Do you think Eric Packer is the most stylish character you’ve ever created?
Actually, I think Dr Jung in A Dangerous Method was pretty darn stylish. There is a contemporary quality to Eric that is certainly timely and cutting-edge in that sense. On the other hand, he’s a guy who, like a lot of the financiers that we read about now, the “London Whale” being one of them, really want to be anonymous. They don’t want to cut a great figure in the public eye. Part of their power as investors is anonymity and so although Eric Packer does have a bodyguard in this movie, the bodyguard is there to protect his life, not keep the fans away.
What’s been your worst date?
I never really dated. The thing is I’ve been married for about 37 years and it’s kind of a strange thing because I’ve never done this tradition of dating and pick-up lines. Somebody in Berlin said, “What’s the worst pickup line you’ve ever heard?” I said, “I’ve never given one, at least not consciously”. Rob said his answer for that is “I would look good in your clothes”. I thought that was a pretty good one.
David Cronenberg talks to Francine Stock from ‘The Film Programme’ about ‘Cosmopolis’, casting Rob & his fans at 3:50.
ETA another audio interview added – David talks about Rob in Cosmopolis with France Inter at 11:20 and 28:58. Listen to it HERE
11:12 to 12:55: Is it true, David Cronenberg, that during the shooting of Cosmopolis, you were saying to Robert Pattinson – who’s the lead: “If you understand anything to what we’re doing, we’re lost.”
David: I did say that, I said, because he said: ‘I have no idea what I’m doing with this movie and what this character is.’ And I said: “But you are doing everything perfectly correct.” And therefore, it would be boring and it would lack spontaneity , it would lack inventiveness, if you knew before you made the film everything you need to do in the film. Also, I’ve said many times that you make the film to understand why you wanted to make the film. You don’t even know why you wanna do this film. And I was explaining to him, because he’s a young actor and he did not have the experience, that they are many ways to understand something. It’s not always a sort of logical intellectual way of understanding. It’s more intuitive, it’s visceral. And he has wonderful intiution and mainly when I said that, I was really saying to him: “Trust your intuition, you really have wonderful acting intuitions, you must trust them.”
at 28:24 to 28:58 David: Both DeLillo and Burroughs have wonderful, very funny, very strange, very bizarre dilaogue, and wonderful to hear actors speak. So I’m sure I have absorbed Burroughs from a very early age. The rythym of their speech is very american, I’m Canadian and so when I hear american speech from DeLillo, from Burroughs it’s foreign to me, it’s foreign dialogue. Canadians don’t speak that way. So just as Robert Pattinson, who is English, has to do an American accent when he is in the movie, I too as a writer and a director, I am actually doing an american accent.
By way of preparation, Cronenberg showed his crew the 2009 film Lebanon, which takes place inside an Israeli tank, and 1981 war epic Das Boot, which takes place inside a German submarine.
“I said: ‘Let’s not be intimidated by this, this could be quite exhilarating if we do it right.’ We built a limo that comes apart like a Lego car in about 24 pieces. I don’t think of it as a challenge, but as a lot of fun.”
Robert Pattinson’s performance as the billionaire banker has been largely well received since the film’s Cannes debut.
“At its heart is a sensational central performance from Robert Pattinson,” said Tthe Telegraph’s Robbie Collin. “Pattinson plays him like a human caldera; stony on the surface, with volcanic chambers of nervous energy and self-loathing churning deep below.”
Empire’s Damon Wise observed: “Lean and spiky – with his clean white shirt he resembles a groomed Sid Vicious – Pattinson nails a difficult part almost perfectly, recalling those great words of advice from West Side Story: You wanna live in this crazy world? Play it cool.”
What made Cronenberg choose Pattinson as his leading man? “This character is in every scene in the movie which is quite unusual for a movie with a big star,” he says.
“That means he must have charisma, and that he is constantly revealing different tones and shades – and Rob has that.
“Finally, he has to be good with dialogue because this is wall-to-wall dialogue, some of it quite technical, which can be very intimidating for an actor. Once I convinced him he was the guy, he had no problem with it.”
Cronenberg is closely associated with the “body horror” genre through his 1970s and 80s films such as Rabid, Scanners, Videodrome and The Fly.
Cronenberg has written a screenplay for a new Fly movie, but says plans to make it appear to have been squashed.
“I was interested in not doing exactly a sequel or a remake,” Cronenberg explains.
“It was suggested to me by the people at Fox who have the rights to the original [1950s] movie and my movie, but there was what we should call ‘creative differences’.
“What I was interested in doing and what they wanted were two different things, so it’s no longer in my control. It’s in their court to play.”
Cronenberg laughs when it’s pointed out that Robert Pattinson was born in 1986 – the same year that he made The Fly. “There comes a time as a director when you are no longer the youngest guy on the set – I used to be and now I’m the oldest!”
DD: What struck you about Robert Pattinson to make you think he’d fit the part of Eric Packer?
David Cronenberg: He’s intensely charismatic and watchable and this is a role in which the lead character is in every single scene, and that’s really unusual, even for a movies with big stars. And that means you have to have somebody who people will watch and want to watch and want to listen to. I’d seen some of his movies that were not Twilight and I thought this guy’s got an interesting range and he seems to be a serious actor, he’s really interested in chances and is willing to take chances.
In our exclusive video interview below, Cronenberg talks at length about not only Cosmopolis, but also several of the most significant films from his prolific career.
From casting Twilight’s Robert Pattinson in Cosmopolis, to the controversy that continues to cling to Crash, and from The Fly’s actor-repelling make-up effects to Videodrome’s haphazard shoot, the director talks candidly and articulately, offering incredible insight into how his approach to moviemaking has developed over the years.
So settle in for an audience with Cronenberg, and get watching the video below:
Here’s a new interview with Rob, David Cronenberg and Paul Giamatti from Toronto Press Junket. The video can be watched only in Canada, we’ll add youtube video as soon as possible. *UPDATE* Youtube added
There seems to be a reflection of the Occupy movement in the film – what struck you about that group and how did they inform the film?
David Cronenberg: Well, they didn’t inform the film at all, because we really just stuck to the script – it just happened that what Don DeLillo [author of the original novel] wrote was prescient and clairvoyant, and it felt as if the world was just catching up with him. But for example, Paul Giamatti texted me and said ‘I can’t believe I just saw Rupert Murdoch get a pie in the face’, because we had just shot the scene where Eric Packer (Pattinson) gets a pie in the face! (laughs) It was certainly strange to be shooting scenes about anti-capitalist riots in the streets of New York and then to read about the Occupy movement. But there really are no anti-capitalists in this movie and it’s been noted that the Occupy Wall Street movement is not anti-capitalist; they want a piece of it, they want the 99% to be a part of the capitalist dream. Giamatti’s character Benno loves capitalism and investing and his complaint is that he’s been left behind by Eric, who’s destroyed the way Benno loved to work.
Well, there’s the paraphrasing of the Communist manifesto seen in the film, with banners reading ‘A spectre is haunting the world – the spectre of capitalism’, and you changed the currency that features heavily in the plot from the novel’s Japanese yen to the Chinese yuan…
David Cronenberg: That was just my feeble attempt as an ignoramus in terms of economy to make the film a letter futuristic. Since the book was written, the yen had collapsed, and then you had the tsunami that hit Japan, and suddenly they’re staggering. Now it’s obvious that Don’s ‘look to the east’ was correct but it’s China that will be the world power, and by 2015 the yuan will be a fully convertible currency and therefore might displace the dollar as the world currency.
Here’s a great interview by Hey You Guys: There are some spoilers in the interview but they’re highlighted 😉
With the Twilight behemoth winding down, Robert Pattinson is an actor looking to shake off his teen idol persona and establish himself as a adult leading man. He’s taken the latest step on this road to rehabilitation by teaming up with Canadian body-horror legend David Cronenberg, taking the lead in his adaptation of Don Delillo’s dark sci-fi satire Cosmopolis.
Pattinson is superb as Eric Packer, an arrogant, narcissistic young billionaire who trundles through a dystopian future New York in search of a haircut, while the city, his life and his fortune all crumble around him. The film marks another step in the evolution of David Cronenberg’s career, building on the triumphs of his recent steps away from horror such as Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method, but also retaining a uniquely Cronenbergian world view. It’s also a very timely film, feature a financial crisis and protests in the streets that strongly echo the Occupy Wall Street movement.
We sat down with Davin Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson in London to talk to them about the film.
One of Cronenberg’s answer does include some spoilers for the film, but we’ve clearly highlighted it.
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