The simple reason David Cronenberg doesn’t appreciate improvisation
Canadian director David Cronenberg is known for a lot of things: grotesque body horror, psychonautical examinations of the self, chilly and chilling cult classics. Not least of those things is the penchant for adapting difficult and complicated novels that other directors wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.
The director started off simply enough with the straightforward narrative of his Christopher Walken-starring adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. But from there, the source materials grow woollier and more inscrutable, ranging from William S Burrough’s head-scratcher Naked Lunch, a fictionalisation of the lives of identical twin gynaecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus in Dead Ringers, JG Ballard’s car-collision romance Crash, and Patrick McGrath’s unreliably narrated gothic novel Spider.
By the time of his adaptation of Don Delilo’s Cosmopolis in 2012, you’d be forgiven for thinking he has a healthy appetite for adapting the unadaptable. But that’s a characterisation Cronenberg himself rejects. At a press conference following that movie’s release, he said that’s not how he approaches adaptation: “Certainly, the entire idea of trying to film ‘unfilmable’ novels is not in my head at all. I think they’re filmable, and that’s why I film them. It’s not as if that’s a challenge I’m looking for. On the contrary, the easier it is to work, the happier I am. I’m fairly lazy that way.”
It’s nevertheless undeniable that Cronenberg has a strong record of delivering books to the silver screen, which would be a tall order for many. Perhaps this can be attributed to his distaste for improvisation and respect for the dialogue of writers like Don DeLillo. Explaining, “I don’t want the actors to be screenwriters. They’re not designed to work like that. If you’re making a movie like Cassavetes and everyone’s improvising and that’s understood and you’ve got actors that are used to it, that’s a whole other thing. Basically, I want them to stick to the script, but within that there’s tonnes of things that an actor can bring to you. It’s the choreography and the tonality, the pitch, the rhythms, and the pauses.”
According to Cronenberg, it’s how DeLillo’s characters speak that forms the backbone of the screenplay. “I thought that it was typical Don DeLillo dialogue, which is realistic because Americans do speak like that, but it’s also heavily stylised,” he said. “I do think of it as being a bit Pinteresque in that it has a real stylized rhythm and tone that you can recognise from a mile away and that the punctuation really matters. I literally had the computer here and the book here, and I transcribed all of the dialogue into screenplay form, and I just asked if it was a movie or not, and I thought, yeah, it was. Then I just put in a whole bunch of action stuff, and that was it.”
Cosmopolis marked one of the first forays into the art house and independent side of cinema for lead actor Robert Pattinson, after an early career marked by roles in films like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Edward Cullen in the Twilight series. It’s a course he stayed for at least the rest of the decade, with appearances in films like Claire Denis’ High Life and the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time.
Pattinson said the preservation of DeLillo’s writing in the screenplay allowed him to approach the role without having to come up with his own entire character analysis of DeLillo’s enigmatic novel. “So it comes down to thinking about creating an interpretation of DeLillo that’s completely original in two weeks, which is completely ridiculous,” he concluded, speaking to Cronenberg at the press conference. “But there’s something about the construction of his writing that’s so easy that you don’t need to add anything to it, and you just encouraged me.”
