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.
Thinking of Rob 