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Peter told us that his biggest challenge was shooting the car-to-car footage. What was the toughest aspect of those scenes for you?
Cronenberg:
Oh, everything. It's the detail that you ignore that kills you finally. You have to try to subdue every obstacle. Getting the roads was crucial. I was watching some movie on TV the other day and I said to myself, 'Uh oh, we're on a deserted stretch of unfinished highway, there's a car crash coming up.' I could just sense it coming. To avoid that predictability, I really wanted the roads in Crash to feel lived-in. We were offered the use of a highway that was under construction, which would have made things very convenient, but it had that same boring feel, so I said no.
We actually got the use of roads in Toronto that no one's ever shot on; we shut down some major internal freeways. Part of the reason we were able to do that was my relationship with the city over the years, and part of it was that they were very excited that we were shooting the city as Toronto, and wouldn't be changing all of the street signs to make it look like Chicago. It was a matter of civic pride!
It's a wonderful playground to have those kinds of roads at your disposal. But it also created a paradoxical situation in which Peter and I had to shoot action scenes without making an action movie. I had to keep telling the stunt guys, 'No, tone it down, I don't want the triple-flip and the explosion.' We did no slow-motion shooting; everything was done at 24 frames, and it was a very deliberate choice. Two of the most photographed things in movie history are sex and cars. For reasons of both personal ego and cinematic tone, I wanted to shoot those things in a way that no one had ever seen, but not in a spectacular way. This required us to make many small aesthetic choices, such as mounting the cameras on the cars just off the normal axis, or splitting the frame with the guy driving the car on the left and the roadway on the right.
It's folly to think that you're going to find an angle that no one has used before. You have to rely on an accumulation of small details to create the feeling in viewers that they've never seen cars shot in quite the same way. Every day we made a little prayer to the gods of cinema that we could find a subtly different way to do everything.
The film has a lot of intriguing symbolism. In the car-wash scene where Vaughan is groping Ballard's wife in the back seat of the Lincoln, the heavy strips of material cleaning the car almost seem like extensions of Vaughan's fingers.
Cronenberg:
That's a lovely perception, because when people talk to me about technology and what it's doing to us, I always reply, 'What are you talking about? Technology is us.' Technology doesn't come from outer space; it's an extension of us, almost an incarnation of human will.
Those scenes lend the film an interesting subtext. Did you plan to use symbolic visuals all along, or did those ideas occur to you later?
Cronenberg:
It's an organic process. When you're directing a movie, you're making literally thousands of decisions a day, and your orientation to the material is guiding you. It's partly intuitive, because you're usually shooting out of sequence and you're working with actors and lots of other contributors. You're being guided on many levels by many things, and if it all works, at the end it's all integrated and it works in the movie. It's not a process where you make a list of 'stuff' - you know, 'Here's a list of metaphysical stuff, here's a list of symbolic stuff, here's a list of filmic stuff.' It's a constant process of integrating all of these things. For example, we decided to use bruise colors for the costumes. As soon as we made that decision, it affected everything, including the upholstery in the the wife's Miata, which is a purply color. We had the car reupholstered just for that reason. In the book, her car is white, but no cinematographer's going to want you to have a white car, so we made the car silver. We had to paint a combination for the car that didn't really exist in the Miata line.
So part of the lighting and set decorating was done with the clothes colors in mind. That became a conscious decision, and it gave us an orientation on many levels. Physically, these were the right colors for a story as dark and moody as this, and symbolically, they worked for the characters, who are very bruised people trying to recover some kind of life.
The point you made about the futuristic look is very interesting, because there's nothing in the book that's futuristic, even though lots of people think of Crash as a sci-fi book. When you read it, it's very hard to justify the 'sci-fi' label in the usual way. But in my opinion - and I felt it was the boldest part of the book - I think the psychology of the characters is futuristic. It's as though Ballard has anticipated a kind of common psychopathology that may no longer look like one because everyone will have it. It will be the normality. He did that in the book, and I did it even more rigorously in the film. Ballard and I were at a press conference overseas, and a Finnish journalist said, 'I really liked the movie, but I don't think the movie goes as far as the book.' But Ballard very graciously replied, 'I completely disagree, I think the movie goes much farther than the book, and I think the movie starts where the book left off.' That sort of ended that discussion.
I had to go through a distilling process when I was writing the script. I wanted to begin with that psychology, and I did my own version of the jump-cutting that Godard pioneered in Breathless, excising all of the things that didn't interest me. I didn't want to show viewers how these people got that way, or why they got that way. What interested me was, 'Where do they go from here?' The book has that inner monologue that you can never do on film, and it's the thing I'm most jealous about when I think of writing. Voice-over can sometimes work, but it's quite a different thing.
So the sci-fi aspects of the book is more of a tone that comes from the characters and their weird disconnections dialogue and relationships. Peter and I were looking for a visual correlative for that.
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