Beyond the Multiplex

David Cronenberg on his gritty film "Eastern Promises" and being "hot for 10 minutes" (an interview and podcast). Plus: The charming "Great World of Sound" and more.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Read more: Andrew O'Hehir, David Cronenberg, Movies, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews, Beyond the Multiplex, Salon Conversations

Sept. 13, 2007 |

To listen to a podcast of the interview, click here.

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At age 64, David Cronenberg has become, as he dryly puts it, "hot for 10 minutes." When I interviewed him on the release of "Spider" five years ago, we hung out for an hour in an empty production office talking about Russian novels, his Toronto childhood, experimental films of the '70s and what's wrong with contemporary horror movies. Things have changed. When I caught up with Cronenberg this week at his New York hotel, he had only a few minutes to meet in the bar, where we could barely get served amid the crowd of BlackBerry-toting media execs. Nabokov was not on the agenda.

What came in between, of course, was "A History of Violence," the erotic, twist-and-turn thriller starring Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello that became both an international hit and the best-reviewed film of 2005. In its wake, Cronenberg is no longer the aging cult-film legend of another day. Now he's a great, gray lion of genre cinema, widely acclaimed as a formal master. (He's been around this particular block before, and is well aware what goes before the fall.) Cronenberg's moody new London-set mob thriller "Eastern Promises," with Mortensen once again in the lead, premiered a few days ago at the Toronto Film Festival (to largely enthusiastic reviews) and opens this week in major North American cities. He was working the press in New York for a day or two, after hopscotching from Toronto to Montreal, and was either heading out to L.A. or back to Toronto next, he wasn't sure.

"Eastern Promises" is clearly among the most-anticipated titles of the year, but I hope it doesn't totally eclipse "Great World of Sound," a simultaneously ruthless and charming character study from North Carolina's Craig Zobel that might be my favorite American indie of the year so far. Made on a change-under-the-cushions budget, it's brilliantly acted, acutely observed and deceptively profound. And the riches continue! This week also brings us a couple of gems in limited release: "Forever," a marvelous study of Paris' legendary Père Lachaise cemetery from Dutch director Heddy Honigmann, one of the world's true documentary masters; and a long-awaited director's cut of "My Brother's Wedding," the virtually unseen 1982 feature by African-American filmmaking legend Charles Burnett.

"Eastern Promises": Blood in the borscht, or a side of London the tourists never see
I often think about David Lynch when I think about David Cronenberg, and vice versa. These two cult heroes are so dissimilar in so many ways, yet they attract similar audiences and draw their water, so to speak, from the same deep wells. Both are informed simultaneously by classic genre movies and by European art film. Both draw on the subconscious in their movies, both are attracted to the grotesque at least as much as the sublime. (You could say that both find each element in the other one.) If you ask me, Lynch could use a little more of Cronenberg's cool control, and Cronenberg could use a dose of Lynch's intuitive dream logic. But that's a topic for another time.

Put their two most recent films, Lynch's "Inland Empire" and Cronenberg's new "Eastern Promises," next to each other and they seem like polar opposites. Lynch's film is a nightmarish interior voyage that has almost no coherent narrative, while Cronenberg's is a tightly plotted, mostly conventional film noir about the workings of the Russian mob in London. (Its screenwriter, Steven Knight, also wrote "Dirty Pretty Things" for director Stephen Frears.) But appearances can be deceiving. I would argue that both films take place in a dream state or imaginary space that is pretty far from observed reality, but that Cronenberg takes pains to disguise this.

I asked Cronenberg about this with regard to "A History of Violence," which struck me as the most overtly Lynchian of all his films. He insisted that the film's Indiana small-town setting was meant to be naturalistic (although he shot all of it in Ontario), while admitting, "I'm constantly treading the line between realism and impressionism." That boundary remains pretty porous in the brooding "Eastern Promises," which is dominated by Mortensen's charismatic performance as a sinister Russian mob chauffeur with a secret tender side (and some other secrets as well).

Shot in some of the grittiest neighborhoods of immigrant-rich south London and the East End, "Eastern Promises" follows Nikolai (Mortensen) as he slowly opens up to Anna (Naomi Watts), an English woman of Russian parentage who has come into possession of a dead prostitute's diary. The journal clearly implicates Kirill (played by Vincent Cassel), the hotheaded son of Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who is both a grandfatherly restaurateur and, as Anna realizes a little too late, the biggest boss of London's underworld. If nothing about these characters or their story is acutely surprising, "Eastern Promises" is nonetheless a dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world of black leather and expensive haircuts, of vodka, cigarettes and hookers; a world of coarse luxuries that periodically erupts into paroxysms of violence.

As I've suggested, I think judging Cronenberg's recent films by standards of realism is inappropriate; the imaginative universe of his movies has changed only slightly since the days when he depicted characters growing new sexual organs ("Rabid") or giving birth to throngs of evil, murderous dwarfs ("The Brood"). There's an expensive veneer of plausibility to "Eastern Promises" that his horror films did not exactly possess, but he's still depicting a world in which everyone's heart holds dark secrets, where men and women remain unknown to each other, and where love is a dangerous, deceptive and disruptive force. (You can listen to a podcast of my interview with Cronenberg here.)

This is a pretty different movie from "A History of Violence," but still, it's a crime thriller directed by you and starring Viggo Mortensen as a sort of shadowy, mysterious central character.

I know. Who'd have thunk it? You see, I didn't decide the timing. There were various other films that floated by after "History of Violence," but they didn't come together and the deals didn't work out. I had been talking to Focus Features and BBC Films about this script a year before they finally came back to me and said, "OK, we'd like you to do this." The timing has nothing to do with what I want and don't want. It's when the money comes together, really. It wasn't calculated.

Creatively, I can see that the two movies would make a very interesting double bill, with all the thematic resonances and character connections that you could make. But that has nothing to do with the making of the movie. In this one, there are no American characters. It doesn't take place in America, and it's a real film noir in the sense that most of it happens at night in a city, whereas there's a brightly lit, rural feel to "History of Violence." And the challenge to Viggo was completely different, really.

Next page: "I don't think about 'Is this a David Cronenberg movie?'"