Cronenberg looking forward to Golden Globes
TORONTO (CP) – David Cronenberg insists he’s not bothered that his film A History of Violence is nominated for best film at Monday’s Golden Globe Awards but that he didn’t make the cut in the best director category.
“It’s always been this way,” Cronenberg said Friday in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. “There are some strange voting systems. Each group has its own weird system of voting.”
Cronenberg also shrugs off perennial questions about the validity of the Golden Globes, which are voted on by fewer than 100 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, often the target of scathing criticism in years past for having members of questionable credibility.
They awards seem to have an uncanny knack for forecasting the Academy Award nominees, which will be announced Jan. 31.
“Somehow the Globes just by force of will, and partly luck, have come to have meaning and are taken seriously even though, on another level, they’re not,” he said.
Whatever the significance of Monday’s awards, Cronenberg said he hears it’s a pretty fun event and hopes to see a lot of people drinking and behaving badly.
“They are a strange group but they’re an interesting group. You can’t write them off.”
The renowned director turns serious, however, when asked about fellow Canadian filmmaker Paul Haggis who wrote, produced and directed Crash, which earned one Golden Globe nomination, for supporting actor Matt Dillon.
He is furious that the film, an interweaving of stories about various Los Angeles residents on a single day, has the identical title to his own 1996 feature.
He calls it disrespectful, condescending and unjustified.
“I have now met Paul Haggis and he knows exactly how I feel,” Cronenberg said caustically. “I thought it was a really stupid thing to do because when we both end up in the DVD racks together, it’s going to be very confusing.”
On the issue of violence that is at the heart of his nominated film, Cronenberg acknowledges he set up the brutal sequences precisely to make them both thrilling and repugnant.
And indeed, moviegoers are often compelled to cheer when a bad guy who deserved it gets blown away in such graphic fashion, yet their excitement is likely to turn quickly to guilt for having found the violence so satisfying.
“I think it’s part of what the movie is about, that ambivalence that we have towards it, especially in the cinema.”
But Cronenberg, who hails from Toronto – where gun violence has shaken the city – has no patience for people who suggest violence in the movies begets real-life violence.
He doubts those people even go to the movies.
“I’ve never felt that people were so simple that they would just do what they see,” he said.
“I myself have seen, I think it must be hundreds of thousands of killings in cinema, but they’re not really killings. And I’ve never remotely felt close to killing somebody.”
Cronenberg has previously said he took on A History of Violence because he needed “a solid paycheque” after the weak financial performance of previous auteur features like 2002’s Spider and 1999’s eXistenZ.
While he appreciates the favourable memos from studio heads for making a film that was both a commercial and critical hit, he said he doesn’t organize his work into doing one film for his art and one for the bank account.
“No, no. I don’t make enough movies to do that,” he says. “If it’s two years of your life, which it tends to be – and it seems to take me three years between movies – I can’t really afford to play that kind of game. I have to be working on something I really want to work on. And History of Violence was something that I really wanted to work on.”
The film also netted a best film actress nomination for Maria Bello. The Golden Globes air Monday night at 8 p.m. EST.
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