David Cronenberg talks 'Crimes of the Future' with Now Toronto

Excerpt from the interview relating to Crimes of the Future: 

But it turns out Cronenberg is not done with directing. He recently returned home to Toronto from shooting a movie called Crimes Of The Future in Athens with a cast that includes Mortensen, Lea Séydoux, Kristen Stewart and Scott Speedman. It’s the first film he’s made based on his own original screenplay since 1999’s Existenz.

In addition to a round of press interviews to promote Slasher, he’s busy doing post-production on the film, which he hopes to finish in time to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next May. The movie shares its title with an underground sci-fi movie he made in 1970 but it’s not a remake or sequel, he says. 

The title of your new movie, Crimes Of The Future, shares a title with an early film of yours. Can you talk about whether there is a connection between the two or is this is a case of looking back to move forward?

We basically just like the title and stole it for this movie. I guess I wasn’t finished with the use of that title, which actually comes from another work called Hunger by the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun. He wrote a novel called Hunger, and there’s a movie version starring Per Oscarsson who plays a poet in the 1890s and at one point you see him on a bridge writing a poem called Crimes Of The Future. And that struck me. I thought, “I want to read that poem.” And then when I became a filmmaker later I thought, “I want to make that movie.” So it’s been stolen twice – I stole it from Knut Hamsun and now I’m stealing it again from myself.

It is not a sequel to the old underground film that I made. It’s not a remake of it at all. There is, though, the idea of crimes of the future. That is to say, crimes that could not exist now but exist in the future. It’s an intriguing concept. So there is that connection between the two. For example, there are all kinds of crimes now that involve the internet – harassment over the internet, stealing people’s emails. These crimes did not exist 30 years ago because there wasn’t the internet. There are new laws for new crimes. That intrigues me.

Last year, the movie Crash was re-released and is more widely available again. It’s famous for the scenes on the Gardiner Expressway, which is now being partially torn down. You shot this new movie in Athens, but do you have any feeling toward the look and feel of Toronto’s cityscape and the way it’s evolved with all the new condos?  Does it capture your imagination similarly to the way it did in that film?

Well, I think as the city evolves, filmmakers who work in the city will move with it. Certainly I wrote the script Crimes Of The Future thinking of Toronto, and then I ended up shooting it for various reasons in Athens. The only changes to the script that I made – not dialogue or characters – are the ones that involve shooting in a city that is very, very different from Toronto and taking advantage of what Athens is now. In a way, it’s found art. There is always that element in filmmaking for me where you find something. You find a location that provokes a certain kind of choreography of your actors and so on, some changes in the visual aspect of it. I have no doubt that if I shoot another movie in Toronto, I will embrace the new Toronto. I will not be trying to resurrect the old Toronto of Crash from 1996. I would shoot what’s here.

It’s an interesting thing that when you’re doing location scouting in a city. I had a Greek driver who took me around and he said that he had been living in Athens for 60 years and we – the production – were showing him places that he had never seen before and never knew existed. There is that element of you, the foreigner, coming to a foreign city, a strange city, and you discover things that the inhabitants of the city have never really known were there. You get excited about those places and that provokes you into shooting a movie in a certain way. It’s very exciting when that happens.

To wrap up, can you talk about where you’re at with Crimes Of The Future and any other projects you have on the go?

I’ve finished shooting Crimes Of The Future. I’ve now gone into the editing room and have worked with my editor. I almost forgot how much fun editing can be because it’s been a while since I did it. We’re expecting the movie to be finished by May. There are a lot of visual effects that have to be developed and the sound, the music – all of that. We figure it’ll be ready to be premiered somewhere, maybe at the Cannes Film Festival, in May. And that’s pretty much it.

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