The Complexity of Cronenberg

Canadian director David Cronenberg, dressed in black, his graying hair parted on the side in a ‘70s-style heap, enters a hotel room in midtown Manhattan and sits down. Only it isn’t David Cronenberg. It’s “David Cronenberg.”

“There is a media version of me that is not me,” he says amiably. “It’s an invented thing; it’s sometimes connected to you, but it’s a weird doppelganger. You’ve got to know that it exists on many levels.”

The media version of the 56-year-old Cronenberg, who is based in Toronto, is a cult figure who has directed some of the most disturbing movies in the history of cinema. Among them: “Videodrome” (subversive television transmissions short-circuiting viewers’ brains), “The Fly” (scientist morphing into an insect), “Dead Ringers” (lethally inseparable twin gynecologists), “Naked Lunch” (paranoid writer tormented by visions of a talking organ) and, most recently, “Crash” (eroticism and auto accidents).

Many of these films feature outrageous bodily mutations and extrapolations, earning Cronenberg a reputation as a purveyor of horror, though that’s only one level of his complex work.

Cronenberg’s newest film, “eXistenZ,” which opens Friday, is about a virtual-reality game creator (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her bodyguard (Jude Law), who are being pursued by assassins who want to strike a blow for “reality” by destroying both her and her newest creation, eXistenZ. In keeping with Cronenberg’s penchant for things organic, the technology of eXistenZ is not silicon-based but rather a living organism--a “pod” that looks like a puddle with nipples on it. It plugs into the spine of the player via a tube that resembles an umbilical cord.

If this sounds unsettling, it is. But what’s really disturbing is that once they’re plugged into the game it becomes increasingly difficult for the players--and the audience--to determine what is the game and what is reality.

Oddly enough, this scenario was inspired not by Microsoft or Myst but by a clandestine interview Cronenberg conducted with the writer Salman Rushdie. On one level Cronenberg was intrigued by the idea of an artist being persecuted because of something he created (in Rushdie’s case, “The Satanic Verses,” which offended Iranian Islamic militants so much that they offered a bounty on his life).

On a deeper level, he saw that Rushdie was being victimized by a media version of himself created not only by Iran (which said he is a blasphemer) but also by elements of the British press (which said he is exploiting the government security forces assigned to protect him). That these versions of Rushdie are not true doesn’t make them any less real, Cronenberg asserts.

“This movie is about the way different realities are created and the idea that we do create reality,” Cronenberg says. “There is no absolute reality. It has to do with our physiology, and then it has to do with our consciousness. Just the way every movie-maker is creating a reality, the first thing people do when they wake up in the morning is reinvent reality and their identity. They have to remember who they are, where they are, what they’re supposed to be doing, what world they live in.”

This is pretty heady stuff, though the film works in a conventional story line: the attractive couple on the lam. But there’s something a little off here. When Leigh and Law flee an assassination attempt, the background as they drive along is an obvious matte shot. The gas station they go to is called “Gas.” A two-headed mutant amphibian shows up for no particular reason. All of this is made clear at the end, but will audiences still be around when it is?

“I actually think audiences in general have gone downhill since I made ‘Videodrome,’ ” Cronenberg says. “I think the Hollywood template has taken over much more of the world in the last 20 years. I comment on it in ‘eXistenZ’ when I have Jennifer say, ‘People are programmed to accept so little, but the possibilities are so great.’ I really think people are programmed to accept only a very narrow way of filmmaking.”

Not surprisingly, this programming made “eXistenZ” difficult to finance. It was actually ready to go before “Crash,” but Cronenberg says studio execs were afraid of it. (Miramax ended up distributing the film.)

“It’s the Hollywood approach to characters, which is very Freudian, I think; you must identify with a main character,” Cronenberg says. ‘People seem to want movies to be kind of psychotherapy so they’ll cry and they’ll laugh and they’ll do this and they’ll do that.”

This inability of Hollywood to get Cronenberg is nothing new. He says that industry executives have wanted to work with him for years, but only with their version of him. How else to explain their offering him such projects as “Flashdance,” “Witness,” “Seven” and “The Truman Show”? He says that when he went around town pitching “Dead Ringers,” execs said, “Do they have to be gynecologists? Couldn’t they be lawyers?” More than one studio told him they wouldn’t make his twins project, but they would be happy if he made theirs.

Even his own representatives didn’t get it. Before Cronenberg made “Crash,” his agent told him that the movie would destroy his career and encouraged him to do Demi Moore’s “The Juror” instead. He no longer has that agent.

Given the sophistication of Cronenberg’s films, it’s ironic how low-tech they are--even “eXistenZ” (he concedes that this may present a marketing problem, especially with the virtual-reality film “The Matrix” muddling the picture). Cronenberg says he usually stays away from visual effects because he considers his sets a “sculptural” space. He gets more realistic performances from actors when they have something to respond to, which was why, for example, an actual pod was built. Leigh took one home, as did Law, so they could get comfortable with them.

“It’s not as simple as a Gameboy or a Sony Playstation,” Leigh says dryly. “I wanted to know what each button does and be really clear about it. I also thought that, as a designer, it should be pretty intuitive. It feels like one of those balls that reduce stress or help with carpal tunnel syndrome, squishy but good. It looks alive. I really did think of it as a combination of a pet and a Macintosh.”

Leigh says that Cronenberg had his cast bone up on the existentialists in order to understand where he was coming from. And she says she had fun playing with the various levels of reality in the film. Unfortunately, around five weeks into the shoot, Stanley Kubrick called her for three weeks of new shooting on “Eyes Wide Shut,” in which she had a cameo. Because she is in almost every scene in “eXistenZ,” this proved impossible, so Kubrick recast the part.

“It was a huge disappointment because I loved working on the movie and I loved working with Kubrick,” Leigh says. “It was a big thing in my life.”

So many roles and so little time. It’s the rare actor who gets to play them, and the rare director who celebrates them.

“Without this being ‘Shakespeare in Love,’ ” Cronenberg says, “ ‘eXistenZ’ is about acting and movie-making and writing. There are comments everywhere in the film about creating roles and moving in and out of them.”

When it’s suggested that somehow Leigh and her pod won’t summon the same sort of warm feelings that Gwyneth Paltrow and her bard did, he laughs. “I don’t think so either. Too bad.”