David Cronenberg's 1996 film, Crash, was banned in London; hislatest film, Spider, is a stark study of schizophrenia set in post-war England. Danny Leigh meets the director who refuses to compromise.
Outside, it's just another morning in London's Soho. The sex shops with the frosted windows are already open for all kinds of business, and the crack dealers have set up stall on the usual corners. David Cronenberg looks down from the third-floor window and squints a little. "Yeah," he says, "you can see I was the moral danger round here." He isn't scrimping on the irony. Here, after all, in the eyes of Westminster Borough Council, Cronenberg was once formally deemed a public menace. The problem was Crash, the director's chilly 1996 take on J.G. Ballard's novel of sex and bad motoring.
To most audiences, the film was more baffling than outrageous; to the area's elected guardians, however, it was deemed to "deprave and corrupt" and was, as such, promptly banned. You could spend all day at the nearby "adults only" Astral cinema, but Cronenberg's essay in carnal bumper-denting was a thrill too far. And now, all these years later, he's back on enemy turf. "Maybe they'll be waiting for me as I leave. Make sure I don't bother any tourists." For a walking affront to decency, he's looking pretty dapper in all-black garb and immaculately coiffed silver hair. But then confounding preconceptions has always been his trademark. How else could you explain a career full of cerebral, deeply reflective movies that just happened to involve rampant sexual parasites (Shivers, his feature debut), the outer limits of gynaecology (Dead Ringers), exploding heads (the infamous Scanners) or insectile typewriters spurting orgasmically (the predictably crazed William Burroughs tribute The Naked Lunch)? "Weird" doesn't even begin to cover it: the long, productive marriage of a peerlessly gooey aesthetic and an ardent fixation with the overlap of evolution, technology and death.
Which, given his contrary make-up, obviously means his latest project is Spider, a stark adaptation of novelist Patrick McGrath's portrait of a British schizophrenic (played by Ralph Fiennes) following his release from an asylum. There is no technology to mutate here - just one man's struggle with his own damaged past.
Between such doleful subject matter and the abandonment of his usual arch-modernist settings for a dank, post-war Whitechapel, the film might seem a departure for its maker. Only, by his own meandering account, it's a wholly natural step for someone raised by Anglophile parents in 1950s Canada "where the queen still gazes serenely from our banknotes".
"In the '60s, of course, I came to London as a student, and I still remember those dingy rooming houses, putting threepenny bits in poorly-maintained electric heaters . . . and a lot of the movies that fascinated me at the time were either made by Brits or had some connection to the place . . . and also - I have to mention this - rock music has always been incredibly important to me . . . I mean, I saw the Stones in, what, '66 . . . at the Palladium, I think . . ." He drifts away, lost in a reverie of nostalgia. ". . . So the idea of somehow coming to terms with Englishness was hugely appealing to me." But Englishness isn't all that's being scrutinised in Spider. There's also mental illness, captured in acute and often harrowing detail by Fiennes. Rather than lapsing into a clinical study, however - "Ralph knew I didn't want a checklist of symptoms in place of a character" - the film chips away at its protagonist's condition to reveal a vintage Cronenberg obsession: the slippery nature of reality.
There's a donnish furrow of the brow. "Well, certainly I've always been intrigued by the lack of definitive perception, and the idea that reality is a willed, created thing. And yes, Spider does deal with the creative element of memory, the idea there's no such thing as a true memory."
And then he turns to more prosaic matters. The "pure joy" of bringing McGrath's book to the screen; of working with both Fiennes and co-stars Miranda Richardson and Gabriel Byrne; how he's proud of the fact that the likes of Videodrome's James Woods and Dead Ringers' Jeremy Irons have turned in probably career-best performances in his movies. His expression only darkens at the mention of money, so tight on Spider that, aside from the director himself deferring his salary, his British crew went unpaid for weeks. You wonder how frustrating it must be, still scrabbling to plug holes in low budgets after years of eager (if sometimes puzzled) critical acclaim. There's a shrug.
"You just get on with it. Dwelling on it would be futile. I mean, had my relationship with Hollywood ever blossomed then I would have been dealing with a world where money is never the problem but everything else is. So if the money has to be hell for the art to be heaven, fine." There speaks the voice of experience.
Because for all his idiosyncrasy, Cronenberg and Hollywood have been batting their eyelids at one another for almost two decades. Along the way there's been the occasional movie made within the studio system (notably box-office hits The Dead Zone and The Fly), a whole lot more he's rejected (including, but not limited to, Beverly Hills Cop, The Truman Show and, remarkably, Flashdance), and some he clambered on board only to see almost instantly capsize. Of the latter, perhaps the most infamous came in the late 1990s, right before his first involvement with Spider - an abortive sequel to Basic Instinct which, after months in pre-production, finally collapsed amid byzantine legal wrangling.
"I don't necessarily think of the executives that fondly, but working with them again isn't an impossibility. That's why the flirtation's still alive." Alive, but never quite consummated - and kept that way, at least in part, by his reluctance to fit into any recognisable genre. For all their futuristic shimmer, his work has little to do with sci-fi; equally, despite the enthusiasm of horror buffs for his gorier moments, he sees the slasher movie and its blood-stained ilk as "usually just incredibly dull".
Instead, to all intents and purposes, his baroque visions have become a species unto themselves. And the result, even without the interventions of enraged London councillors, has been a constant struggle to get his films distributed ("in American cinemas, I may as well not exist"). Yet, in his dry, vaguely professorial way, he refuses to budge.
"I'm aware of what the problem is," he says, breaking into an unlikely giggle. "The problem is me. My taste, my sensibility. I'm curmudgeonly. Always have been. And the older I get the more curmudgeonly I get and I just feel less and less like compromising."
In purely economic terms, it's just Cronenberg's bad luck that the fulfilment he seeks could only come from wrestling with his intellect. Hence his films resemble nothing so much as extracts of his own interior monologue, poised somewhere between the movie house and philosophy tutorial, touching on and occasionally foreseeing everything from AIDS to television's co-opting of reality.
"It's sweet if people think I've prophesied anything," he says, "but what I'm interested in is what it is to be human. So the films are really my investigation of that. For someone like Arthur C. Clarke it's probably kind of a macho feather in the cap if you can say, 'Oh, I predicted satellites decades before they existed.' For me, it's a given that if your antennae are allowed to be as sensitive as they can be, you'll stumble into things..."
But where does that impulse come from? Why wouldn't he be happy with the usual film-making staples of gunplay and one-liners? "That's the mystery. You just can't know whether it's genetic or it's cultural or a combination of both. I just always anticipated being an artist. My father was a writer and my mother was a musician. Is that what did it? I don't know, because lots of artists come from backgrounds which have no artistic ambience at all . . . And yes, I mean, what's interesting and strangely depressing is that young film-makers now don't want to be Bergman or Fellini. They want to be Michael Bay (director of Pearl Harbor).
"And that's fine, that's great - but it's not the same as art. Which I don't imagine is in any way an issue for those film-makers, but for me it always was." He takes another glance out of the window over the fleshpots of Soho.
"The real driving force wasn't to introduce yourself to the world as being a movie director. The point was to be an artist. And for me it still is."
Spider opens on Friday, January 3rd
- Guardian News Service