Cronenberg determined to keep challenging audience

ORLANDO, Florida ― At 69, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has had his share of movie making ups and downs. His 40 years in film are a perfect illustration of the roller-coaster career.

He was the young prince of shock and horror with “The Brood,” “Scanners,” “Videodrome” ― films that by the late 1980s had led him to “The Fly” and “Dead Ringers.”

There followed a fallow decade, when he made everything from “Naked Lunch” to “Spider,” interesting films which didn’t find an audience.

Then, “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises” gave him a comeback.

But never one to rest on genre success, Cronenberg went and made “A Dangerous Method,” about the Freud-Jung rivalry in the early years of psycho-therapy. Audiences didn’t line up to lie on the couch for that one. And he’s followed that with a film adaptation of novelist Don DeLillo’s “abstract” and “metaphysical” drama about the super-disconnected super-rich, “Cosmopolis,” a film that stars Robert Pattinson but that will challenge audiences in ways “Twilight” never could.

“There are some projects that you cannot dumb down,” Cronenberg says. “Not without destroying them. If I couldn’t adapt the novel as it was with the dialogue as it was it wouldn’t be worth making the movie.”

“Cosmopolis” follows a young lion of finance (Pattinson) as he rides, in his luxuriously appointed limo, from Wall Street across town to the barber he has used since childhood. Over the course of a long day, Eric Packer meets colleagues, has sex and undergoes a prostate exam, shrugs off staggering market losses and ponders the “Occupy”-styled anarchy outside the limo’s windows and his lack of connection to that world. Eric speaks “in philosophical tropes” ― “Talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.”

In preserving DeLillo’s distinct way with dialogue, Cronenberg was willing to run the risk of losing viewers.

“These people in this movie are very articulate, very hyper,” he says. “They’re intellectuals, but I don’t think the audience needs to understand every kernel of what they say.”

What’s important, says the filmmaker, who scripted “Cosmopolis” before directing it, is that you get the gist of the scene, catch the authority in the performance and notice that others verify “that the experts know what they’re talking about. It’s a different approach to drama than your typical movie.”

A filmmaker lumped into the broad category of “critic’s darling” isn’t earning his best notices for this modestly budgeted drama. They range from “vapid” (Time) and “freeze-dried” (Toronto Glove & Mail) to “chilly, crisp and crystal-shard sharp” (MSN Movies). Cronenberg was expecting that. The opening credits, filled with all manner of production partnerships, national and regional film funds, betray how difficult it was just to get this one financed and made.

“I talk about that with Marty Scorsese from time to time, because people also think that he can do whatever he wants, based on his track record,” Cronenberg says. “We share a laugh, a tragic laugh. The answer is no, we aren’t automatically able to get financing every time out. We have to fight for every cent. There are a lot of projects that you’ve never heard of that didn’t get made because even for Scorsese, or for me, if you’re not working within the Hollywood system, it’s hard to find the money.”

He was happy to endure that because he believes DeLillo (“Libra,” “White Noise”) is a great novelist. And not just because “Cosmopolis” seems to connect with the current angst over capitalism’s mania for self-destruction.

“DeLillo doesn’t want to be a prophet,” Cronenberg says. “It’s not in the nature of art to be prophecy. But think of when he was writing this, years and years ago. He saw what was coming. I don’t even have to mention ‘1 percent’ or any of that stuff in the film, it’s a subtext that’s in the book and in the film and everybody understands it without anybody in the movie saying it.”

By Roger Moore

(MCT Information Services)