, but you really have to suffuse yourself – not just with the book, but with ‘Ballardism’… just as I became engulfed in Burroughsiana. You only really have your intuition to guide you – it’s a strange thing, and it’s not really a question of ‘shall I leave this in or out?’
For example, the Liz Taylor thing – I didn’t think twice about it: it was gone, there was no question in my mind. It was only after the fact, when you’re doing interviews, when you’re talking to people about it, that you become analytical about these things that you were in fact totally intuitive about doing. It just felt wrong, I just knew that it wouldn’t work. You do try things on paper, if they don’t work you shuffle things around. It’s not really analytical, it’s not a calculation, it really is more like an invocation to be suffused by the spirit of the book and the author. Although that sounds a bit vague, it’s very palpable and real and tangible when you’re doing it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
BALLARD: How has film affected me as a writer, with reference in this case to Empire of the Sun, which is full of film imagery? Right from the age of seven or eight I was a big film-goer, with my parents, with my nanny, it was a form of a babysitting. What TV is as a babysitter today, I think film was in the 1930s. When my parents couldn’t stand this hyperactive child charging around the place they would tell the Chinese nanny or the White-Russian nanny, ‘God! Take him to the cinema!’ So I loved sitting in these huge empty cinemas, giant theatres – ten times the size of this one – in Shanghai watching films. I adored films and I’ve always tried to make my novels like films because I think film has got the grammar and the language in the way the twentieth-century imagination sees itself. So I’d like to think that my fiction, which some people find very difficult, is, in fact, very close to cinema. I know a film maker like David would say ‘what rubbish!’
CRONENBERG: I wouldn’t dare say that.
BALLARD: Cinema is so important, there’s no question about it.
CRONENBERG: It’s an interesting thing for me because some time ago I interviewed Salman Rushdie for a magazine in Canada and one of the things I asked him was, ‘Do you think that the cinema is an inferior art form to the novel?’ And he looked at me as though he didn’t know what I was talking about because he too had been raised in cinema.
And yet Bergman always felt that he was not a real artist, because for him, growing when he did, real artists wrote novels. That’s why he published his four screenplays; he rewrote them so that they would be more literary, they weren’t really like screenplays at all. I suppose there is that lingering, it might be Victorian, residue.
But there are things you can do in fiction and writing that you simply cannot do in cinema and vice versa. I don’t really think one supplants the other; they enhance each other, and they reflect on each other, ideally that would be the way it would be. I think to read the book of Crash and see the movie of Crash together would be a much richer and more dynamic experience than to experience either one alone. I don’t think it would be great for fiction to become cinema, to become an inferior version of cinema, or vice versa. I have great respect for the art of fiction, huge in fact.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
CRONENBERG: Are we saying the same thing? (I’m saying this for the mikes, here.) Do we feel we have been saying the same thing with the book and the movie? I believe definitely not, although there are many overlays and crossovers. At the press conference in Cannes, it was quite interesting because we had heard that the press were very divided and vocal about the film and there were almost fist fights and yellings and screaming and stuff. Then we had to move our press conference into the big theatre because there were 300 press, three times as many as the normal press screening, and we were all up there ready for a fight; we had five actors, and producers and Jim and myself – we were ready for a fight. One of the first things that came up was a Finnish journalist who said ‘I think that the movie just does not go as far as the book’, and Jim said ‘I completely disagree with you, I think that the movie goes much further than the book. In fact, the movie starts where the book ends.’ That ended that discussion, and after that the press were very sweet. In a way it was too bad. We were ready for a fight. Holly, as you say, she was ready.
I completely understood that not to mean at all that the movie was better than the book or anything like that, just that it did go off in a different direction. Part of it is the time; the book is 25 years ago, and we are now, and I couldn’t possibly go back to that sensibility even if I wanted to. But I do believe that the two are quite different in many, many ways, which is another reason why I asked about the cautionary tale element and so on, because some journalists (there are some intelligent ones) would say ‘Do you think that your movie is a cautionary tale, and I would say ‘No’ – I don’t feel it that way.
Now it’s conceivable that with the perspective of time I might see it much more that way, but to make the movie I had to do, really, what Jim did, which is to be the character. I had to live that life and that is why in the movie there is no superimposed false moral stand taken by the film-maker. It was like a lab experiment in a way, I wanted the characters to be allowed to do what they’re going to do, go where they go, and see what happens. If I am always there looking over their shoulder, saying ‘See, this is now bad. Now what you’re doing, see, this is bad’, it deranges the film. Even if that might be the effect that it has afterwards, during the course of making the film you can’t feel that way about it.
The moral stance as understood by Hollywood is almost a narrative device, or it’s a part of characterisation. You have to give the character moral indignation, you have to be, as a filmmaker, morally outraged. But how many times have we seen films from Hollywood in particular, where we know that no-one involved in the film gave a damn about that aspect of it, it was just there as a plot device, to motivate the character to jump on the bus or to take his gun, finally, out of the drawer: a mechanical device. What I wanted to do, and certainly what I felt when I read the book was that it would be much stronger and much more revealing absolutely to accept that that was not the project, to forget that now, and after the fact and in the course of time you begin to see what meaning the movie might have.
BALLARD: I think that’s the key thing. The absence of a moral frame around the film (the same absence that is present in the novel) is what’s so original about it. If you think of the huge output of violent films from Hollywood, all the Die Hard films and so on, Broken Arrow, or whatever comes along this week, there’s always a saving moral frame: the hero is working for the CIA or whatever it may be. Bruce Willis is not allowed to play a baddie, he’s always on the side of the powers that preside over our world and hold it together. What I’m really impressed with about your film, because it’s much more difficult in a public medium like the cinema to bring this on, is the way you eliminated the moral, you’ve dispensed with the moral frame. You present the events of the film without any apparent easy get-out for the audience, or for the characters within the film. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film in which there is no moral frame in quite the same way; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film where there is no attempt whatsoever to moralise away the events being portrayed. I think that’s your film’s originality: you present these extraordinary events, as you said in your interviews here, as a sort of metaphor for a larger fusion of all sorts of challenging ideas but without any attempt to justify within a conventional moral calculus what is going on. Now that, I think, is the main achievement of the film; that’s not something that one wants to say too loud, but that is its great achievement.
CRONENBERG: One critic did say to me that the most frightening thing for him about the movie was this lack of a moral stance, and I said but in a sense that is the subject of the film, and to impose one would be to subvert what the movie was all about, it would also suggest that I had the answer and I don’t, so the movie also raises questions that I don’t have answers for, so I wanted to let the characters say, ‘Well, what Vaughan is doing, maybe it would be good’, in order to allow him to continue to the end of the film. It’s interpreted, though, in quite a different way by people. I truly don’t believe that if we tacked a little moralising ending on to the end of the film – where they were all arrested and confessed that they had done bad and were misguided -– that the press hysteria would be different. I’m not sure that it would … maybe it would. I’m not so sure.
BALLARD: The press need a get-out. One’s got to stand by whatever one believes in. Crash, both book and film, would have been meaningless if some sort of explicit moral justification was tacked around all this material. The moral framework, if there is to be one, is provided by the audience; the novel and the film are each an extreme hypothesis. As I see it, these tendencies are inscribed in the world in which we live, this strange fusion of sexuality and violence and sensation and this affectless realm that is the late twentieth century. Where do the lines on this graph seem to lead? Crash, film and book, represents the end point, an extreme extrapolation, beyond the graph paper, of where these lines are leading. It’s not a prophecy, it’s just an extrapolation if you like, no moral point is being made but perhaps the truth is being reached. In the case of your film, that is achieved by the narrative drive and the accumulation of images that drive the film towards credibility. I think the film does arrive at a point of credibility. Whether one likes this point of arrival, whether one wants to get off this particular train and face up to what stands around the platform, is a different matter, but it’s nothing to do with moral frameworks.
CRONENBERG: So, we began by talking about the differences and we’ve come back to the similarities. Maybe we meant exactly the same thing… I’m not sure.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
CRONENBERG: Let me give you my little rap about that. That also might also illuminate some of the differences, although we might once again end up not disagreeing. It’s not really a matter of disagreeing, it’s almost a matter of different interpretation of the same thing.
For me, this movie is a kind of existentialist romance (I mean that literally, the card-carrying existentialist meaning of that word) in the sense that the characters have found that the old forms of love and sex and relationship and many other things no longer work; they’re going through the motions but it’s not working. And because of an epiphany that one of the characters has in a car crash – which breaks his car, breaks his body – the nice little lines of traffic which give you the illusion of order and control are immediately destroyed in the chaos of any kind of car crash, and so suddenly you’re crossing all the lines, the cars are spinning, you don’t know what direction you’re facing in. I give the Ballard character a very boring car; it’s comfy, it’s cosy, it’s completely acceptable, it’s understood, non-threatening; and suddenly that’s torn apart, his body is torn apart, the traffic is chaotic, and his life is also torn apart, and he’s got to put all of those things back together again. He finds they won’t go back together again because they had been coming apart anyway. He meets another group of people who have gone through the same thing, and they begin to embark on a process of reinventing all of these former absolutes, which turn out to not be absolutes: sexuality, eroticism, many other things, and that’s the trip that they go on in the movie. They arrive at a very strange place, but in a way for the characters it’s a bizarrely happy ending – I think this movie has a happy ending, because the two main characters have come somehow to find a way to come back to each other even though it’s in an extremely strange place.
And I happen to think that that’s a legitimate metaphor for what does happen in each individual’s life, I think we end up in a very strange place. So that’s my interpretation – on one level – of the movie. And it might not be my interpretation of the book; in fact, it wouldn’t be. So that’s the difference – and yet I think that the movie is also the book: it’s a strange, multi-layered interconnection between the two.
BALLARD: The question was asked – what is this platform that I referred to? The name of the platform is love. This is a love station. Crash, bizarrely you may think, is actually a love story between the two principal characters.
CRONENBERG: Now, do you see the book that way?
BALLARD: ….yes. But I think you bring out that element which is implicit in the novel, I think you make it explicit. The film is very much a love story. Those who think, like a present member of the British Cabinet, who’s got all excited and seems to think that David’s film is the biggest threat to the sanity of the British since mad-cow disease – she’s not seen the film, of course, but so what – she should be told that this is a love story. Being serious, this is one of the few ways left to the late twentieth century perhaps to meet itself with deep love and affection. The film is a love story between Spader and the beautiful Deborah Unger, playing husband and wife; the film is the story of their rediscovery of their love for each other. I’m not being flippant…
CRONENBERG: It’s very difficult, it shows you where we are – it’s very difficult to say that these days without it meaning something very weak and stupid.
BALLARD: It’s a romance. It’s a romantic film. One shouldn’t be afraid of saying …
CRONENBERG: No. I agree, we have to say it. But if you say existentialist romance, it gives a little toughness don’t you think?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Both of you as artists have always drawn a very clear distinction between your fairly extreme artistic imaginations and your more conservative day-to day lives. The question is, how do you react to the fact that the majority of people seem unwilling to accept that distinction?
CRONENBERG: Are you kidding? You should have seen him at Cannes – he was an animal! It is strange, though it is very understandable. A mildly famous moment in my life was when Marty Scorsese told me that he had been terrified to meet me because he had seem my movies – this is the guy that made Taxi Driver, he was afraid to meet me! He was very relieved to see that I looked very much to him like a Beverley Hills gynecologist. Of course, that was before I made Dead Ringer…
But the relationship of an artist to his work is a quite strange, complex, intricate one, that would lead Jim to say that Crash is more autobiographical to him than Empire of the Sun is. He did say that, and people might scratch their heads, and say ‘how can that be?’ It is a true statement, but it has to be interpreted – it is an interior autobiography, or an interior search. It’s not a one-to-one relationship: what you are, how you live… There is a sense that what you put up on screen as a film maker is what you fear – not what you live, not what you have, not what you wish for, but what you fear or what you want to control. The cinema is a great place for people to exorcise their anxiety and fear by allowing it full rein in the cinema and then you walk out and, unless you’re in New York, you’re someplace else. But if you’re in New York, you go out of the cinema … same place.
It’s not a one-to-one relationship. But it’s very difficult to convey that to people who’ve not actually experienced it themselves, and most people don’t… I think most people do but they’re not aware of how they do it – even someone who should know better, another film maker, could worry that the film maker was going to be what his work is as a director.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Largely inaudible]
CRONENBERG: But I love that film Peeping Tom. The socially redeeming feature thing is a prickly one. My first response would be that I pray that I will never make a film with socially redeeming features, because that’s normally meant to mean some school-mistressy kind of moralistic fable. That even though you get the titillation of seeing naughty things, at the end it’s OK because what it’s really teaching you is that you weren’t really titillated by what you were.
Peeping Tom is a brilliant film. In its day I think it caused more of a stir than Crash and in some ways did destroy Michael Powell’s career, which on that level was an absolute tragedy. It just was ahead of its time, or out of its time, as some of the best art always is, and was not understood at all – especially since he was a film maker who’d been considered quite classy and respectable and artistic, and then suddenly he makes this grotesque horror film about a psychotic and seems to take some pleasure in it. This was a very disturbing film for people, and I think now it still is, even though it has been imitated by many lesser film makers hundreds of times. It is still a very powerful film. (I don’t know if I actually answered a question there.)
BALLARD: I agree. I saw Peeping Tom when it first came out. There are sort of tacky things about Peeping Tom that immediately unsettled the reviewers. As David said, it eclipsed Michael Powell’s career virtually, for many, many years. The tackiness is partly that Soho world that the insane camera killer inhabited. Also, the partial absence of that moral frame unsettled people, the same problem that some people find with David’s Crash.
CRONENBERG: Yeah, because he was really allowing the main character a chance to express himself at all levels including very human and sympathetic ones.
BALLARD: Yes, the insets of what appear to be home movies – which I think in fact were real home movies (the father, the nominal father in Peeping Tom was in fact Powell himself) – created an ambivalence in the spectator’s mind, that the film maker in some way sympathized with Carl Boehm, the German actor playing the killer. It was, no doubt about it, a very unsettling film. But it was still within the formulas of the psychopathic movie; Crash is light years ahead of it, there’s no doubt about that. … No, I mean it.
CRONENBERG: He could be wrong, but I know he means it.
BALLARD: Because Crash defines its own terms, which Peeping Tom did not. Peeping Tom accepted the rules laid down by a certain kind of horror cinema; the whole film is saturated in conventions of dark alleyways, and cobble-stoned little backyards, and prostitutes’ horrid little boudoirs – Soho 1967 or whatever it was. It was saturated in the conventions; in appearance it was a very conventional film. Crash is not a conventional film, there are no conventions that Crash is relying upon – that’s the originality of David’s film. He’s not relying on any established conventions: the horror film, the film noir, or whatever. Crash, David’s film, creates its own rules from scratch. That’s what’s unsettling about it because you can’t take refuge, you can’t say ‘this is something like some other film’, you can’t escape the thing, it’s coming at you like a runaway truck. Peeping Tom was well within a certain set of conventions – great film, no question about that.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
CRONENBERG: I found right away that there was a formalist issue with Crash. When several Italian journalists at Cannes went back to Italy and reported that this was a totally pornographic film. In Cannes at the time there was a channel on the television in your room at the Carlton Hotel playing hard-core porn 24 hours a day …
BALLARD: We never found the button!
CRONENBERG: …to turn it off! I was watching that and thinking about my film and saying ‘There’s no similarity. What are these journalists talking about?’ Then I began to realize, the movie opens with three sex scenes in a row. This is a formal atrocity for almost any movie that you can think of because it’s just not done – you may have one sex scene, then you go to something else, but the three in a row really confuses people, then there are other sequential sex scenes, which is really very rarely done. Normally, in a Hollywood film in particular, but in other films, you have a sex scene and if people don’t like sex scenes or they’re not very interested, they just shut-off while that’s happening and wait for the movie to get going again. The scene is sort of modular – you can take it out and it wouldn’t really affect the movie. But in Crash when there’s a sex scene on screen it is the movie, there is no other movie to start again. People sometimes giggle or they have very strange reactions when after one sex scene there is another, and then there’s another. But the problem is that they might stop watching, they might do that ‘turn-off, wait for the movie to get going again’, and then they’ve missed the movie.
It’s also the juxtaposition of the sex scenes that tells you things – the reactions of people from one scene to the next. There is a sexual language involved; whether they have an orgasm or they don’t is telling you something about what’s going on, it’s not a frivolous thing or a peripheral thing, it is the subject at that moment. I don’t want to claim that there’s never been another film that’s done that, but obviously most people haven’t seen one like that. There are those problems when you are trying to play with cinematic form. It’s not as extreme as, let’s say, Pillow Book, where you know that you’re playing another game entirely, it’s not any kind of a narrative movie in the normal sense. Here, you see an attractive, young, upper-middle class couple, and they’re having affairs … ‘is this going to be Fatal Attraction or something?’ But then the way they speak, the way they relate to things, and the way they react to things is quite odd and dissonant. So I do think that this movie in particular I have actually had the pleasure of having critics admit to me that they didn’t get it the first time, and they had to see it the second time. This is extraordinary, because most critics would never admit that even if it were true, or they don’t go the second time so they never really see the movie. But they’re bouncing off the surface of the film, off the structure the first time, trying to get in and they can’t because they’re not letting go of their expectations based on other movies. The second time they see the movie they know the game, they see the structure, and they relax and then the movie can reveal more things to them.
It’s true that Peeping Tom doesn’t work that way. Whether one is more valid or ground-breaking than the other – I would stay out of that discussion myself, because I think there’s a way that you can work within a genre and still subvert the genre. I think I did that somewhat in The Fly; you can say that it’s a legitimate horror film, yet it’s doing things that are not genre things. It’s an interesting question, the categories and the formulas, and really a film maker is always needing to deal with peoples’ expectations – what do they expect, coming into the cinema? That’s why this press stuff that’s going on is so destructive. Just yesterday someone said to me that he can’t really deal with violence in films, and so he came to Crash cringing every moment, waiting for the hideous things to happen … and they didn’t happen. Three-quarters of the way through the movie he realized that they weren’t going to happen; it is not a violent movie, it’s conceptually violent but it’s not physically on-the-screen violent. I’m not being flippant when I say Braveheart is thousands of times more violent and yet people think it’s just a great historical romp; for children who walk in in the middle of Braveheart it’s not that, it’s quite excruciatingly horrifying. I could say, if I put everybody in Crash in a kilt would that be better, would that give you that distance?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Did you cast the cars as carefully as you casted the actors?
CRONENBERG: Absolutely. Casting the cars was as crucial as casting the actors. Certainly the Lincoln is a character in the movie, and by the end of the movie is almost the reincarnation of Vaughan. So Vaughan becomes the car, they fuse together, they look the same, they smell the same. It wasn’t difficult in terms of the ’63 Lincoln because that’s in the book, and it’s so perfect and potent and with the Kennedy association and all that. The casting was easy; finding the actual cars, we had six of them and cut some of them in half and made a pick-up truck out of one of them so we could shoot from the back. So there was not just one car. The car-wash scene was shot over a series of three days, and part of that was shot in a car that was cut-away.
But I wanted Ballard’s car, as I said, to be quite a boring car. I mean if you’d given that character a Ferrari, that’s saying absolutely the wrong thing. The potency of technology is increased when it’s invisible, and a car that you just jump in every day … . Jacques Villeneuve is a brilliant Canadian Formula One racer and he was on the cover of Wired magazine in his racing suit and it said ‘Jacques Villeneuve: the ultimate man-machine interface?’ I say ‘No, actually not.’ The driver who jumps in his car to go to work and doesn’t think twice about it is the ultimate man-machine interface; that is perfect. Villeneuve is a racer who is always calculating and adjusting and changing and thinking. It’s when it’s invisible and automatic and natural, when you’ve embedded this car, this Dodge Dynasty, into your nervous system … we had to give it a fake symbol because everybody was worried we’d be sued.
Catherine’s car is described as a small white sports car in the book. I had to think: do we give her a nice old Alfa? But you have to take care of an old Alfa, what’s the equivalent? And I came up with a Miata, and the reason it’s not white is my cameraman went crazy when I said it was going to be white, because you’re shooting at night and white reflects and the car would always be overexposed if everything else was properly exposed. So we compromised with silver. So even in that sense, it’s more than casting, it’s cosmetic surgery as well. So the short answer is ‘Yes’.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
CRONENBERG: When you say ‘deliberately’, of course I want to take credit for everything. I’d say that it was deliberate in an intuitive sense because when you’re working with the actors … I mean there’s a scene where Vaughan is hovering over Ballard’s shoulder and he’s smelling him, he’s inhaling him, and he’s almost touching him – it’s very animal-like. Without us being conscious, but finding a style for the dialogue, trying to find a cinematic way to deliver some of the subtle tones of the book, we came up (without all saying ‘let’s do it this way’) … the dialogue was very whispered and very slow and very narcotized, it was described as by somebody – I thought it was a very nice word. But Vaughan is not that, Vaughan is still an animal. In a sense it’s because he, being the furthest advanced along the route that they’re all going to take, is perhaps the free-est of the machinery that they are still engaged in. That’s how I would interpret that, and try to make it my own.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How did Rosanna Arquette get involved in the movie, because the role of Gabrielle seems a very unusual role for any actress to play? How did she feel about that sex scene in the car with James Spader?
CRONENBERG: Ah. Well, Rosanna is a great girl. She had been talking to me about being in a film of mine and she is really not afraid – none of the actors was, they’re all not very conservative actors, as you can imagine. I put that together with the role – the fact she wanted to work with me and that I’ve always thought she was a wonderful actress who’s often not used in the most interesting way. She had a great time in that scene, actually. She loved the shackles; the other women were very jealous that she got to wear all that great gear. In fact they said ‘Instead of having this little scar on my cheek, couldn’t I have a plastic kind of …’. So for her it was great fun. It was odd, because she was nursing her first baby at the time; you see that very clearly, I think, in the film. She’d leap out of the car, which was cut-away in several different ways, and then grab her kid and start nursing her kid with that gear on. She was pretty loose, she was relaxed. Spader was the one … it was physically difficult for him, how jammed and cramped that car is, with the hand controls that keep getting in the way, and all that.
Sex with a disabled person. On a literal level, I guess that’s what it is. In Korea, when the film was shown at the Korean film festival, there was a scandal about this film there, but it was a different kind of scandal. The film was cut, and was not supposed to be cut. No-one knew that it was cut until it was actually being screened because they wanted to gain credibility as an international film festival, and the one thing you cannot do if you want that is to cut films that are being shown at the festival. If you do that, you have no credibility. So here was this film, and suddenly many things were cut from it. One of the things that was cut was that scene – because in Korean society, and I think in many Asian societies, sex with anyone who’s physically disabled in any way is a total taboo. Now whether that holds for what the person’s husband or wife does with them at home alone, I don’t know. But in public it is not acceptable, the idea that a disabled person, a cripple, could have any sexuality, could have a chance to express their sexuality is an absolute taboo. So that is why that was cut, for that particular reason.
In North America, I’ve actually had support from this particular quarter; people who are disabled love that character, because she’s a woman who is not sexually destroyed or disintegrated by the fact that she’s disabled. She in fact incorporates her new destroyed body into her sexuality and uses it as a kind of a new sexuality. And that fits right in with what’s happened to the other characters in the course of reinventing their sexuality, she’s done that herself for her own reasons and that’s why they all work so well together.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [Inaudible]
CRONENBERG: The first thing that Vaughan says when the Ballard character asks Vaughan ‘What is your project? What is this mysterious project that you’re trying to involve us all in?’, he says ‘It’s the reshaping of the human body by modern technology.’ Of course, many of my own films are about that, and frankly I can’t remember whether that line is in the book or not – which is when you know that you’ve fused properly, because I can’t tell which one of us wrote that. But later he doubles back on that and he says that’s not really what the project is, that’s just a crude sci-fi concept that floats on the surface, doesn’t disturb anybody. There I’m talking about my own prior films, you see; I think I did write that line. He says ‘No, it’s really about something else’, and he goes on talking about the car crash as a fertilizing event rather than a destructive event – that’s from the book. This guy, even as radical and crazed as Vaughan is, feels the need to make a moralizing comment on what he’s doing. But he’s not very good at it, he keeps changing and he keeps forgetting what he said before. I got that feeling very distinctly from the book as well, that with Vaughan you never quite find out what the project is, and the reason you don’t is because he’s fumbling for it as well, he’s not a guru who has an incredibly well-defined agenda, he’s someone who is exploring and fumbling.
Rodley (to JGB): would you agree that you never really find out what his project is in the book?
BALLARD: I think that’s a fair point that David’s just made. The book is open-ended, and I think the film is open-ended. It presents a terrain, it’s discussing something that’s been happening since the Second World War, which is – I don’t know what you would call it … the sort of normalising of the psychopathic. Larger and larger areas of what used to be regarded as psychopathic and aberrant behaviour have now been annexed into the acceptable. This has pluses and minuses. We’re much more tolerant on an everyday level of what seems to be, if not psychopathic, at least aberrant behaviour. I mean if you hear that the woman next door has been charged and fined for shop-lifting, your reaction isn’t moral disapproval, it’s probably ‘Oh, poor woman, she’s been through a rough time recently, her husband’s having an affair’, one feels sympathy. This applies to areas of human behaviour, particularly those involved with perverse sex, which my parents’ generation would have regarded as absolutely within the realm of the psychopathic.
We had a case here a couple of years ago where half-a-dozen SM devotees, all taking part in consensual sex, with some very sinister equipment – hammers, nails, and planks of wood – were arrested and charged with some offence under whatever statute. I think they received short prison sentences, and there was a huge debate about this – should people engaging in extreme forms of perverse sex that are no harm to anybody else be allowed to do so. Now I reckon that most people would regard the things that those people were doing as well within the area of the psychopathic. Crash also is exploring that terrain, where I assume the human race is heading.
CRONENBERG: I certainly was well aware of that making the movie, that the psychology of the characters was not normal. This is another formal thing too; it’s a basic tenet of Hollywood film making that the audience must identify with the characters. That’s why you get in the story conferences ‘Can’t Vaughan be a little more sympathetic? Could he have a dog?’ The answer is ‘maybe not’.
These characters are familiar because of the way they look and the world that they live in, but the part that’s unfamiliar is their psychology. Some people think of Crash as sci-fi and I do feel that it does has a very strong futurist element, but the futurist element is this future psychology. Jim has taken a psychology that he sees being the standard psychology in forty years and brings it back to the present – well, now the past, that’s interesting – and gives it to these characters who live in the present, and see what happens. Once again, without saying that it’s bad, that it’s psychotic. That’s why the police are a very minor presence in the book and in the film, because the exercise is not to see what would happen realistically now if people did this, it’s to allow them to do it unhindered, to see where it takes them psychologically. That’s why, to the great confusion of some newspaper writers, I think it’s still legitimate to say that the movie is not to be taken literally or realistically but as more metaphorically. And that’s where the true response to the film will come.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Given your experience lately with the film and subsequent criticisms and comments, do you still feel the same way about American Psycho, which I believe you were interested in?
CRONENBERG: American Psycho was something that I was interested in. First of all, I had read a lot about it, and then an American producer named Ed Pressman, who’s made some very interesting films, sent me a note saying ‘I hear that you love this book, American Psycho, and I have the rights to it and would you be interested?’, and I wrote him back saying ‘I’ve actually never read it, but I would be interested in reading it.’ He sent it to me, and I thought it was a fantastic book. I also thought that, despite everything that I’d read, I had not seen one description of the book that was remotely accurate, including one by Norman Mailer that was supporting it in some ways. Which just shows you. It’s the way I feel most people who’ve only read about Crash have no idea, none whatsoever, about what the movie will feel like when they’re in it.
The book was I found mesmerising and incredibly strange and put me in a very strange place. I thought it was really very literary too, which not too many people said; it was well written, with great love and attention to detail. I did go through a couple of attempts to develop a script from it, one that Brett Ellis did himself as the writer of the book, and one that my friend Norman Snyder, who co-wrote Dead Ringers with me, tried. I began to feel that I could not do that book; I couldn’t find a way to replicate on screen the experience that I had reading the book. You see, when I started to write Crash, I had no idea that it would work – I was very prepared to say at the end of some months of trying to write it that it didn’t work, and that I couldn’t figure out a way to do it. With American Psycho, even leaving aside the incredible hostility that there would be to the movie just because of the book, I didn’t feel that I could find a way to make that work on the screen. And that was the end of it.
RODLEY: I think we have to leave it there
because there’s another movie at nine o’clock. Thanks everyone for coming.
The post ‘Crash Talk’: A Q&A with David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard, London, 1996 appeared first on Ballardian.
