Thursday, April 10, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Film: Spider man: An interview with David Cronenberg

By Jeannette Catsoulis

The Canadian Parliament once called him a public menace, and his films--such as Dead Ringers, Videodrome and Crash--have polarized critics and audiences for more than 27 years. Yet the irrepressible David Cronenberg remains coolly above the fray, focusing his considerable energy on movies that continue to challenge and engage us. Spider is his 14th feature.

Mercury: Film critic David Thomson says you have "the mindset that could make cancer a hero," referring to your preoccupation with disease and ability to portray alternate realities.

David Cronenberg: I do believe there's no absolute reality, that what we call reality is very much a created thing. This movie is about the reality of memory, which is nothing less than our identity. Think about it: You can't have an identity if you have no memory. But memory isn't static, it's constantly being re-created and re-imagined.

Someone said when the film shows Spider watching himself as a young boy, he's like a director on a film set. I hadn't intended that, but it really works because in a way he's re-directing these scenes from his past and he's going to re-edit them later. We all do that. We're constantly updating and changing our memories, finding out that things we thought we remembered as a child are actually things we were told about--we weren't even there.

Mercury: The original script had a voiceover narration. Why did you exclude it?

DC: Originally Spider is writing in his journal and we're supposedly hearing what he's writing. But what we hear is a man speaking very articulately about his thoughts and feelings, and I'm thinking, where is this voice coming from? It can't possibly be this character we're seeing, this shabby, confused individual. In the novel, it works; we can accept that someone who is schizophrenic and hallucinating could write coherently. But when we tried to put it on the screen it didn't work at all. So I said to Patrick [McGrath, the writer], look, you've created two very different Spiders and the visual one is the one I want.

Mercury: How involved were you in developing Ralph Fiennes' character?

DC: Ralph wanted a complete collaborator. He needed me to watch him microscopically, constantly making corrections and suggestions. He asked if he could observe schizophrenics and I said, "Yes, if you want, but I'm not interested in doing a clinical study of a disease." To me, Spider is a study of the human condition and I had no intention of even mentioning schizophrenia in the movie. I wanted the character to grow without worrying about whether we were adhering to some checklist of schizophrenia symptoms.

Mercury: Some people feel this film is a departure for you, being both less shocking and less sexual than your other films.

DC: Sometimes journalists confuse their process with mine. I'm not analytical at all, because if I looked at my own films, I would be a critic, not a filmmaker. On the creative level, I'm not thinking about my other films, and I don't have a checklist of themes that have to be included every time. Making a movie is a philosophical endeavor for me, and I talk to myself all the time and try to understand myself and the world in general.

Spider is not an asexual movie, it's just that the sex in it is different. On one level the film is an intense family psychodrama with strong Freudian overtones. The core of the film is the boy's confused sexuality, his manifestation of a kind of Oedipal complex. So for me Spider is just as sexual as anything I've ever done.

Mercury: This film seems to be very personal for you.

DC: I totally identified with Spider, although my childhood and background couldn't have been more different. I don't see him as pathetic or psychotic. He goes to extremes, but in order to illuminate what's universal about human nature you need a character who'll push things to extremes. Spider has pared himself down to bare essentials--the clothes on his back, the stuff in his pockets, his one small suitcase--and what he's left with is simply the essential strangeness that is the human being in all of us.