Yours extremely, David Cronenberg and Bruce Wagner

Interview, August, 1996

Filmmaker David Cronenberg has said that the subject of all horror movies is physical death. For the characters who inhabit writer Bruce Wagner's fictions, death is life without a three-picture deal. If that doesn't exactly make soul mates of the cerebral Canadian auteur and the acerbic Hollywood insider, it's no surprise that they admire each other's work. Indeed, one could envision Cronenberg being the director of choice for the Tinseltown remake of Pasolini's Teorema, outlined in Wagner's latest book, I'm Losing You (Villard).

Like Wagner's 1991 novel Force Majeure, the four fleet novellas in I'm Losing You unfold in a purgatory of dead stars and live human flotsam overwhelmed by envy, alienation, and bizarre sexual habits. Esoteric erotic behavior also drives Cronenberg's upcoming movie Crash, adapted from J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel about a group of people who find sadomasochistic release in automotive crack-ups. Essentially a series of tableaux of car parts and fluids coalescing with those of their drivers, the movie was cited for its "audacity, daring, and originality" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and has since received an NC-17 rating en route to a controversial opening this tall. J.D.

DAVID CRONENBERG: What's brilliant about I'm Losing You is that you're able to be cynical about complex, fucked-up characters, yet I still feel a huge compassion flowing toward them. It's not a typical Hollywood satire, in that it goes into the general yearning of humans to transcend themselves.

BRUCE WAGNER: Well, you know, Hollywood is so much a part of me. The thought of writing a straight satire about Hollywood - I would reach for my revolver, as they say.

DC: I think it's actually, "I reach for my Browning," which is an automatic, self-loading pistol.

BW: No, that's a Vassar student: "I reach for my Browning [anthology]." [laughs] But, yes, my ex-wife used to joke that I was always writing about Rodeo Drive. That was my Main Street, so to speak. When I was ten I was fetching Variety and The Hollywood Reporter at the drugstore for my father, who was a television producer. So I'm heavily in the mix. I am, in the extreme, writing about what I know - so extremely that when Oliver Stone optioned [the unfinished draft of] Force Majeure, I knew that whatever happened from that point would be fodder for the rest of the book.

Now, I want to talk to you about Crash, David. You know, I spoke with Paul Schrader recently. He had just seen Taxi Driver [which Schrader wrote] again and he told me he wished he could still be in that subversive groove. Now that he has a wife and family, though, a heavy penalty could he exacted if he were to venture too far down the river.

DC: For me, the penalty for not going that far down is too high a price to pay.

BW: But you do lead a super-normal life.

DC: Yes, that's true. I have a wife and kids, too.

BW: So how do you manage to go so far in your work?

DC: It's easy. To me, Crash feels exactly like my life - my inner life. I could have called the main character in my movie "David Cronenberg." That doesn't mean that I've done what he does. I find that living a normal life is deranged enough.

BW: You can go even farther in books. When I discovered the Marquis de Sade, I was startled that his work was sitting out on the shelves of major bookstores.

DC: Margaret Atwood, the novelist, once argued with me that books shouldn't be censored, but that movies should be. And her reasoning was: Nobody reads, so who cares? If I were to put on-screen what you've written about, I would be flayed alive. And however extreme my version of Crash is, Ballard's is much more so.

BW: Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night to caution someone who's going to see Crash?

DC: Definitely. I warn people away. But my own experience of Crash is full of love and positive vibes from my having been hermetically sealed on the film set. Than I show it to people and they faint! I feel audiences will sense the emotion and the compassion that I know to be in my work. But people say, "Fuck. That was a cold, brutal, nasty film." And I wonder, That other level, is it not there?

BW: The ultimate review of Crash, of course, would [be headlined]: CRONENBERG STRUCK DOWN IN CROSSWALK AT CANNES.

DC: Well, my son was hit by a car once, near the Vatican. He's fine now, but I'm reminded of what Ballard said about the writing of Crash. His wife had died, and he was raising their three kids himself. Every morning be would send them off to school, across several major roads, and sit down to write Crash, praying that fate wouldn't deal him "a nasty surprise," as he put it. But when it comes to car crashes, who can possibly be immune? They're one of the unspoken plagues of our century. Cars have affected us so completely in our understanding of space and time and sexuality that we almost don't see them anymore.