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Out of the subconscious: David Cronenberg's films don't shy away from testing the audience

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Ten years ago, David Cronenberg's film Crash - about people who glean sexual kicks from car pile-ups - was banned by Westminster Council. This meant it couldn't be screened in the West End. But that's where Cronenberg was last week, hobnobbing with the great and good in a tuxedo, while his new movie Eastern Promises opened the 51st London Film Festival. It begs the question, is the film-maker once known as the 'baron of blood' now happily part of the Establishment?

'On the contrary,' says the cool Canadian. 'That's the conundrum of art in society - there's always been that weird push and pull. As Freud would have said, art appeals to the unconscious, so art is always subversive. Plato wanted to banish all artists from his Utopia because they were subversive of society.

Yet society seemingly needs art. However "Establishment" you are, you still need the understanding of the transgression that art gives, even if you don't live it.'

Finding Freud on the tip of Cronenberg's tongue is no surprise. His work frequently worms around the nastier side of the subconscious: his first short Transfer (1966) was about a psychiatrist being stalked by a patient. When accompanied by his sunken, blue-eyed stare, pleasant but unnervingly neutral voice and erudite references to Plato et al ('There was a time when I thought I might become an academic - you know, a literary academic'), interviewing Cronenberg begins to make me feel uncomfortably like Jodie Foster in The Silence Of The Lambs.

However, Cronenberg's grisliness is more clinical observation than lip-smacking terror. Eastern Promises is just as much an unflinching dissection of violence as it is a slick and brutal crime thriller about Russian gangsters in London. Undeniably more accessible than his earlier, squishier (nay, stomach-churning) 'body horror' classics - you may recall the talking anus in 1991's Naked Lunch - it also reunites Cronenberg with his A History Of Violence star Viggo Mortensen. These mob movies have given Cronenberg a new audience: A History Of Violence was arguably his biggest commercial and critical success to date. Yet the 64-year-old director bridles at the charge, levelled by his diehard fans, that he has gone 'mainstream'.

'I just make movies that intrigue and interest me - if I was really going to go mainstream, I'd make Spider-Man 4. Then you have a built-in audience, a budget of something outrageous like $200million, you don't get any creative freedom but you get paid a lot of money and you're guaranteed a huge success. That's mainstream.'

He had his chance with Top Gun or Beverly Hills Cop, both of which he was offered following the success of 1983's Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone (a testimony, perhaps, to the amount of drugs knocking round Hollywood in those days).

Instead, he was more interested in working on Videodrome (1983), where James Woods plays a character who develops a huge slot in his tummy that accepts videotapes. Not that he made that in protest. 'I have nothing to prove. I'm not doing anything to show anybody anything, frankly,' he says with convincing detachment.

Originally dismissed as a sort of exploitation horror hound, Cronenberg is now considered a genuine auteur. Yet entwining the psychological with the physical connects his entire body of work. In Eastern Promises it is evident in the tattoos all the Russian gangsters sport, as a kind of visible CV. 'I know people will look at the tattoo stuff and say I wanted to do the movie because it's about "body consciousness" or whatever - actually, it wasn't even in the original script and it was Viggo that found out about all that stuff,' he insists.

That Cronenberg has no tattoos himself is unsurprising for a controlled, self-contained man who clearly gives little away.

He strongly resists the idea that's been repeatedly put to him, that he has his own 'stamp'. 'In A History Of Violence,' he says, 'I actually cut out a scene that I've allowed to appear on the DVD extras.

It's a dream sequence where Ed Harris has his torso blown open by Viggo and he's lying there, still alive, with his chest open and you can see his ribs and' - he mimes pulsating entrails - 'I knew people would think "Cronenberg put that in just so he could have a Cronenberg moment".'

My own Cronenberg moment drawing to a close, I ask what's next for this disconcerting director - only to find it's an opera adaptation of his 1986 body mutation flick, The Fly, which starred Jeff Goldblum as the metamorphosing mad scientist.

Who knows, next year we may see Cronenberg back in his tuxedo as The Fly premieres at the Royal Opera House - I do wonder if he'll be enjoying it with a nice Chianti.

Eastern Promises will be in cinemas from Friday.

 

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