FEST2003

Spider
David Cronenberg, director  

 Review by Rada Djurica   

"Hollywood is very seductive in many ways and I have flirted with it many times and I keep thinking there must be a way [to work within it] and then I realize there is no way. I was going to do 'Basic Instinct 2' with Sharon Stone. Now that's pretty Hollywood. I think we could have made a very good movie if we could have made it the way I made 'Spider.' 'Spider' was agony in terms of finance and we had to go through torture to get it made. For the first three weeks we went to the set we weren't sure there was going to be anybody there because we weren't paying anybody but our crew was incredibly faithful to us and showed up. On the creative side it was fantastic. Everyday was ecstasy. In Hollywood everything is the reverse: the financing is ecstasy and the work is hell." - David Cronenberg

Spider is prematurely discharged from a mental institution. He walks the streets of London, haunted by his past and by the images of his unhappy childhood. This is a confusing and complicated Freudian story.

"Spider" is an exploration of the mind of a schizophrenic, and the story is told through the eyes of a son whose father probably murdered his mother and replaced her with a prostitute. Gradually, it is revealed that memory and reality can be unstable concepts. Spider is absolutely convinced that his father murdered his mother in order to move on his new alcoholic girlfriend. Spider, all alone, wanders through the streets of London, returning to the confused scenes of his childhood, testing the limits of his endurance. Locked up in his own world of suspicions, he picks on his landlord, provoking her to take desperate measures for protection over and over.

Ralph Fiennes gives a brilliant performance of the psychotic, unbalanced and misguided Spider. Cronenberg's artistic direction creates an awesome atmosphere for Spider's isolation and confusion. His world is full of deranged and dangerous perceptions and yearnings. This story is pure, vivid and absorbing Cronenberg.

Canadian born David Cronenberg, writer/director of art shock films such as "Naked Lunch," "Crash," "Existenz," and "Shivers," is recognized for having an original style. His latest feature, an adaptation of the Patrick McGrath novel, Spider, maintains his recent tradition of exploring the relationship between mind and body. However, I think that Patrick McGrath had an easy collaboration with Cronenberg, who was willing to do exactly what McGrath wanted with the script.

"Yes, it's fun teaching people about movies. I loved the script and I loved the fact that Ralph Fiennes was attached to the script. I only read it because Ralph wanted to do it and I was very interesting to work with him. So I read the script and thought, 'My God, this is actually a wonderful script and Ralph has cast himself beautifully as Spider,'" Cronenberg said.

In fact, it looks like there was no translation, but only a transformation. I reckon that, in doing such a story, you really have to betray the novel in order to be faithful to it. What Patrick did in the novel Spider was to have a lot of internal monologue to give the reader a feeling of the interior landscape, of the mind of Spider. Sometimes that works in a movie, but it's difficult and it's rare. A person who works alone in an interior way -- probably a writer more than a film maker -- is creating and recreating his own life. But he is speaking a language that is so obscure that he only has himself as his audience. So maybe in an unconscious way Spider becomes the archetype of the misunderstood.

It is hard to be clinically accurate in portraying the mind and the experience of the psychotic man, and I think that Cronenberg took it beyond the narrow, clinical limits, imposing and creating confusion. Fiennes, during the shooting, wanted to go to various asylums and meet schizophrenics and so on, in order to make his performance stronger. I reckon that "Spider" was agony in terms of financing, but on the creative side it was a fantastic project.