More Eastern Promises
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Beyond the Multiplex: David Cronenberg
Source: Salon.com
© Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group, Inc
Thanks to greenknight at Viggo Works!
Excellent article with David Cronenberg on his gritty film "Eastern Promises" and being "hot for 10 minutes" (an interview and podcast)
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.
Well, with his hair slicked back and all that black leather, you barely recognize him. People who only know him from "Lord of the Rings" and your previous film may be wondering, "So where's Viggo? And who is this Russian dude?"
That's right, and I'm sure that's one of the attractions for Viggo. This guy is a Russian. He comes from Yekaterinburg in Siberia. He's got to walk like a Russian, he's got to think like a Russian. He speaks English with a Russian accent and speaks Russian fluently. What I've heard from all the Russian journalists so far was that Viggo is perfect, totally convincing. Which is incredibly gratifying. Until we vetted it for some Russians, we didn't know whether what we had done with our Russian consultants had worked. That's been a nice validation.
When you first read Steven Knight's script, what was in it that made you think this was potentially a David Cronenberg movie?
Well, you see, there you've added something that I never add. I'm serious. I don't think about "Is this a David Cronenberg movie?" Because I have no idea what that is. I try to totally forget what I am or what I'm perceived to be, and what people's expectations might be based on my other movies. I think that's very deforming, it will distort your perception. On the contrary, I'm reading this script and I'm in the audience: "Wow, these characters are amazing. They're exotic but real. I've never known anything about this subculture. The streets of London in this movie are not going to be any streets of London you've ever seen in a movie before. The textures, the ancient hostilities brought to the new country, the betrayals, the lack of trust but the need to work together in a criminal globalization." All that was really intriguing and it felt connected to what's going on in Russia today, while still being a fiction, a drama. It really felt relevant.
Of course you have mostly shot in Canada before, and most of your films are set there. This was mostly shot on the real streets of London, right?
Well, there were some major sets: Semyon's restaurant was a set, and the bathhouse [where a major and bloody fight scene takes place]. We did spend a lot of time in the streets of London, but they were the mean streets of London. They were the streets that tourists don't go to. Our English crew loved where we were shooting. They told me, "This is the real London, this is the London that we know. It's where we live."
I was thinking of a line from an early Public Image Ltd. song, "A side of London the tourists never see."
That could have been our theme song.
Something also struck me here: It's been said that to be an English-speaking Canadian is to belong to a culture that's partway between the United States and Britain. You've been bouncing back and forth across that divide: "Spider" was set in London in the '50s. "History of Violence" was set in Middle America. Now you're back to London again. I'm sure that wasn't precisely intentional.
No, it wasn't, but it's true that Canada's relationship to England is quite different from that of the U.S. We started from the same point, but we never cut those ties. We never had a revolution. I mean, we still have the queen on our money! Our relationship to Britain is more congenial, and we feel more connected. The resonances of that relationship are much different.
I was talking with another critic last night about the question of whether this film should be considered realistic. I think I have two answers. Obviously you spent a lot of time and money making the clothes, the settings, and the accents appear authentic. On the other hand, all your films, including this one, seem to exist in a time and space and reality that is your vision, rather than in some objective real world.
Well, how could they not? If you're doing a documentary you're doing a documentary. But as Michael Moore and Ken Burns and all those other documentarians will tell you, they think they're doing fiction anyway. It's a creative thing, an illusion of reality. As a director, you make 2,000 or 3,000 decisions a day that are unique to you. They flow through your nervous system, your culture, your background, your education, your visual sense. You cannot avoid that filtration system. It filters out other people's versions of reality and you don't have to struggle to make it your own. There's no way to avoid it, frankly, because of the nature of what directing is, or certainly the way I perceive it.
But I love being in those real streets. I love owning the streets at night. My favorite thing is shooting in the streets at night when everybody else has gone to bed and there's just us doing our thing. There's no hangers-on, there's no partying, it's just us. But then the streets become your set. It's all a set; the whole city is your set.
One point of connection between this film and "History of Violence" is that Viggo plays a character whose true nature is hidden from us. He's this career criminal, an almost stereotypical Russian gangster who does terrible things. But he has other dimensions we can't see.
Part of that is because we don't know what a man in that position would really be like. Being the chauffeur to the boss' son in a crime organization means you've got to be pretty discreet and controlled, especially since the boss' son [Kirill, played by the French actor Vincent Cassel] is wild and volatile. You're there to take care of him and make sure he doesn't kill himself. You're controlled and you don't give much away, because it's not your show, it's his show. At the same time, you're ambitious, you want to move up, you're observing everything, you're calculating, you're planning your next move. Well -- would somebody like that have no sense of humor? Would somebody like that not flirt with a pretty girl on the street? Maybe he would. Would he have absolutely no kindness or gentleness? I'm not sure that he wouldn't, you know? I think that's just real; everybody is pretty complex. Even Stalin could be nice on a given day.
I understand he was highly sentimental, actually.
Well, Armin Mueller-Stahl said, when we talked about his character [the mob boss Semyon], "All monsters are sentimental." That's how they manage to express their emotions when on other occasions they have to be incredibly controlled and emotionless. So it goes into a strange and structured place; sentimentality is a very structured version of emotion. Viggo's character also -- it's not unrealistic to think that he might behave that way. Whether that indicates something more profound and deep or not is another question.
The linguistic challenge of this movie must have been immense. We have three principal actors, an American [Mortensen], a Frenchman [Cassel] and a German [Mueller-Stahl], all playing Russians living in England. So they had to have some version of an English accent, with a Russian accent ...
On top of that, yes. And we have a Pole, Jerzy Skolimowski [himself an acclaimed filmmaker]! We had two language coaches on set at all times. One was an Englishman watching the Russian accent when English was spoken, and another one was a Russian watching when Russian was spoken. It was a very specific Russian, because it's a slangy, criminal Russian, not formal or academic Russian. You take Vincent Cassel, whose English is pretty good, but he normally speaks with a French accent and he had to warp that into a Russian accent.
To add to the complexity, we had the question: What is the relationship of each of these people to the English language? At what point in their lives did they learn English, and who did they learn it from? We assumed that Viggo's character learned English in Russia, maybe just at school, so he has the thickest accent. We assumed that Kirill, Vincent's character, came to England when he was about 17, so his accent is more English-inflected. Armin's character is more mysterious: Where did he learn English and how long has he been speaking it? There are different levels of accent strength in each case.
It's almost like a metaphorical way of seeing the ambiguity or the mystery in all these characters. It's right there on the surface.
I think so. We used to say, "This movie is about language," and we meant that metaphorically as well.
In case some of your longtime fans are wondering whether there's any blood and gore in this movie, and whether you use any special effects, the answer would be yes.
Oh, a little bit. People have said that this movie is very violent, but in terms of screen time, it's very little. There are only three scenes, although one of them is longish, I suppose. [Mortensen's character does protracted bloody battle with a pair of Chechen would-be assassins, while stark naked in a bathhouse.] When you consider the body count of "The Departed" or "The Sopranos," ours is pretty darn low. The difference is that I take it seriously in terms of realism, and the camera does not look away. We've had a long discussion about why I do that, but I have very good reasons. That's why the impact of those scenes goes beyond screen time.
How has the success of "History of Violence" changed your career. Has it made projects possible that weren't possible before?
I believe it has. I'm hot for 10 minutes, you know? I take it with a grain of salt, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Suddenly people are considering me for scripts that I guarantee you they would not have considered me for before "History." If you showed them "Spider" as my last movie, they would blanch. They'd get very nervous. Because it's an art film with a capital A, and it's low budget. My most expensive film is still "History of Violence," which cost $32 million. This one was around $27 million. When people hear about movies costing $180 million, they may think that's peanuts. But in fact, everyone involved takes $26 million very seriously, and so do I. It's a lot of money.
You've worked with Hollywood-scale budgets before, making "The Dead Zone" and "The Fly," and then you found yourself on the outside again. So you must be aware that at some point you could be back down to the "Spider" level again.
Sure. You just have to make it not affect you. It only becomes a seriously bad thing when it frustrates you from doing a movie you really want to do. And that has happened to me. There were a couple of projects I really wanted to do, and I was just too scary for those studios to consider. I could tell you some very funny stories about that one.
I'm not even banking on "Eastern Promises" being successful. It's gotten some very good reviews and a couple of not-so-good reviews. We had a great gala opening at the Toronto Film Festival with the most wonderful audience that followed every twist and turn and laughed at every joke. I'd like to bottle that audience and take it with me everywhere I go. Beyond that, I've got no guarantees of anything.
Any words of wisdom for the old-time Cronenberg purists out there, the ones who wish you were still making "Videodrome"? I talked to one guy after the screening last night who was just fuming. You know, "Cronenberg's turned into a hack, he's a Hollywood sellout, he hasn't made a decent film in 15 years."
Oh, God, that's great! I've been trying to sell out for years. So maybe without realizing it I've achieved it. That's exciting. [Laughter.] Well, to me that's not a real fan. That's a horror-film fan, it's not really a Cronenberg fan. If Viggo's fans only like him as Aragorn and don't like him in anything else, then they're "Lord of the Rings" fans, they're not Viggo fans. If you look at the auteur theory, it's like, once you commit to someone's sensibility, you say, "This guy's a really interesting director, I'm going to be curious about everything he does." Even when he's made a film that's not so great, maybe not his best, you still enjoy it. If he struggles, then you watch him struggling. That's a real fan.
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Blood, guts and body politics
Source: washington post (posted in brisbanetimes.com)
© 2007 Brisbane Times
WHEN DAVID CRONENBERG brings violence to the screen it feels like something directed at our moral consciences as much as at the dead, bleeding bodies sprawled in front of us. His is not the popcorn exhilaration of The Bourne Ultimatum, with punch-shoot-run fast editing, or the adrenaline buzz in the campy gore-a-thons of Quentin Tarantino. With Cronenberg, well, let's just say, don't read on if you're not prepared for gore, even gore with a message at its centre.
In his new film, Eastern Promises, about nefarious doings within the Russian underworld of London, an assassin's attempt to slit a man's throat isn't quick and clean. He has to saw and saw until the blade, finally, cuts through to the jugular.
In his 2005 A History of Violence, Cronenberg ends a hero's triumphant gun battle not with reaction shots of admiring onlookers but with a gruesome close-up of his shooting victim's bloody, shattered head. And in his 1981 film, Scanners, a person's head explodes in a cloud of blood - the image rendered more disgusting than cinematically spectacular.
His brand of violence is apparent in nearly all of his 17 features, which include The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. (The plot of his 1996 film, Crash, even examines violence as sexual stimulant.)
What makes these scenes different is that they resonate beyond simple grotesquerie and plot development. They give a quite literal lesson, albeit gruesome and backhanded, about the sanctity and preciousness of life.
The uncomfortable tone of Cronenberg's violence makes us realise how insulated we are from reality in other films. And how most Hollywood movies have conditioned us to the A-B-C response to violence: fear, shock, relief.
The violence in action-oriented movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum is "impressionistic, there's almost no physicality to it," says Cronenberg, 64.
"It's easy to lose sight of the fact we're talking about the destruction of a body and a unique human, whose experiences are never to be replicated again. I want the audience to take it as seriously as I do. It's not just an aesthetic thing. It's a tragedy, on some level, that they should feel and I think the only way they can feel it is emotionally and physically."
Which is why, in Eastern Promises, Cronenberg emphasises the onus of severing a human throat - an idea that occurred to him after watching a terrorist beheading video. The would-be assassin in Cronenberg's movie is "not very experienced at this," he explains. He discovers the human body is "a complex thing with sinews, muscles and tendons. It resists destruction to the last drop of blood. So it's not a nice clean cut. It's messy and horrifying for him - and us."
Cronenberg concentrates his fullest attention on moments that other directors might gloss over. In places they edit for viewing speed or audience squeamishness, he keeps the cameras rolling. In his hands, a bathhouse battle between Viggo Mortensen, playing a Russian hit man, and two Chechen killers becomes a sensual, bloody treatise on the inefficiency and horror of real fighting - not the slick action sequence we'd normally find in a conventional crime picture. Shunning professional stuntmen, the Canadian director insisted Mortensen and his fellow actors create a fight that looked like "hard physical labor. It doesn't go smoothly, and things don't quite connect and things are missed, and you screw up, and all of those things should be in there."
On-screen, the scene seems to run for an eternity, as Mortensen's character, caught unarmed and nude, fights for his life sustaining painful slashes and stabs from his opponents' carpet knives. After the gruesome conclusion, we have a new, palpable appreciation for the sheer grunt work of killing - and dying.
The scene is designed to "get right under your skin and make you feel vulnerable," says Stephan Dupuis, the make-up artist who created and monitored Mortensen's extensive body tattoos and the fake flesh used to hide the blood bags.
Cronenberg's passion for physiology, whether it's severed necks or Jeff Goldblum's oozing flesh in the 1986 film The Fly, is the underlying theme in all his films, says Dupuis, who won an Oscar for his work on The Fly. Earlier in his career, Cronenberg was associated in press reports with horror-meisters such as George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and John Carpenter (Halloween). Cronenberg says he has not watched the grisly Saw or Hostel films, which he describes as nothing more than "torture movies" - a theme he explored in his 1983 film, Videodrome, in which a sleazy cable television owner (James Woods) broadcasts a pirated video of torture and mutilation, only to discover the violence on it is not staged. Cronenberg's work is different, in that instead of shock for shock's value, he's using the form subversively against itself, to promote non-violence.
A conversation with Cronenberg about his use of violence quickly veers to talk of "body consciousness", which, for him, started at the age of 10, when he says he stopped believing in God. "To accept the body is to accept death, and people will do anything to avoid that reality," he says in a voice almost as soft and evenly measured as that of HAL, the computer voice in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Art and religion, he declares, are just some of the ways that humankind attempts to "minimise the reality of the body, to say, well, your body can die but you'll still be alive or whatever. Or that this artist is immortal. Well, he's not immortal, you know" - he interjects a momentary, ironic laugh here - "he's dead."
Perhaps surprisingly, it was a western, Shane, that first influenced his body-based approach to screen violence and filmmaking in general, he says. Watching the 1953 film as a boy, he recalls seeing Jack Wilson (the heavy played by Jack Palance) fire a bullet into a rancher that visibly propelled the victim through the air.
"Before that, in the westerns I'd seen, people would go bang-bang and other people would just fall down," Cronenberg says. "This was the first time I'd seen that effect; the idea a bullet could lift you off the ground and blow you away. That really was horrifying, and suddenly this had an impact. You really felt the death of that person as a physical thing."
Cronenberg is "unafraid of intimacy with violence and sex," says Holly Hunter, who played one of the characters in Crash. "He takes you on the inside track of it, which is nothing to do with slickness or glamour, and it can actually be quite blasphemous and macabre … There's a coolness to David's movies - cool in temperature, I mean - and in that way, they're not pornographic or thrillseeking."
Told of Hunter's comment, Cronenberg responds: "I think people are curious, drawn, attracted, repelled and afraid, all at the same time, about violence, and they're right. There's an eroticism involved, certainly in Crash, and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on. It was pretty obvious to me, though [the terrorists] would be in total denial about that. There are strange, perverse elements to violence."
Ultimately, Cronenberg says, he hopes his message reaches beyond movie audiences. "There are so many ways to make murder abstract - or killing, if you don't want to call it murder, or war. You can go to statistics … You've got language, which is always a great curtain, such as 'collateral damage' and all these other euphemisms for ripping bodies apart, throwing heads around. But if the bodily consequences of war were the first thing you thought of, war wouldn't happen."
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Gentleman's relish
Source: Guardian Unlimited
©Simon Hattenstone
Thanks to Chrissiejane at Viggo Works!
Very detailed interview with Cronenberg, focusing on just about all his movies, showing what drives this extraordinary auteur
All of Cronenberg's films... are concerned with two questions: who are we, and what is the real nature of consciousness?"
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Source: Metro Pulse
Quote:
All of the performances in Eastern Promises are strong, but most notable is that of Mortensen’s, who brings a dangerous and brooding gravity to the role of Nikolai. Lantern-jawed and taciturn, Nikolai says more with his eyes than with his words; we’re often left tensely watching his dark, flashing orbs, seeking some clue as to whether he’ll let a slight or an insult pass, or surrender to the suppressed brutality that simmers within his breast.
©Mike Gibson
Quote:
But despite its moments of eruptive violence (including one of the most riveting fight scenes in recent memory) and splashes of Cronenbergian viscera, Eastern Promises becomes gradually more focused on the human condition, on the nature of good and evil and the choices we make, as the film wears on. By movie’s end, Nikolai has undertaken a soul-rending litany of complicated moral choices as he struggles with the ramifications of executing his sworn duties as a full member of Semyon’s vory. Is he redeemed, in the end? That’s for you to decide.
Cronenberg’s filmmaking is slicker and more accomplished than ever before. But theme is the most significant point of divergence between latter-day films like Eastern Promises and 2005’s History of Violence and his movies of yore. Whereas earlier films like The Fly and Videodrome dealt with isolation, alienation, and the dehumanizing aspects of technology, his latest work is more about connections, and the things that make us human. It would seem that the Master of Body Horror has finally discovered his soul.
©Mike Gibson
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Source: Bad Ass Cinema
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I really hope Eastern Promises is the second in a long line of films that David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen will work together. Mortensen once again just disappears into this role, though it's not that hard to really believe him as a super bad ass gangster. What is also not surprising is just how likable he makes his Nikolai in this film, as Mortensen flawlessly infuses his character with humanity. This isn't some superman with a Russian accent. Nikolai is the type of character the Harrison Ford used to play, a man that heeds the call for action, but doesn't look for it. When the time comes though, he'll rip your throat out if need be.
You may have already heard about the movie's big fight scene, and as a man that likes to watch fight scenes, I'll say it deserves its reputation. The scene is brutal and bloody, but not in ridiculous or cartoony way like the battle in House of Blue leaves in Kill Bill. This is hardcore, bruised knuckle fighting and Nikolai gets ripped to shreds in the process. The fight scene may be the most brutal piece of film making put on film all year.
The scene is the exception, not the rule to this film though. While there is plenty of violence and the threat of violence throughout Eastern Promises, what we really get is a taut drama about ordinary people that end up simply trying to save a child from what they perceive is real evil. This is a terrific piece of film making from Cronenberg that displays what kind of power he can really have over an audience. There is a scene of love towards the end of the picture that is one of the most convincing and authentic I've ever witnessed, but at the same time goes in wild directions that I wasn't expecting at all.
© Robert Sutton
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Video interview with Viggo Mortensen by Chicago Tribune
©Chicagotribune.com
Thanks to Ewa at Viggo Works!
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Source: www.moviecitynews.com
Quote:
The real meat of the film is the Russian mob, led by Armin Mueller-Stahl, his bungling son played by Vincent Cassel, and Viggo Mortensen as the ambitious driver. Also on the Russian tip is director Jerzy Skolimowski, working as an actor for Cronenberg here, as he has in the past for Julian Schnabel, Tim Burton, Taylor Hackford, and a few others. He plays Watts’ character’s Russian uncle. Theirs is the universe we are being welcomed into in Eastern Promises. The film is filled with details of why “they” are the same as us… and how they are so different.
©David Poland
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Source: new haven advocate
Quote:
If Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy did nothing else, credit it with providing the brilliant Mortenson an opportunity to become a true American screen icon. It may be finally happening under Cronenberg's watch, in the excellent A History of Violence and now Eastern Promises, which feels like a richer, darker followup to the equally episodic History. Implacably cool and convincingly Russian, Mortenson's own body horror is reflected in the jail tattoos that mark him and all vory v zakone members, hierogryphically telling their life stories of sin. Those tattoos are never more evident than in the already celebrated climax of the film, one that's explosively violent yet possesses an intimacy that is at once horrific, homoertoic and, in those various Pieta-like intertwining of bodies, holy.
Though just as compromised as other serious Hollywood directors by their subject matter at the beginning of this new century, Eastern Promises also manages to be just as probing and discomfiting as Cronenberg's best work. For Cronenberg, I'll wager that it'll be Scorcese time at next year's Oscar's.
© new haven advocate
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Source: www.azcentral.com
Quote:
If next year's MTV Movie Awards have a category for fiercest naked fighter, Viggo Mortensen will be the runaway winner for his vicious steam-bath death battle with two thugs...
©AZ Central.com
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Source: Times Records News
Quote:
The acting in this film is pitch-perfect, on all counts. Mortensen plays a conflicted hit man artfully. He is Hollywood's go-to guy for any character with a foreign accent, and rightfully so.
©Times Record News
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Source: Charleston Gazette
Quote:
Viggo Mortensen has one of the most incredible faces in the world, striking and amazingly versatile. His rough-hewn, chiseled visage allows him to inhabit any character he wants to, regardless of background or ethnicity, and we buy into it unconditionally.
Through physical appearance alone, Mortensen can be both “Lord of the Rings’” rugged warrior and noble king and “Hidalgo’s” half-Lakota cowboy. He was even entirely convincing as an everyman with a shady past in “A History of Violence.”
It’s no surprise then that his turn as a Russian gangster in “Eastern Promises” is yet another triumph. What is surprising is just how fantastic he is in the role.
Although his acting chops have never been in doubt, what Mortensen accomplishes in the role of Nikolai Luzhin, the driver of a Russian mob family, goes beyond simply good acting - it’s a complete transformation. With his flawless Russian accent, tattoo-covered body and a face so sharp it looks like it could cut diamonds, he becomes nearly unrecognizable, even without the use of prosthetics or heavy makeup.
Nikolai is arguably Mortensen’s most deeply drawn and accomplished character to date. It’s a performance worthy of the highest praise and one that will surely catapult him to the top ranks of in-demand actors...
©Charleston Gazette
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From Russia With Blood
Source: Total Film
©Total Film
Thanks to Chrissiejane at Viggo Works!
"Viggo blew me away on a daily basis," chimes Watts. "He spent time in Russia and every day he would come to the set with something interesting: a piece of writing or a Russian chocolate or a photo album. I think he stayed in character pretty much the whole time. And that's great. It really helped me... I saw Viggo yesterday for the first time since we finished the film and it was like a whole different person. I almost didn't recognize him."
If the scans aren't large enough, go here.
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TOTAL IMMERSION: VIGGO MORTENSEN PLUNGES INTO RUSSIAN LORE FOR 'EASTERN PROMISES'
Source: Detroit Free Press
©Detroit Free Press
Cronenberg says "Promises" is definitely more of a collaboration than most of his other films because of Mortensen.
"I learned in the last film that you don't make a movie with Viggo in it; you make a movie with Viggo. He doesn't try to impose himself the way some actors do. He just assumes we're all in it together to make the most emotionally and dramatically accurate representation of life that we can."
It was that commitment, says Cronenberg, that begat the most controversial sequence in the film, a violent, extended bathhouse assault that Mortensen plays nude.
"David asked me how I wanted to shoot it, and I told him I didn't think there was any other way to do it. If I had somehow managed to keep a towel on in that struggle to the death, or if we had shot it behind columns or used tricky camera angles or something that concealed the body, audiences would have seen through that, it would have been avoiding the truth of that violence, and then it would have been phony, just another fight scene. I may not be comfortable being naked before a camera, but I would have been less comfortable doing something false. It's just the way I'm made."
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Viewing the Naked Truth
Source: Daily News Tribune
© 2006-2007 GateHouse Media, Inc.
Article re: nudity in movies
Ready to be shocked?
There's violence at the megaplex. Of the 27 movies now screening at the various major chains, 10 are either exceedingly violent or contain violent elements. Want to hazard a guess how many of these films contain nudity, apart from fleeting glimpses of an exposed body part? The answer is four. A film featuring a corpse with her shirt unbuttoned has since left the theaters.
The conclusion one might draw from this revelation is that Hollywood has no qualms about showing people getting killed yet shies away from showing them naked. One might also conclude that Hollywood is simply reflecting American predilections.
I remain astounded by the number of parents who take their children to see R-rated violent films but freak out if a movie shows a woman's breasts. I've actually seen parents let their children watch heads get decapitated, yet the instant some flesh gets revealed they pull their tykes out of the theater.
How warped is that? Are they afraid by seeing nudity that their children are going to have sex? Apparently, they're less worried about their children picking up a knife and butchering the baby sitter after seeing "Halloween".
So is Hollywood's avoidance of nudity a reflection of our Puritan past? Is its acceptance of violence a reflection of our Wild West past? I'll answer yes to both of those queries. I don't think Gen. George Patton was too far off the mark in his famous speech that opens the film "Patton."
"Men," he says to the 3rd Army, "all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle."
I don't believe Patton ever addressed the issue of Americans loving the sight of an exposed breast. As anyone who has spent any time in Europe knows, most Europeans don't have a hangup about nudity.
One of the more comical practices in American cinema these days concerns the steps filmmakers will take to keep nudity under wraps, so to speak. For some sex scenes, the actors keep all their clothes on, which is mildly moronic. In other instances, you don't even hear the man unzip his zipper or see the woman remove her panties, yet the lovers groan in orgiastic ecstasy. Now that's acting.
Even more imbecilic is the filming of women making love in the privacy of their bedrooms with their bras still on. More common is the breast cover-up where the camera only shows the sides of the woman's breasts. No cursed nipples allowed.
Viewers craving nudity in their films will be disappointed to know that Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who has appeared nude in many of her European films, engages in the dreaded breast cover-up while making love to Clive Owen in "Shoot 'em Up." This film depicts bad guys getting carrots shoved into their eyes, an umbilical cord getting severed by a bullet and a death count approaching triple digits. Yet Bellucci's nipples are MIA.
By the way, this is the movie with the aforementioned corpse. Her shirt was unbuttoned because she was breastfeeding her baby before she took a bullet in the head. Who says Hollywood doesn't honor traditional family values? Sadly, you'll have to wait for the DVD to see this classic.
"Good Luck Chuck," while an incredibly bad movie, at least doesn't skimp on the nudity. That's to be expected considering the plot. Poor Chuck (Arlington's Dane Cook) has been cursed so that every woman he has sex with ends up marrying the next man she meets. When word gets out about Chuck's curse, every woman with a nuptial urge wants to bed him. During these scenes, the film shows these women having sex with Chuck in a variety of positions in quick-cut images, and most of the ladies don't have their bras on. Imagine that.
Again, cinematic voyeurs will be saddened to discover that the film's co-star, Jessica Alba, has the cinematographer hide her private parts with discreet camera angles. Milla Jovovich receives the same coy treatment in "Resident Evil: Extinction." The opening scene shows Jovovich lying naked in a shower. Another scene shows multiple Jovovich clones suspended naked in watery bubbles. Strategically placed arms provide the cover-up here.
"The Heartbreak Kid," a horrendous remake of the 1972 original, shows actress Malin Akerman naked as she makes love to Ben Stiller. The scene is played for laughs. Too bad it's not funny. Ditto for the nudity in a gross-out scene involving urine and a jellyfish sting. Don't ask.
In "In the Valley of Elah," nudity centers on a strip club. Yes, the strippers are naked. In the film, Tommy Lee Jones plays a straight-laced former military man investigating the disappearance of his son. The discomfort he displays while interviewing a topless bartender is palpable. In a later scene, he doesn't recognize her with her top on.
"Feast of Love" also uses nudity effectively. Here, when people make love, they are actually naked, and unlike in "The Heartbreak Kid," the lovemaking is played with passion in mind. When the couples get out of bed, they don't cover themselves up with bedsheets - preposterous - or miraculously have underwear on - ridiculous. It's called reality.
Another dose is provided in "Eastern Promises," a film that contains male nudity. The exposure of Viggo Mortensen's genitalia is brief, but the fact that his nether regions are even seen at all is rare for a mainstream Hollywood film.
The scene also provides the film with its signature moment. Mortensen's character is in a bathhouse when two bad guys arrive to kill him. During the ensuing struggle, Mortensen's towel goes bye-bye, forcing him to fight au naturel. Apparently, the bad guys won't let him slip into something more comfortable. At the megaplex, you just don't see too many men in their birthday suits stabbing assassins.
A hack director would have had Mortensen's towel miraculously stay in place, or made the actor wear a bathing suit or played the camera cover-up game, but any of those choices would have pulled the fight scene's punch. Nudity in a film, as "Eastern Promises," "Elah" and "Feast of Love" prove, doesn't have to be gratuitous. It can serve the story.
Just don't expect Hollywood to change its undercover ways. As long as Americans continue to get more of a rise out of violence than sex, actresses and actors will continue to bear arms rather than bare all.
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Beyond the Multiplex: David Cronenberg
Source: Salon.com
© Copyright ©2007 Salon Media Group, Inc
Thanks to greenknight at Viggo Works!
Excellent article with David Cronenberg on his gritty film "Eastern Promises" and being "hot for 10 minutes" (an interview and podcast)
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.
Well, with his hair slicked back and all that black leather, you barely recognize him. People who only know him from "Lord of the Rings" and your previous film may be wondering, "So where's Viggo? And who is this Russian dude?"
That's right, and I'm sure that's one of the attractions for Viggo. This guy is a Russian. He comes from Yekaterinburg in Siberia. He's got to walk like a Russian, he's got to think like a Russian. He speaks English with a Russian accent and speaks Russian fluently. What I've heard from all the Russian journalists so far was that Viggo is perfect, totally convincing. Which is incredibly gratifying. Until we vetted it for some Russians, we didn't know whether what we had done with our Russian consultants had worked. That's been a nice validation.
When you first read Steven Knight's script, what was in it that made you think this was potentially a David Cronenberg movie?
Well, you see, there you've added something that I never add. I'm serious. I don't think about "Is this a David Cronenberg movie?" Because I have no idea what that is. I try to totally forget what I am or what I'm perceived to be, and what people's expectations might be based on my other movies. I think that's very deforming, it will distort your perception. On the contrary, I'm reading this script and I'm in the audience: "Wow, these characters are amazing. They're exotic but real. I've never known anything about this subculture. The streets of London in this movie are not going to be any streets of London you've ever seen in a movie before. The textures, the ancient hostilities brought to the new country, the betrayals, the lack of trust but the need to work together in a criminal globalization." All that was really intriguing and it felt connected to what's going on in Russia today, while still being a fiction, a drama. It really felt relevant.
Of course you have mostly shot in Canada before, and most of your films are set there. This was mostly shot on the real streets of London, right?
Well, there were some major sets: Semyon's restaurant was a set, and the bathhouse [where a major and bloody fight scene takes place]. We did spend a lot of time in the streets of London, but they were the mean streets of London. They were the streets that tourists don't go to. Our English crew loved where we were shooting. They told me, "This is the real London, this is the London that we know. It's where we live."
I was thinking of a line from an early Public Image Ltd. song, "A side of London the tourists never see."
That could have been our theme song.
Something also struck me here: It's been said that to be an English-speaking Canadian is to belong to a culture that's partway between the United States and Britain. You've been bouncing back and forth across that divide: "Spider" was set in London in the '50s. "History of Violence" was set in Middle America. Now you're back to London again. I'm sure that wasn't precisely intentional.
No, it wasn't, but it's true that Canada's relationship to England is quite different from that of the U.S. We started from the same point, but we never cut those ties. We never had a revolution. I mean, we still have the queen on our money! Our relationship to Britain is more congenial, and we feel more connected. The resonances of that relationship are much different.
I was talking with another critic last night about the question of whether this film should be considered realistic. I think I have two answers. Obviously you spent a lot of time and money making the clothes, the settings, and the accents appear authentic. On the other hand, all your films, including this one, seem to exist in a time and space and reality that is your vision, rather than in some objective real world.
Well, how could they not? If you're doing a documentary you're doing a documentary. But as Michael Moore and Ken Burns and all those other documentarians will tell you, they think they're doing fiction anyway. It's a creative thing, an illusion of reality. As a director, you make 2,000 or 3,000 decisions a day that are unique to you. They flow through your nervous system, your culture, your background, your education, your visual sense. You cannot avoid that filtration system. It filters out other people's versions of reality and you don't have to struggle to make it your own. There's no way to avoid it, frankly, because of the nature of what directing is, or certainly the way I perceive it.
But I love being in those real streets. I love owning the streets at night. My favorite thing is shooting in the streets at night when everybody else has gone to bed and there's just us doing our thing. There's no hangers-on, there's no partying, it's just us. But then the streets become your set. It's all a set; the whole city is your set.
One point of connection between this film and "History of Violence" is that Viggo plays a character whose true nature is hidden from us. He's this career criminal, an almost stereotypical Russian gangster who does terrible things. But he has other dimensions we can't see.
Part of that is because we don't know what a man in that position would really be like. Being the chauffeur to the boss' son in a crime organization means you've got to be pretty discreet and controlled, especially since the boss' son [Kirill, played by the French actor Vincent Cassel] is wild and volatile. You're there to take care of him and make sure he doesn't kill himself. You're controlled and you don't give much away, because it's not your show, it's his show. At the same time, you're ambitious, you want to move up, you're observing everything, you're calculating, you're planning your next move. Well -- would somebody like that have no sense of humor? Would somebody like that not flirt with a pretty girl on the street? Maybe he would. Would he have absolutely no kindness or gentleness? I'm not sure that he wouldn't, you know? I think that's just real; everybody is pretty complex. Even Stalin could be nice on a given day.
I understand he was highly sentimental, actually.
Well, Armin Mueller-Stahl said, when we talked about his character [the mob boss Semyon], "All monsters are sentimental." That's how they manage to express their emotions when on other occasions they have to be incredibly controlled and emotionless. So it goes into a strange and structured place; sentimentality is a very structured version of emotion. Viggo's character also -- it's not unrealistic to think that he might behave that way. Whether that indicates something more profound and deep or not is another question.
The linguistic challenge of this movie must have been immense. We have three principal actors, an American [Mortensen], a Frenchman [Cassel] and a German [Mueller-Stahl], all playing Russians living in England. So they had to have some version of an English accent, with a Russian accent ...
On top of that, yes. And we have a Pole, Jerzy Skolimowski [himself an acclaimed filmmaker]! We had two language coaches on set at all times. One was an Englishman watching the Russian accent when English was spoken, and another one was a Russian watching when Russian was spoken. It was a very specific Russian, because it's a slangy, criminal Russian, not formal or academic Russian. You take Vincent Cassel, whose English is pretty good, but he normally speaks with a French accent and he had to warp that into a Russian accent.
To add to the complexity, we had the question: What is the relationship of each of these people to the English language? At what point in their lives did they learn English, and who did they learn it from? We assumed that Viggo's character learned English in Russia, maybe just at school, so he has the thickest accent. We assumed that Kirill, Vincent's character, came to England when he was about 17, so his accent is more English-inflected. Armin's character is more mysterious: Where did he learn English and how long has he been speaking it? There are different levels of accent strength in each case.
It's almost like a metaphorical way of seeing the ambiguity or the mystery in all these characters. It's right there on the surface.
I think so. We used to say, "This movie is about language," and we meant that metaphorically as well.
In case some of your longtime fans are wondering whether there's any blood and gore in this movie, and whether you use any special effects, the answer would be yes.
Oh, a little bit. People have said that this movie is very violent, but in terms of screen time, it's very little. There are only three scenes, although one of them is longish, I suppose. [Mortensen's character does protracted bloody battle with a pair of Chechen would-be assassins, while stark naked in a bathhouse.] When you consider the body count of "The Departed" or "The Sopranos," ours is pretty darn low. The difference is that I take it seriously in terms of realism, and the camera does not look away. We've had a long discussion about why I do that, but I have very good reasons. That's why the impact of those scenes goes beyond screen time.
How has the success of "History of Violence" changed your career. Has it made projects possible that weren't possible before?
I believe it has. I'm hot for 10 minutes, you know? I take it with a grain of salt, but I appreciate it nonetheless. Suddenly people are considering me for scripts that I guarantee you they would not have considered me for before "History." If you showed them "Spider" as my last movie, they would blanch. They'd get very nervous. Because it's an art film with a capital A, and it's low budget. My most expensive film is still "History of Violence," which cost $32 million. This one was around $27 million. When people hear about movies costing $180 million, they may think that's peanuts. But in fact, everyone involved takes $26 million very seriously, and so do I. It's a lot of money.
You've worked with Hollywood-scale budgets before, making "The Dead Zone" and "The Fly," and then you found yourself on the outside again. So you must be aware that at some point you could be back down to the "Spider" level again.
Sure. You just have to make it not affect you. It only becomes a seriously bad thing when it frustrates you from doing a movie you really want to do. And that has happened to me. There were a couple of projects I really wanted to do, and I was just too scary for those studios to consider. I could tell you some very funny stories about that one.
I'm not even banking on "Eastern Promises" being successful. It's gotten some very good reviews and a couple of not-so-good reviews. We had a great gala opening at the Toronto Film Festival with the most wonderful audience that followed every twist and turn and laughed at every joke. I'd like to bottle that audience and take it with me everywhere I go. Beyond that, I've got no guarantees of anything.
Any words of wisdom for the old-time Cronenberg purists out there, the ones who wish you were still making "Videodrome"? I talked to one guy after the screening last night who was just fuming. You know, "Cronenberg's turned into a hack, he's a Hollywood sellout, he hasn't made a decent film in 15 years."
Oh, God, that's great! I've been trying to sell out for years. So maybe without realizing it I've achieved it. That's exciting. [Laughter.] Well, to me that's not a real fan. That's a horror-film fan, it's not really a Cronenberg fan. If Viggo's fans only like him as Aragorn and don't like him in anything else, then they're "Lord of the Rings" fans, they're not Viggo fans. If you look at the auteur theory, it's like, once you commit to someone's sensibility, you say, "This guy's a really interesting director, I'm going to be curious about everything he does." Even when he's made a film that's not so great, maybe not his best, you still enjoy it. If he struggles, then you watch him struggling. That's a real fan.
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Blood, guts and body politics
Source: washington post (posted in brisbanetimes.com)
© 2007 Brisbane Times
WHEN DAVID CRONENBERG brings violence to the screen it feels like something directed at our moral consciences as much as at the dead, bleeding bodies sprawled in front of us. His is not the popcorn exhilaration of The Bourne Ultimatum, with punch-shoot-run fast editing, or the adrenaline buzz in the campy gore-a-thons of Quentin Tarantino. With Cronenberg, well, let's just say, don't read on if you're not prepared for gore, even gore with a message at its centre.
In his new film, Eastern Promises, about nefarious doings within the Russian underworld of London, an assassin's attempt to slit a man's throat isn't quick and clean. He has to saw and saw until the blade, finally, cuts through to the jugular.
In his 2005 A History of Violence, Cronenberg ends a hero's triumphant gun battle not with reaction shots of admiring onlookers but with a gruesome close-up of his shooting victim's bloody, shattered head. And in his 1981 film, Scanners, a person's head explodes in a cloud of blood - the image rendered more disgusting than cinematically spectacular.
His brand of violence is apparent in nearly all of his 17 features, which include The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch. (The plot of his 1996 film, Crash, even examines violence as sexual stimulant.)
What makes these scenes different is that they resonate beyond simple grotesquerie and plot development. They give a quite literal lesson, albeit gruesome and backhanded, about the sanctity and preciousness of life.
The uncomfortable tone of Cronenberg's violence makes us realise how insulated we are from reality in other films. And how most Hollywood movies have conditioned us to the A-B-C response to violence: fear, shock, relief.
The violence in action-oriented movies such as The Bourne Ultimatum is "impressionistic, there's almost no physicality to it," says Cronenberg, 64.
"It's easy to lose sight of the fact we're talking about the destruction of a body and a unique human, whose experiences are never to be replicated again. I want the audience to take it as seriously as I do. It's not just an aesthetic thing. It's a tragedy, on some level, that they should feel and I think the only way they can feel it is emotionally and physically."
Which is why, in Eastern Promises, Cronenberg emphasises the onus of severing a human throat - an idea that occurred to him after watching a terrorist beheading video. The would-be assassin in Cronenberg's movie is "not very experienced at this," he explains. He discovers the human body is "a complex thing with sinews, muscles and tendons. It resists destruction to the last drop of blood. So it's not a nice clean cut. It's messy and horrifying for him - and us."
Cronenberg concentrates his fullest attention on moments that other directors might gloss over. In places they edit for viewing speed or audience squeamishness, he keeps the cameras rolling. In his hands, a bathhouse battle between Viggo Mortensen, playing a Russian hit man, and two Chechen killers becomes a sensual, bloody treatise on the inefficiency and horror of real fighting - not the slick action sequence we'd normally find in a conventional crime picture. Shunning professional stuntmen, the Canadian director insisted Mortensen and his fellow actors create a fight that looked like "hard physical labor. It doesn't go smoothly, and things don't quite connect and things are missed, and you screw up, and all of those things should be in there."
On-screen, the scene seems to run for an eternity, as Mortensen's character, caught unarmed and nude, fights for his life sustaining painful slashes and stabs from his opponents' carpet knives. After the gruesome conclusion, we have a new, palpable appreciation for the sheer grunt work of killing - and dying.
The scene is designed to "get right under your skin and make you feel vulnerable," says Stephan Dupuis, the make-up artist who created and monitored Mortensen's extensive body tattoos and the fake flesh used to hide the blood bags.
Cronenberg's passion for physiology, whether it's severed necks or Jeff Goldblum's oozing flesh in the 1986 film The Fly, is the underlying theme in all his films, says Dupuis, who won an Oscar for his work on The Fly. Earlier in his career, Cronenberg was associated in press reports with horror-meisters such as George Romero (Night of the Living Dead) and John Carpenter (Halloween). Cronenberg says he has not watched the grisly Saw or Hostel films, which he describes as nothing more than "torture movies" - a theme he explored in his 1983 film, Videodrome, in which a sleazy cable television owner (James Woods) broadcasts a pirated video of torture and mutilation, only to discover the violence on it is not staged. Cronenberg's work is different, in that instead of shock for shock's value, he's using the form subversively against itself, to promote non-violence.
A conversation with Cronenberg about his use of violence quickly veers to talk of "body consciousness", which, for him, started at the age of 10, when he says he stopped believing in God. "To accept the body is to accept death, and people will do anything to avoid that reality," he says in a voice almost as soft and evenly measured as that of HAL, the computer voice in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Art and religion, he declares, are just some of the ways that humankind attempts to "minimise the reality of the body, to say, well, your body can die but you'll still be alive or whatever. Or that this artist is immortal. Well, he's not immortal, you know" - he interjects a momentary, ironic laugh here - "he's dead."
Perhaps surprisingly, it was a western, Shane, that first influenced his body-based approach to screen violence and filmmaking in general, he says. Watching the 1953 film as a boy, he recalls seeing Jack Wilson (the heavy played by Jack Palance) fire a bullet into a rancher that visibly propelled the victim through the air.
"Before that, in the westerns I'd seen, people would go bang-bang and other people would just fall down," Cronenberg says. "This was the first time I'd seen that effect; the idea a bullet could lift you off the ground and blow you away. That really was horrifying, and suddenly this had an impact. You really felt the death of that person as a physical thing."
Cronenberg is "unafraid of intimacy with violence and sex," says Holly Hunter, who played one of the characters in Crash. "He takes you on the inside track of it, which is nothing to do with slickness or glamour, and it can actually be quite blasphemous and macabre … There's a coolness to David's movies - cool in temperature, I mean - and in that way, they're not pornographic or thrillseeking."
Told of Hunter's comment, Cronenberg responds: "I think people are curious, drawn, attracted, repelled and afraid, all at the same time, about violence, and they're right. There's an eroticism involved, certainly in Crash, and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on. It was pretty obvious to me, though [the terrorists] would be in total denial about that. There are strange, perverse elements to violence."
Ultimately, Cronenberg says, he hopes his message reaches beyond movie audiences. "There are so many ways to make murder abstract - or killing, if you don't want to call it murder, or war. You can go to statistics … You've got language, which is always a great curtain, such as 'collateral damage' and all these other euphemisms for ripping bodies apart, throwing heads around. But if the bodily consequences of war were the first thing you thought of, war wouldn't happen."
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Gentleman's relish
Source: Guardian Unlimited
©Simon Hattenstone
Thanks to Chrissiejane at Viggo Works!
Very detailed interview with Cronenberg, focusing on just about all his movies, showing what drives this extraordinary auteur
All of Cronenberg's films... are concerned with two questions: who are we, and what is the real nature of consciousness?"
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Source: Metro Pulse
Quote:
All of the performances in Eastern Promises are strong, but most notable is that of Mortensen’s, who brings a dangerous and brooding gravity to the role of Nikolai. Lantern-jawed and taciturn, Nikolai says more with his eyes than with his words; we’re often left tensely watching his dark, flashing orbs, seeking some clue as to whether he’ll let a slight or an insult pass, or surrender to the suppressed brutality that simmers within his breast.
©Mike Gibson
Quote:
But despite its moments of eruptive violence (including one of the most riveting fight scenes in recent memory) and splashes of Cronenbergian viscera, Eastern Promises becomes gradually more focused on the human condition, on the nature of good and evil and the choices we make, as the film wears on. By movie’s end, Nikolai has undertaken a soul-rending litany of complicated moral choices as he struggles with the ramifications of executing his sworn duties as a full member of Semyon’s vory. Is he redeemed, in the end? That’s for you to decide.
Cronenberg’s filmmaking is slicker and more accomplished than ever before. But theme is the most significant point of divergence between latter-day films like Eastern Promises and 2005’s History of Violence and his movies of yore. Whereas earlier films like The Fly and Videodrome dealt with isolation, alienation, and the dehumanizing aspects of technology, his latest work is more about connections, and the things that make us human. It would seem that the Master of Body Horror has finally discovered his soul.
©Mike Gibson
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Source: Bad Ass Cinema
Quote:
I really hope Eastern Promises is the second in a long line of films that David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen will work together. Mortensen once again just disappears into this role, though it's not that hard to really believe him as a super bad ass gangster. What is also not surprising is just how likable he makes his Nikolai in this film, as Mortensen flawlessly infuses his character with humanity. This isn't some superman with a Russian accent. Nikolai is the type of character the Harrison Ford used to play, a man that heeds the call for action, but doesn't look for it. When the time comes though, he'll rip your throat out if need be.
You may have already heard about the movie's big fight scene, and as a man that likes to watch fight scenes, I'll say it deserves its reputation. The scene is brutal and bloody, but not in ridiculous or cartoony way like the battle in House of Blue leaves in Kill Bill. This is hardcore, bruised knuckle fighting and Nikolai gets ripped to shreds in the process. The fight scene may be the most brutal piece of film making put on film all year.
The scene is the exception, not the rule to this film though. While there is plenty of violence and the threat of violence throughout Eastern Promises, what we really get is a taut drama about ordinary people that end up simply trying to save a child from what they perceive is real evil. This is a terrific piece of film making from Cronenberg that displays what kind of power he can really have over an audience. There is a scene of love towards the end of the picture that is one of the most convincing and authentic I've ever witnessed, but at the same time goes in wild directions that I wasn't expecting at all.
© Robert Sutton
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Video interview with Viggo Mortensen by Chicago Tribune
©Chicagotribune.com
Thanks to Ewa at Viggo Works!
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Source: www.moviecitynews.com
Quote:
The real meat of the film is the Russian mob, led by Armin Mueller-Stahl, his bungling son played by Vincent Cassel, and Viggo Mortensen as the ambitious driver. Also on the Russian tip is director Jerzy Skolimowski, working as an actor for Cronenberg here, as he has in the past for Julian Schnabel, Tim Burton, Taylor Hackford, and a few others. He plays Watts’ character’s Russian uncle. Theirs is the universe we are being welcomed into in Eastern Promises. The film is filled with details of why “they” are the same as us… and how they are so different.
©David Poland
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Source: new haven advocate
Quote:
If Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy did nothing else, credit it with providing the brilliant Mortenson an opportunity to become a true American screen icon. It may be finally happening under Cronenberg's watch, in the excellent A History of Violence and now Eastern Promises, which feels like a richer, darker followup to the equally episodic History. Implacably cool and convincingly Russian, Mortenson's own body horror is reflected in the jail tattoos that mark him and all vory v zakone members, hierogryphically telling their life stories of sin. Those tattoos are never more evident than in the already celebrated climax of the film, one that's explosively violent yet possesses an intimacy that is at once horrific, homoertoic and, in those various Pieta-like intertwining of bodies, holy.
Though just as compromised as other serious Hollywood directors by their subject matter at the beginning of this new century, Eastern Promises also manages to be just as probing and discomfiting as Cronenberg's best work. For Cronenberg, I'll wager that it'll be Scorcese time at next year's Oscar's.
© new haven advocate
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Source: www.azcentral.com
Quote:
If next year's MTV Movie Awards have a category for fiercest naked fighter, Viggo Mortensen will be the runaway winner for his vicious steam-bath death battle with two thugs...
©AZ Central.com
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Source: Times Records News
Quote:
The acting in this film is pitch-perfect, on all counts. Mortensen plays a conflicted hit man artfully. He is Hollywood's go-to guy for any character with a foreign accent, and rightfully so.
©Times Record News
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Source: Charleston Gazette
Quote:
Viggo Mortensen has one of the most incredible faces in the world, striking and amazingly versatile. His rough-hewn, chiseled visage allows him to inhabit any character he wants to, regardless of background or ethnicity, and we buy into it unconditionally.
Through physical appearance alone, Mortensen can be both “Lord of the Rings’” rugged warrior and noble king and “Hidalgo’s” half-Lakota cowboy. He was even entirely convincing as an everyman with a shady past in “A History of Violence.”
It’s no surprise then that his turn as a Russian gangster in “Eastern Promises” is yet another triumph. What is surprising is just how fantastic he is in the role.
Although his acting chops have never been in doubt, what Mortensen accomplishes in the role of Nikolai Luzhin, the driver of a Russian mob family, goes beyond simply good acting - it’s a complete transformation. With his flawless Russian accent, tattoo-covered body and a face so sharp it looks like it could cut diamonds, he becomes nearly unrecognizable, even without the use of prosthetics or heavy makeup.
Nikolai is arguably Mortensen’s most deeply drawn and accomplished character to date. It’s a performance worthy of the highest praise and one that will surely catapult him to the top ranks of in-demand actors...
©Charleston Gazette
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From Russia With Blood
Source: Total Film
©Total Film
Thanks to Chrissiejane at Viggo Works!
"Viggo blew me away on a daily basis," chimes Watts. "He spent time in Russia and every day he would come to the set with something interesting: a piece of writing or a Russian chocolate or a photo album. I think he stayed in character pretty much the whole time. And that's great. It really helped me... I saw Viggo yesterday for the first time since we finished the film and it was like a whole different person. I almost didn't recognize him."
If the scans aren't large enough, go here.
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TOTAL IMMERSION: VIGGO MORTENSEN PLUNGES INTO RUSSIAN LORE FOR 'EASTERN PROMISES'
Source: Detroit Free Press
©Detroit Free Press
Cronenberg says "Promises" is definitely more of a collaboration than most of his other films because of Mortensen.
"I learned in the last film that you don't make a movie with Viggo in it; you make a movie with Viggo. He doesn't try to impose himself the way some actors do. He just assumes we're all in it together to make the most emotionally and dramatically accurate representation of life that we can."
It was that commitment, says Cronenberg, that begat the most controversial sequence in the film, a violent, extended bathhouse assault that Mortensen plays nude.
"David asked me how I wanted to shoot it, and I told him I didn't think there was any other way to do it. If I had somehow managed to keep a towel on in that struggle to the death, or if we had shot it behind columns or used tricky camera angles or something that concealed the body, audiences would have seen through that, it would have been avoiding the truth of that violence, and then it would have been phony, just another fight scene. I may not be comfortable being naked before a camera, but I would have been less comfortable doing something false. It's just the way I'm made."
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Viewing the Naked Truth
Source: Daily News Tribune
© 2006-2007 GateHouse Media, Inc.
Article re: nudity in movies
Ready to be shocked?
There's violence at the megaplex. Of the 27 movies now screening at the various major chains, 10 are either exceedingly violent or contain violent elements. Want to hazard a guess how many of these films contain nudity, apart from fleeting glimpses of an exposed body part? The answer is four. A film featuring a corpse with her shirt unbuttoned has since left the theaters.
The conclusion one might draw from this revelation is that Hollywood has no qualms about showing people getting killed yet shies away from showing them naked. One might also conclude that Hollywood is simply reflecting American predilections.
I remain astounded by the number of parents who take their children to see R-rated violent films but freak out if a movie shows a woman's breasts. I've actually seen parents let their children watch heads get decapitated, yet the instant some flesh gets revealed they pull their tykes out of the theater.
How warped is that? Are they afraid by seeing nudity that their children are going to have sex? Apparently, they're less worried about their children picking up a knife and butchering the baby sitter after seeing "Halloween".
So is Hollywood's avoidance of nudity a reflection of our Puritan past? Is its acceptance of violence a reflection of our Wild West past? I'll answer yes to both of those queries. I don't think Gen. George Patton was too far off the mark in his famous speech that opens the film "Patton."
"Men," he says to the 3rd Army, "all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the war, is a lot of horse dung. Americans, traditionally, love to fight. All real Americans love the sting of battle."
I don't believe Patton ever addressed the issue of Americans loving the sight of an exposed breast. As anyone who has spent any time in Europe knows, most Europeans don't have a hangup about nudity.
One of the more comical practices in American cinema these days concerns the steps filmmakers will take to keep nudity under wraps, so to speak. For some sex scenes, the actors keep all their clothes on, which is mildly moronic. In other instances, you don't even hear the man unzip his zipper or see the woman remove her panties, yet the lovers groan in orgiastic ecstasy. Now that's acting.
Even more imbecilic is the filming of women making love in the privacy of their bedrooms with their bras still on. More common is the breast cover-up where the camera only shows the sides of the woman's breasts. No cursed nipples allowed.
Viewers craving nudity in their films will be disappointed to know that Italian actress Monica Bellucci, who has appeared nude in many of her European films, engages in the dreaded breast cover-up while making love to Clive Owen in "Shoot 'em Up." This film depicts bad guys getting carrots shoved into their eyes, an umbilical cord getting severed by a bullet and a death count approaching triple digits. Yet Bellucci's nipples are MIA.
By the way, this is the movie with the aforementioned corpse. Her shirt was unbuttoned because she was breastfeeding her baby before she took a bullet in the head. Who says Hollywood doesn't honor traditional family values? Sadly, you'll have to wait for the DVD to see this classic.
"Good Luck Chuck," while an incredibly bad movie, at least doesn't skimp on the nudity. That's to be expected considering the plot. Poor Chuck (Arlington's Dane Cook) has been cursed so that every woman he has sex with ends up marrying the next man she meets. When word gets out about Chuck's curse, every woman with a nuptial urge wants to bed him. During these scenes, the film shows these women having sex with Chuck in a variety of positions in quick-cut images, and most of the ladies don't have their bras on. Imagine that.
Again, cinematic voyeurs will be saddened to discover that the film's co-star, Jessica Alba, has the cinematographer hide her private parts with discreet camera angles. Milla Jovovich receives the same coy treatment in "Resident Evil: Extinction." The opening scene shows Jovovich lying naked in a shower. Another scene shows multiple Jovovich clones suspended naked in watery bubbles. Strategically placed arms provide the cover-up here.
"The Heartbreak Kid," a horrendous remake of the 1972 original, shows actress Malin Akerman naked as she makes love to Ben Stiller. The scene is played for laughs. Too bad it's not funny. Ditto for the nudity in a gross-out scene involving urine and a jellyfish sting. Don't ask.
In "In the Valley of Elah," nudity centers on a strip club. Yes, the strippers are naked. In the film, Tommy Lee Jones plays a straight-laced former military man investigating the disappearance of his son. The discomfort he displays while interviewing a topless bartender is palpable. In a later scene, he doesn't recognize her with her top on.
"Feast of Love" also uses nudity effectively. Here, when people make love, they are actually naked, and unlike in "The Heartbreak Kid," the lovemaking is played with passion in mind. When the couples get out of bed, they don't cover themselves up with bedsheets - preposterous - or miraculously have underwear on - ridiculous. It's called reality.
Another dose is provided in "Eastern Promises," a film that contains male nudity. The exposure of Viggo Mortensen's genitalia is brief, but the fact that his nether regions are even seen at all is rare for a mainstream Hollywood film.
The scene also provides the film with its signature moment. Mortensen's character is in a bathhouse when two bad guys arrive to kill him. During the ensuing struggle, Mortensen's towel goes bye-bye, forcing him to fight au naturel. Apparently, the bad guys won't let him slip into something more comfortable. At the megaplex, you just don't see too many men in their birthday suits stabbing assassins.
A hack director would have had Mortensen's towel miraculously stay in place, or made the actor wear a bathing suit or played the camera cover-up game, but any of those choices would have pulled the fight scene's punch. Nudity in a film, as "Eastern Promises," "Elah" and "Feast of Love" prove, doesn't have to be gratuitous. It can serve the story.
Just don't expect Hollywood to change its undercover ways. As long as Americans continue to get more of a rise out of violence than sex, actresses and actors will continue to bear arms rather than bare all.
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