The David Cronenberg movie that Francis Ford Coppola hated: “I have to bite my tongue”
Known as the creator of body horror, director David Cronenberg knows how to get under people’s skin with his provocative and sometimes grotesque tales regarding matters of the body. Whether showing one man’s transformation into a fly or critiquing our societal obsession with violence, Cronenberg has a knack for bringing humanity to absurd and surrealistic subject matter, always with a tone of satire in his dark and unsettling post-modern stories. However, one film of his caused a bit more of a scandal among film lovers and makers alike, with one infamous director expressing his distaste over the film.
Crash, released in 1996, follows a group of strangers who find themselves united after a car accident, but all experience a similar reaction as they become sexually attracted to the chaos of car accidents, trying to replicate the scene for their own enjoyment.
The film is filled with raw energy while also feeling cold and lifeless, with a bleak industrial backdrop that feels draining and devoid of any life. It pulses with the lust and desire of these characters as they attempt to feel anything but have been numbed by the monotony of everyday life, desperate for danger as a replacement for joy in a harsh, consumerist world. And in a world that has commodified sex, the only way that these characters can feel arousal is through death, flirting with destruction.
Crash was met with mixed responses and was famously labelled as being ‘beyond the bounds of depravity’, with some critics and audience members being repulsed by the explicit eroticism in the film and the way it incorporated this with violence. And after its initial screening at Cannes, the film was awarded the Special Jury Prize “for originality, for daring and for audacity”. This was famously headed by Francis Ford Coppola, who, upon announcing the award, stated that some jury members “did abstain very passionately” from awarding this honour to Crash.
However, Cronenberg later discovered that it was Coppola himself who had abstained from the vote and had hated Crash so much that he had refused to personally hand over the award to the director. When asked about this, Cronenberg said, “Whenever I see Francis he tends to remind me, ‘We gave you that prize, remember?’ I have to bite my tongue to not say, ‘Except I know you didn’t want to give me the prize because you hated the movie!’”
You could argue that compared to Coppola, Cronenberg is a true auteur and has made something that perhaps scared The Godfather director due to how genuinely revolutionary and subversive it was. It isn’t an easy film to understand and is made to make us uncomfortable, not to entertain. Roger Ebert himself described Crash by saying, “I admired it, although I cannot say that I ‘liked’ it”. Crash is not meant to be consumed in the same way as other media, as this is the very critique that is at the heart of the film, highlighting our detachment from humanity when pain is used for entertainment, something that Cronenberg sees as a direct result of materialism and the way we commodify our own humanity.
Crash is both sexy and unsexy, a story about connection that feels desperately lonely, and because of its inner contradictions, it’s not necessarily something you find joy in. But this is the point, and the fact that Coppola can’t see this probably points to a much bigger gap in his own film taste, and coming from the man who made Megaflopolis, I’m not entirely surprised.
