The film's atmosphere of alienation is heightened by the unreality of the staging. There are very few people around except for the main characters.Cronenberg:
I had a very enthusiastic A.D. who was always ready to fill up the streets with a hundred extras at any moment. I didn't want any of those people in the frame, because I wasn't interested in them. The result is a sort of isolated, abstracted feel that reflects the internal world of the characters.
The sexual positions of the characters in the story also reflect that alienation and distance. The characters are physically uninhibited, but at the same time emotionally repressed.Cronenberg:
Right, it's always as if they're looking off into the distance at a third person, or at their own future, rather than at each other. As you've pointed out, that's another way of being repressed - to be able to do anything physically, but nothing emotionally. The sex becomes an out-of-body experience; it's almost as if these people are trying to reinvent sex because the old forms aren't working.
Did the graphic nature of the sex scenes make them particularly difficult to film?Cronenberg:
Not really. They were tough only because everything is very fussy in a sex scene. I don't mean that the actors are fussy; it's just the angles and the aesthetics of it. I often found myself arranging Debra Unger's hair on the pillow just for the sake of continuity. The positions of bedcloths and hair are absolutely unrepeatable; there's no way you can get in and out of bed and have those two things stay the same. That was difficult and agonizing. A lot of that footage looks as if it was done in one or two takes with multiple cameras, but I never use multiple cameras unless I'm doing an action sequence that can't be repeated. Almost all of the sex scenes involved multiple takes. The car-wash scene, for example, took three separate days. We were shooting with a car that had been cut in half, and the front seat was different than the back seat. Likewise, the shot of the two guys kissing was done over three days; part of it was done on a set, part was done outside, and part was done on another set. Naturally, shooting that scene involved a lot of intensity and humor. You can't drag actors kicking and screaming into roles like these; they have to be gung-ho and excited to do it.
The camera lingers over car-crash wounds throughout the film, and almost eroticizes them.Cronenberg:
In Dead Ringers, the character of Elliot says, 'There should be a beauty contest for the inside of the body.' As human beings, our sense of what's beautiful or repulsive is only skin deep, even when it comes to our own bodies. I'm always interested in taking something which seems repulsive at the beginning of the film and making it appear beautiful and inevitable by the end. I can't achieve that with every viewer, but with some people I succeed. The book of Crash is not written like porn at all; it's very clinical and very medical in its descriptions of everything, including sex. But at some point you find yourself being turned on by it, and you say to yourself, 'Oh my God, I'm capable of being turned on by this? It's unbelievable.' I would love to have that happen with the movie.
There is quite a bit of sexual tension in the scenes involving Rosanna Arquette's character. The deep scars on her legs become an erotic focal point.Cronenberg:
At those points, you are hopefully entering into the psychology of the characters. I'd like people to be thinking, 'Even though I would have thought that these feelings were completely distant and impossible for me, I do have a kinship with these characters.' As soon as you've made one connection like that, you can start to make others.
Do you believe, as Ballard does, that our interaction with technology will result in some sort of physical evolution?Cronenberg:
I think the technology is only incidental. As I said earlier, I feel that it's just an extension of human will. We seized control of our own evolution many years ago, and we're probably the only creatures in the universe who have ever done that. It's no longer the survival of the fittest, because what constitutes the fittest? Is it the guy who makes a lot of money and can buy a Mercedes, get the most babes and reproduce his genes the most often? It no longer has to be the guy who's physically the strongest and most aggressive. I think, more likely, that a completely different dynamic of evolution has set in that we're not completely aware of. We are willing ourselves to change, just as we always have. We don't accept the world as a given; we build houses, we change the temperature to suit ourselves, and we don't accept that you can't have light once the sun goes down. We also don't accept when we're sick, crippled or depressed. Prozac is now part of our evolution; we've externalized our bodies' chemistry. That's the nature of the human beast, and the movie does touch on that.
Contrary to what some people have said about the movie, it seems as if there's an underlying thread of optimism in the story.Cronenberg:
Personally, I don't think that the movie is depressing at all. The characters don't just cave into the empty, lifeless situation that they find themselves in. They seek life, even if they're seeking it through death or danger. And I think that's very human. The melodrama and extreme situations in the movie hopefully will serve to highlight those feelings and show how they can apply to more mundane situations in real life.
