DIRECTOR/INTERVIEW
Spider
Directed by David Cronenberg
Sony Pictures Classics, 98 min.
Now Playing at Angelika
Creep Master
Director David Cronenberg shatters the Spider’s web
Director David Cronenberg and Ralph Fiennesn at work on the set of Spider.
“It all begins with the idea that we are inside Spider’s mind,” says director David Cronenberg about his new psychological thriller, Spider. “I wanted audiences to feel by the end of the movie that they have become him,” the spider of the title played by Ralph Fiennes.
A tricky conceit to be sure, as the eponymous character—first played by 10-year-old Bradley Hall in the 1960s segments and Fiennes as an adult in scenes from the 1980s—is a schizophrenic. But damn if Cronenberg doesn’t pull it off with great aplomb, delivering audiences to a place where they will surely feel, if not like Spider, but at least a kinship with his troubled soul.
Although the director very deliberately does not label Spider’s mental illness—“I didn’t want that to be a barrier [for the audience]” he says about this decision—it is pretty clear from Fiennes’ superb performance as the mumbling, scribbling, and all around withdrawn Spider that his character is in very bad shape.
To achieve such dramatic affect, Cronenberg used “lenses, film stock, camera angles, lighting, music, and pacing to make you ‘become’ Spider.” The result is extraordinary. However, the director readily admits, his effort works best when “the audience’s metabolism gets into lockstep with Spider.”
This film, another of Cronenberg’s metabolic and challenging literary adaptations—see Crash, Naked Lunch, and M. Butterfly—is based on Patrick McCabe’s novel about a man sent off to a halfway house near where he grew up. Once there, he remembers his turbulent childhood in which his father (played by Gabriel Byrne) murdered his mother (Miranda Richardson) to take up with a prostitute (also played by Richardson).
“I was sent the screenplay and I knew nothing about McCabe’s writing,” Cronenberg says about how he got involved with the project. “Patrick went very far in re-imagining his book for the screen.” (McCabe adapted his novel himself). “He had already done the hard stuff.”
“The screenplay came with a letter that confirmed Ralph was going to play Spider. The character of Spider was the attraction—I had great empathy for him. I identified [with him] on a very primitive level. The ideas of nature and identity and memory—pared down. These were the things that made me say I was going to do this movie.”
Spider is an austere film, very sterile, and also very unsettling. The film’s drama unfolds mostly with Fiennes appearing in scenes that show his character as a boy. Spider witnesses his parents’ marriage disintegrating, and his mind splinters, leading to his present, schizophrenic state.
“The violence is more imagined than real,” Cronenberg says. Yet he goes on to dispute Hitchcock’s belief that the viewer’s mind can produce a more powerful image than what is in a film. One only has to look at the exploding head of Cronenberg’s classic, Scanners, to see the director’s point.
“What if what you are thinking off camera is unusual? You have to show it,” he explains. “For me, it’s not a theory of audience reaction, it’s the specific moment in that specific film… what works in a specific context. You feel it because you hear the sound effects and see the blood. I am all about serving the film, giving the film what it needs, and not worrying about theories.”
Spider does contain moments of droll humor, another essential element in Cronenberg’s oeuvre. “Humor is a part of life and I have a very humorous set. We like to joke. Some of the jokes are obvious on paper, others you discover. In the direst circumstances, humans need humor as a release. It comes naturally; it’s not calculated.”
And while Cronenberg carefully assembled the pieces of the film to create a very specific whole, he also sees patterns emerging that were not part of his original plan. Reflective surfaces, such as mirrors, windows and glass are repeated throughout the film, giving the story more depth, and dimension.
“Things like that just kind of happened,” the director says. “To me, the trick is to make it inevitable—that it couldn’t happen any other way—not through storyboarding, but by building it detail by detail. You draw threads together—it’s like making a web.”