“It just was sublime”: the one thing that convinced David Cronenberg to adapt ‘Cosmopolis’
While the book vs. blockbuster trope most often turns a hot debate, there exists a growing handful of literary adaptations accepted with grace into the growing list of cinematic classics. Whether it be Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, which debuted on-screen by Francis Ford Coppola, or Greta Gerwig’s take on the Louisa May Alcott novel Little Women, one thing is certain. If a book’s pages are meddled within the right directorial palms, they can springboard a screenwriter’s career. Less in need of the launchpad, Canadian film director David Cronenberg has been central to the sci-fi scene since his inaugural picture, Shivers, was released in 1975.
Featuring a suburban landscape newly infested with parasitical beings, it gave viewers a taste of Cronenberg’s unhinged approach to cinema, which was welcomed consequently by lovers of horror and the unnerving forevermore.
No stranger to book adaptations himself, Cronenberg even channelled his knack for the horrid into a hook-up with writer Stephen King in 1983, successfully remastering his novel The Dead Zone for a respectable critic score of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. So, well-versed in the realm of uncanny-on-page meets uncanny-on-screen, it becomes clear why responding to Don DeLillo’s 2003 novel, Cosmopolis, was a seeming dream come true.
In the film of the same name, released in 2012, Twilight star Robbert Pattinson plays Eric Packer, a serial capitalist with a penchant for improving trade at the cost of almost anything dear to him – all played out in his ‘office’, a black stretch limousine. But as the movie progresses, in its The Matrix meets Panic Room styling, protesting rodents are paraded outside the vehicle’s windows as Packer begins to lose his sense of importance – upheld throughout by Cronenberg’s trademark, up-close camera angles and distorted compositions.
Surprisingly, Cronenberg tells Film Comment that he doesn’t always feel as passionate about books as he did with Cosmopolis. But yet this proceeds to amplify his bond with the film in question, of which he denotes one simple reason to his commitment to bring novel to screen – and to the viewing of his cult fanbase.
Likened to the hard edges of Pattinson’s character throughout, Cronenberg may have his own reservations in reading literature, but was eventually broken down at the chance to translate DeLillo’s novel into his cinematic style, a harmonious matchmaking. Hence, as he expressed to Film Comment what exactly it was that pushed his will over the threshold and onto the set of Cosmopolis, bluntly, he returned: “the dialogue”.
Just as Eric Packer finally drops his previously hardened exterior, shooting his own hand in the final scene in the hopes of finally feeling something, Cronenberg adapts novels he bonds with on a deeper level, as such to do them justice. “It’s easy to say ‘the dialogue’, but it was sublime. So strangely dehumanized and yet so obsessive and passionate underneath”.
Drawing parallels to his own working style, it becomes apparent that when literature makes its mark on a director, just as the death of a cherished artist had on softening Packer in the film, directors like Cronenberg are not merely bringing a book to the screen, but truly living them.
