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Film interview: Eastern Promises - David Cronenberg part 2
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David Cronenberg talks about finding some surprise London locations during the shooting of Eastern Promises, why he gravitates towards darker material in his filmmaking and why the Litvinenko case had some relevance to the shoot...
Did you ever feel that real life intruded? That there were ever any shifty characters visiting the set?
David Cronenberg: Well, we hired those people, so they were on our side [laughs]. No, we did have a lot of extras who were Russians. The old ladies in the birthday scene were all Russians and they surprised me by starting to sing along with the accordion player. I didn't know they were going to do that but it was really quite beautiful and one of the things that was wonderful about getting as many Russians on the set as we could. We also had some of the guys playing bodyguards and drivers who said that in real life they were bodyguards, drivers and bouncers but they wore Armani and drove Mercedes.
So I think we were getting some subliminal consultation even though it wasn't directly Mob related. But really, over the internet, we've discovered that we get two thumbs up from Russian criminals we're not sure whose thumbs they are! But that's because they are criminals so they don't mind being depicted as criminals, they just want to make sure that you're not making fun of them and that you get the details right. We did all that, so apparently we're OK with the Mob.
Eastern Promises is a London-based movie and yet there arent many shots of Tower Bridge, Big Ben or places like that. Was it quite hard to find the kind of sets and looks that you wanted?
David Cronenberg: No, there's more of that in London than those other things. We had a wonderful location manager who was really quite important because he knows a lot about London more than anybody else and he could, based on the script and where these characters would live, tell us what sections of who lived where and why, or who was encroaching in that part of town; who used to live there and why it shifted, immigration patterns and so on... We wanted to get that right too even something just as simple as the young Turk would be an Arsenal fan as opposed to a Chelsea fan. A lot of things connect with locations that you wouldn't think of as locations in terms of the nature of the people who live there.
So, it was very exciting to explore London that way and the crew, who were all Londoners, were pretty excited to be shooting there instead of Notting Hill. To them, it was the real London and the London they knew themselves. There are also some surprises for Londoners as well. I've been interviewed by a number of people now who say they didn't even know some of the places existed, such as the water gate where the body is dumped. It's a pretty unique place, very historical and very significant, but not too many Londoners really have ever been there.
Did the Alexander Litvinenko have any sort of impact on you guys? Weren't you close to where the poison trail was detected?
David Cronenberg: When we started the movie, the Russian Mob in London was a fairly obscure subject. But by the time we finished it, it was front page news all over the world because of Litvinenko. That happened halfway through the shoot and literally half a block from Vincent [Cassel], Viggo [Mortensen] and my own front doors was a building owned by the oligarch [Boris] Berezovsky.
One day when we went by there were police in hazmat suits and a forensic van who were finding traces of polonium and radiation poisoning there because Litvinenko was a friend of Berezovsky and they had obviously met there and something had happened. Likewise, the Itsu on Piccadilly was closed for renovation, except there were police guards around it which is unusual for renovations, and they'd found tonnes of radiation poisoning there and that also was right very close to where we were living.
But being the crazy people that we are, this rather excited us. It didn't scare us or make us nervous. We were thinking: "Well, this means that we have our finger on the pulse of something that's quite current, intense and significant the emergence of Russia as this post-Soviet power again and the ripple effect that it has all over the world. Suddenly, we were feeling that directly. Even though the plot of the movie is not exactly that, it felt relevant.
Why do you make such dark films in general?
David Cronenberg: I think they're all funny [laughs]. It's a kind of a balancing thing. Most artists are interested in exploring places that are not normally explored. It's a matter of curiosity for one thing, and I think there's always the feeling that you will discover something significant or profound about human nature, or the human condition, if you go to those places as opposed to the more mundane, everyday places that we all know.
Not that really wonderful situation comedy or domestic drama can't be very revealing about things as well, but I think artists have the desire to uncover things that are hidden. You don't want things to be hidden. You want to know what's really going on, so you dig after what's really going on and that often leads you into dark places because when there's no light, things happen that are hidden.
Interview: Rob Carnevale
Photo: Pathe
