The words are from Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, a text that echoes through Don Delillo’s 2003 cerebral novel, Cosmopolis, charting the hellish descent of an arch-capitalist from his high rise sanctuary into the streets of Manhattan, the multicultural cosmopolis of the story. The story follows a sleep-deprived young billionaire investor, Eric Packer, travelling across Manhattan one day for a haircut in his stretch limo, losing a vast fortune on online investing, and crashing into the real conditions of life, marriage, mortality, sex, madness and political rage.
From the soundless chamber of Eric Packer’s sound-proof limo to the chilly air-conditioned hallways of a sleek dark Toronto luxury hotel is not much of a transition. Sleep-deprivation, the erasure of national boundaries, money: These subjects are close to the thoughts of director David Cronenberg and his 26-year-old star, Robert Pattinson, this afternoon, at the end of an almost two-week road trip in support of the film. Pattinson, in a baseball cap, slouches in a chair, the director, in an untucked checked shirt, sits next to a table, strewn with half-empty water bottles. Cronenberg waves a weary greeting. He’s too tired to stretch for a handshake, he says. After Cannes, they went to Lisbon, Paris, Berlin and London, meeting press hordes of Pattinson’s teenaged Twilight fans, improbably holding up their copies of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis to be autographed.
“There wasn’t time to unpack. Just get some socks. Try to figure out if they’re used or not,” Cronenberg says. “It was like that.”
For a relatively small movie (with a budget of just over $20-million), the talent is putting in a lot of road time.
“With big movies, it’s usually six or seven countries,” Pattinson says. “But this is way harder getting people to see. For smaller films, they just say, ‘Oh, just New York and London’ or ‘New York and L.A.’ I don’t really understand it.”
“We have the U.S. to come,” Cronenberg reminds him. “I’ve heard both July and August from the U.S. We will be doing New York and L.A.”
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Thinking of Rob 