When, in 1996,
Crash
was released
, a film adaptation of the homonymous novel by JG Ballard directed by David Cronenberg (Toronto, 77 years old), who was familiar with the trajectory of both creators could not imagine a more consistent alliance.
Writer and filmmaker seemed two sensibilities destined to meet in an electrifying head-on collision like the one that would unite the destinies of the novel's protagonist, explicit
alter ego
by Ballard, and Vaughan, an enigmatic character obsessed by the sexual power released in traffic accidents and by the fetishistic fascination of the wounds produced in the obscene communion between flesh and metal.
And yet, the Ballard and Cronenberg thing was not exactly love at first sight.
“I hadn't read anything of his at the time he published the novel
Crash
.
I knew who he was, but I had not approached his work ”, says the filmmaker in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS from his home in Vancouver.
“It was producer Jeremy Thomas who asked me to adapt the novel in the eighties.
I started reading it and I didn't like it at all, to the point that I gave up reading.
I didn't go into his weird and clinical style at all and told Jeremy I didn't want to adapt it.
The fact is that Thomas and I became friends, a few years passed and I resumed reading and, at that moment, I realized that Ballard's work was brilliant, in a sense I managed to understand the novel in a way that had not achieved before.
And then I told Jeremy that if he was still interested in producing it, I was willing to adapt it, "he explains.
David Cronenberg, the veteran of the future
Now,
Crash
returns to the screens in a restored version in 4K, like a car of transgression that has been polished the body to embark on the triumphant race of its twenty-fifth anniversary.
“4K has allowed us to get the best possible version of the film.
It is not only a matter of image texture, but also of sound design, because in its day we had only a stereo mix and now the sound engineers have been able to develop a splendid job, obtaining an enveloping, metallic, mechanical result.
I'm not a celluloid freak.
I firmly believe in the superiority of digital cinema ”.
They came from within ...
(1975), the Canadian's first commercial feature film, was released the same year that British JG Ballard (Shanghai, 1930- London, 2009) published his influential novel
Skyscraper
.
There were few who detected a certain supernatural brotherhood between the two works.
The film seemed a chronologically impossible adaptation of that book with which Ballard continued to delve into that psychopathology of everyday life that he had begun to explore in the revolutionary
The Exhibition of Atrocities
(1970).
“It gives the impression that we were both responding to the same
ethos
, we understood some things that were not so evident to the rest of society at the time,” says Cronenberg.
“I didn't know anything about his work and he, of course, didn't know my work either.
We had the antennas synchronized at the same wavelength and we received the same type of signals from the atmosphere at the time.
In retrospect, it is easy to detect similarities between
Skyscrapers
and
They came from within…
, but there was no influence of any kind between us;
we were both simply letting ourselves be influenced by the sign of the times ”.
I'm not a celluloid freak.
I firmly believe in the superiority of digital cinema
The similarities between the Ballard and Cronenberg trajectories don't end there.
The first creative steps of both were inscribed, with a clearly heterodox imprint, in the generic framework of science fiction, but, at a certain point in his career, the writer began to develop his novels in the strict present, using a slightly distorted realistic record.
Little by little, Cronenberg's cinema also abandoned his poetics of the new flesh, not to betray himself, but to continue talking about the same thing — the transforming power of the unconscious, of the drive — in films with difficult generic cataloging such as
M Butterfly
(1993),
Spider
(2002),
A history of violence
(2005),
Eastern Promises
(2007),
A dangerous method
(2011) or
Cosmopolis
(2012).
The worst thing that can happen to you when you present a movie is that nobody cares, that there are no reactions of any kind
At the Cannes Film Festival,
Crash
received the special jury award, but Cronenberg recalls that the press reaction was not exactly unanimous or friendly.
“The novel was well known and had been published more than twenty years ago.
I never thought I could generate such a heated controversy.
Gilles Jacob, Festival Director, told me that he had scheduled it in the middle of the competition because he expected the film to explode like a bomb.
I took it as a well-meaning exaggeration, but I was right.
The press conference was extraordinary.
They attacked us a lot.
There was a critic who said that he adored the book, but that the film was indefensible.
Ballard cut him off saying no, the movie was so much better than the original.
It was a very generous gesture on his part.
The worst thing that can happen to you when you present a film is that nobody cares, that there are no reactions of any kind, ”he recalls.
Twenty-five years later, the excellence of
Crash
seems beyond any doubt, while the filmmaker prepares the adaptation, which he still does not know if it will take the form of a film or a television series, of
Consumidos
, his first novel, a brilliant synthesis of his obsessions that published when, after the premiere of
Maps to the Stars
(2014), he believed that retirement was going to be his only destination.
The voice of the visionary
In films such as
Videodrome
(1983),
Crash
or
Existez
(1999) a future of media obsessions, social (and sexual) distances and addictions to the virtual is drawn that maintains a more than reasonable resemblance to our dystopian present.
How does Cronenberg feel when she's considered a visionary director?
"I like it, I cannot deny it, but when I make films I do not intend to prophesy anything. I simply react to things that are happening and for which I have no answers, but many questions. Making films means for me to undertake a journey of discovery philosophical and emotional. In retrospect, seeing that some of my films pointed out some of the directions in which society would evolve is satisfying to me, because it indicates that perhaps my intuitions were correct. "
It is tempting, then, to ask him about the pandemic: "We are learning many things, but I am not so sure that this makes us better. Even misinformation does not make us unique, because in times of the Black Death rumors also spread with the same speed as the disease. There was already a lot of conspiracy thinking back then. We are living the modern version of something that has happened to us before. As human beings we are the same as we were then. We do not evolve too quickly. "
.