David Cronenberg flew into London last Friday and into a storm of controversy. His film Crash, which screened before a sell-out LFF crowd on Saturday, has been denounced in the right-wing press as “immoral and depraved.” Heritage Secretary Virginia Bottomley, who earlier in the week had demanded “significant cuts in screen violence”, led calls for the film to be banned.
Cronenberg is polite but firm in defending the film, whose characters are sexually aroused by car crashes: “Some lively controversy can be energising. The only annoying part is when the film is being deliberately misunderstood.” A courteous man with a pedagogic air, he is intrigued by the extreme responses Crash, which he acknowledges is “difficult, disturbing and unrelenting,” has provoked. “A lot of the stuff being written here is being written by people who haven't actually seen it. So it's a relief to have the film shown. People are actually reacting to the real movie rather than the phantom of the movie.”
Last month it was announced that Columbia TriStar had won a keenly fought contest to distribute the film in the UK, with a release set for February. The British Board of Film Classification has yet to decide what to do with the film, which has topped the box office in both France and Canada, and has also opened strongly in Portugal, Norway, Germany and South Africa.
Initially, Cronenberg told Moving Pictures, he wasn't even sure that JG Ballard's 1973 novel could be filmed. “But when I started to write the script, I found Crash was very cinematic - in my sense of cinema, anyway, not the Hollywood sense. It distilled beautifully, I felt, and very simply. In a bizarre way, it has a very classical narrative structure.” He found his collaboration with Ballard highly rewarding. “We had an instantaneous understanding of each other's art even though we came from very different backgrounds.”
Cronenberg's passion for motor racing lies behind his latest project, Red Cars, produced by the UK's Goldcrest. “It's about the 1961 Formula 1 Championship, which was won by Ferrari's Phil Hill, the first American to win. It's quite a different thing to Crash. You could play them in a double bill: they're like two sides of a coin.” Geoffrey Macnab, Nick Thomas
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