David Cronenberg 'Maps' his constellation of stars
Hollywood really hasn't changed much since David Cronenberg started making movies, and neither has the importance of choosing the right actors.
"It's a matter of intuition," says the Canadian director, 71, whose Maps to the Stars is in theaters Friday. "Casting is a kind of black art — it's pretty invisible to most people. But it's hugely important because if you cast the film right, you can do minimal directing and if you cast it wrong you can destroy the movie irreparably."
Whether it's for his dark comedy Maps, which centers on a family and others in Los Angeles willing to go to extremes to maintain their celebrity, or Cronenberg's early horror films in the 1970s such as Shivers, Rabid and The Brood, doing homework on a potential star is where it all starts.
"It gives you an idea of what their taste is in movies and how edgy they're willing to be," Cronenberg says. "These days, strangely enough, YouTube is extremely valuable for a director. You look at interviews that the actor's done. You get a feel for what they're like when they're not playing a role in a film.
"By the time you meet that actor or speak to them over the telephone, you really have a very good feel for them."
Cronenberg has assembled an impressive constellation of stars over the years, and he gives some examples of great marriages between his movies and the right thespians.
Videodrome (1983)
When Deborah Harry, singer for the rock group Blondie, met with Cronenberg for the role of sadomasochistic psychiatrist Nicki Brand, she conceded that she wasn't the most experienced actress. However, the director dug her screen presence and had respect for her as a performer. "She had done many difficult gigs," he says, "and you have to be very disciplined to survive that."
Cronenberg did have to talk with Harry about not exaggerating her facial expressions as she would on a music stage. "I said, 'You know, Debbie, when the camera's in closeup, you don't have to do very much. It's not like when you're on the stage and you're 100 feet away from your audience and you're really playing them from that distance. Here you've got the camera right on your face.' "
Th e Dead Zone (1983)
With his swept-back hair and intense presence, Christopher Walken was the perfect choice to star as a man who comes out of a coma and finds he has extraordinary psychic powers. Yet Cronenberg says the most difficult scenes were the ones in which Walken's Johnny Smith is just a normal, small-town schoolteacher in love.
Once he gets those crazy abilities, though, "the real Chris could emerge in full blast. There's not a lot of props that he has to play with — it's his screen presence that sells all of that. I didn't want to get tricky about flashes of light and the mysterious fog that comes over him.''
The Fly (1986)
Cronenberg's remake of the 1950s horror movie featured genius scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) slowly turning into a man-sized insect after a housefly wanders into his teleportation experiment.
Goldblum nailed the inherent eccentricity from the start, says the director, and the 6-foot-5 actor was in such great shape that he was able to do a lot of the scenes where the scientist becomes increasingly powerful and something definitely not human.
"Gymnasts are usually quite short," Cronenberg says, "and yet Jeff could do some of those moves, which helped me tremendously because it meant I didn't have to use stand-ins too many times."
Dead Ringers (1988)
Finding someone to play twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle in the psychological thriller was Cronenberg's hardest casting job — so hard that 30 of the top English-speaking actors of the time turned him down. "If I named them, they're the most famous actors of that time and some who were not so famous but well-known."
Some didn't like the gynecology angle — "Not macho enough," the director says — while others were bothered by playing two similar characters. Most twin movies have one as a murderous psychopath and the other as the nicer sibling, but there wasn't such a big divide with the Mantles. "That spooked actors because they were afraid they really wouldn't be able to play that differentiation well.''
Jeremy Irons was the first actor who wasn't afraid. "He said, 'I'm interested,' '' recalls Cronenberg, adding that it took a while to seduce him. "Sometimes it's as important that the right people say no as the right people say yes. Now I can't think of anybody else in the role, including any of those other 30 actors.''
A History of Violence (2005)
Cronenberg cast Viggo Mortensen as Tom Stall, a small-town restaurateur whose violent past comes to life when he stops a robbery. The director liked that he was a handsome leading man who displayed the eccentricity, quirkiness and "down-to-earth-ness" of a character actor. The filmmaker liked Mortensen so much that he kept using him — he also stars in the crime drama Eastern Promises (2007) and period piece A Dangerous Method (2011).
A well-rounded artist who also is a musician, poet and publisher, Mortensen can play "100% Midwest American." But he also is a man of the world — he speaks Danish and Spanish, and was raised in Argentina. Cronenberg loves the actor's joy for doing work. "It's never a question of ego, and that's a rare and beautiful thing."
Cosmopolis (2012)
As a rich young man in a dramatic limo drive to get a haircut, Robert Pattinson is in every scene of Cosmopolis. To pull that off, "You need someone who has the charisma to hold the audience and who also has the acting chops to do the same thing. I thought that Rob had that," says Cronenberg, who liked Pattinson's brief appearance in 2005'sHarry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
More important than having a legion of followers, though, is that the Twilight actor (who also stars in Maps to the Stars) is a professional and sweet guy who's extremely knowledgeable about cinema. "I don't think his fans know that about him," Cronenberg says. "I would often find him talking to Juliette Binoche about obscure French art films."
Maps to the Stars (opening wider Friday)
Finding actors often is a pragmatic exercise for Cronenberg: Getting Julianne Moore to play a woman obsessively trying to star in a remake of a movie that featured her late mother seemed like a no-brainer.
Then things got tricky. Moore has dual citizenship in the USA and Great Britain, which for any other movie production might not be important. But Maps was a Canada-Europe co-production, which meant Cronenberg could only have one American actor. So Moore's dual citizenship allowed him to cast John Cusack and Moore as his leads.
"Casting gets very complicated, much more than any normal moviegoer would expect," says Cronenberg, adding that Moore's status also helped to get the movie made for an efficient $13 million. "Which by Hollywood standards isn't even a crafts-services budget. But nonetheless, I couldn't have financed it with an unknown actress in the lead."