Canadian director David Cronenberg has staked out territory that’s mostly outside the Hollywood studio system, both through his subjects – body horror and graphic violence – and, over the past 30 years, in biographical and literary subjects.
The gap between Hollywood as the source of glamour and fantasy, and the desperate industry town that moves the mirrors and stokes the smoke machine, has been explored by great writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Nathaniel West, and by more than a few movies, from Sunset Boulevard to Mulholland Drive.
None of this particularly interested David Cronenberg, the Canadian director who has staked out territory that's mostly outside the Hollywood studio system, both through his subjects – body horror and graphic violence – and, over the past 30 years, in biographical and literary subjects. Like many filmmakers who work against the Hollywood grain, Cronenberg has a loyal following in France. That may be why his newest film, Maps to the Stars, had its premiere at the Cannes film festival in May.
One afternoon, in a funereal nightclub in Cannes that seemed a perfect setting for an unglamorous interview, the 71-year-old director talked about what drew him to do a "Hollywood insider" movie. In fact, Maps to the Stars is Cronenberg's first movie shot in the United States, though only partly. What led him to put the pathology of the movie capital under the microscope, he says, wasn't antagonism, but friendship.
"I'm not obsessed with Hollywood – I have no antipathy or hostility toward Hollywood," says Cronenberg, "and I never had a desire to make a movie about movies. It's really Bruce Wagner's script that I love so much, which brought me to this movie. And yeah, it's odd for me to speak about Hollywood, because I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker and it's not my obsession. But it is his."
Wagner, now 60, grew up in Hollywood. His father was marginally in the business and he went to school with celebrities' kids, was in psychotherapy, walked home past Romanoff's, where Groucho Marx and Warren Beatty dined in the coffee shop. A high-school dropout, he was inspired by the prose of writers such as Henry Miller and Jean Genet. (In a review of his book I'm Losing You, John Updike noted Wagner "writes like a wizard.")
And for a while, before he became established as a novelist, he worked as a chauffeur in Hollywood and tried to sell screenplays. His most prominent credits include Oliver Stone's TV mini-series Wild Palms and Paul Bartel's Scenes from the Class Struggle in Beverly Hills. An early draft of Maps to the Stars was written during that period, before Wagner published his first of nine novels, Force Majeure, in 1991.
The heightened family drama that Wagner spins in Maps to the Stars is half-satire, half-updated Oedipal tragedy. John Cusack (another friend of Cronenberg's) plays therapist and New Age guru Stafford Weiss, whose wife Christina (Olivia Williams) manages the career of their fresh-from-rehab adolescent movie-star son (Evan Bird). The Weisses also have an estranged 18-year-old daughter (Mia Wasikowska), who has recently been released from a Florida psychiatric hospital. Other key players include Julianne Moore, who won a best-actress prize at Cannes for her role as Havana Segrand, a middle-aged movie star who Stafford is treating for abuse at the hands of her late mother (Sara Gadon). Rounding out the cast is Robert Pattinson (the authorial surrogate) as a chauffeur trying to break into the screenwriting business.
Years ago, Wagner sent Cronenberg a copy of Force Majeure. Cronenberg admired the book and the two struck up a friendship. They wanted to work together and tried to create a television series which failed to get green-lighted. Wagner showed Cronenberg his early Maps screenplay and asked if he thought it was still viable. Cronenberg declared it "brilliant."
But things in the movie business grow slowly, and most die before they bear fruit. About eight years ago, when Cronenberg was on one of his recurrent hot streaks (between A History of Violence and Eastern Promises), he went to New York and met with Julianne Moore to ask if she'd be interested in playing Havana Segrand. She agreed, but shortly afterward, Cronenberg had to call and tell her he didn't have the financing to make the movie. But Cronenberg and Wagner kept meeting and talking about the script, and the world of fame kept evolving along on its own strange lines, with camera phones, Twitter and TMZ.
"We had to keep updating the screenplay every year or so," Cronenberg says. "Bruce is very fearless in putting in contemporary references and people of the moment, which, by the nature of pop culture, tend to be ephemeral. In my work, I try to avoid that because I'm worried that movies or whatever I'm writing will become dated. But he's unafraid, and it seems to work when you read his older novels."
While Wagner is a "seismograph" of Hollywood culture, Cronenberg thinks Maps to the Stars as a drama is about contemporary life that happens to have a Hollywood background. The subject could have been Wall Street or Silicon Valley.
"You'd have all the same creativity and craziness and betrayals and jealousies, though, as a filmmaker, it's an advantage that the particular deformation of Hollywood is the emphasis on the visual. In truth, the setting of Wolf of Wall Street doesn't give you much to look at. It's guys looking at computers and talking on the phone. Silicon Valley is nerds in front of computers. Hollywood is inherently visual. That's not just for the actors, but their producers and distributors and agents as well, who feel obliged to appear on the red carpet to support their movies. They're all here [in Cannes] because to be seen means to exist in Hollywood. Non-existence is to not be seen. In Hollywood, you die before you actually die."
If there's an edge of savagery in Maps to the Stars, Cronenberg ascribes that to his writer, not his own well-known fascination in the dark side.
"The anger, I think, is Bruce's. I'm Canadian. We're a peace-loving people – usually. For me, making a movie is a matter of curiosity. It's curiosity about the ultimate subject of art, which is the human condition, which is like a diamond with many facets.
Bruce's script gave me another facet, which I could never have been able to access it on my own, but I totally understand it."
Still, the peace-loving (usually) director takes unwholesome pleasure in making people squirm in their skins. After the Cannes screening, a well-known Hollywood executive approached him and confided the movie had scared the crap out of him. He dreamed about it that night, and the next evening went to an A-list party at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc.
"'All around me, all I could see were people from your movie,'" the man said.
"I thought," said Cronenberg, "that was a helluva great review."