Los Angeles Times Staff Writer September 11, 2007 As Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg plotted the unforgettable bathhouse knife fight in their new crime thriller, "Eastern Promises," Cronenberg told the actor he wanted realism and "body-ness." The director wanted to challenge his audience to really experience the intimacy of such violence. "Well, it's obvious," Mortensen told him, "I have to play this naked." Boy does he. And Cronenberg captures every clammy square inch of Mortensen's well-toned flesh as it's pummeled and slashed and slammed into the unforgiving bathhouse tiles by two clothed real-life professional fighters, turning an otherwise excruciating four minutes of film into a quintessential Cronenberg statement. "Eastern Promises," a Focus Features release opening Friday in L.A. and in 1,500 theaters nationwide on Sept. 21, explores the fine line between fragility and brutality, humanity and horror in the lives of three Londoners: Russian mob driver and sometime "fixer" Nikolai Luzhin (Mortensen); London midwife Anna Khitrova (Naomi Watts), who is striving to unite an orphaned baby with her Russian family; and mob boss Semyon (Armin Mueller-Stahl), who hides his sex slavery trade behind the guise of a grandfatherly restaurateur. The film is Cronenberg's first collaboration with Mortensen since their 2005 Oscar-nominated "A History of Violence," a critical and commercial hit that fans of Cronenberg's previous work -- "Dead Ringers," "Naked Lunch" and "The Fly," among them -- considered surprisingly accessible. It's also a tough act to follow. So far, reviews have been strong, praising Mortensen's complete immersion in the role -- adapting his body language and perfecting the accent -- calling the performance "brilliant," and even "Oscar-caliber." Indeed, Focus Features' decision to open the film in mid-September, traditionally a dead period for serious films, could give "Eastern Promises" a jump on the glut of performance-heavy fare coming in October. And despite its disturbing subject matter and memorable fight scene, the film could prove even more commercial than "A History of Violence." It has just three scenes of violence. But the director gives each throat-slice, each blood pool a natural, three-dimensional effect. "I have a very existential approach to the human body," Cronenberg said. "I take bodies seriously, [as if] I'm actually photographing the essence of this person." "Unless you have a story this profound, it doesn't matter how good anything looks," added Mortensen. "Then you just get an exercise in brutality. That's what I like about his films. It's like real life." Mortensen is only the second actor in Cronenberg's 30-odd-year career to collaborate twice with the director. (Jeremy Irons is the other, having starred as twin gynecologists in 1988's "Dead Ringers" and as French diplomat Rene Gallimard in 1993's "M. Butterfly.") The affinity between Mortensen and Cronenberg was evident as the two friends deconstructed the "Eastern Promises" naked fight scene recently, sitting opposite each other in the director's fashionable Beverly Hills hotel room, volleying tongue-in-cheek gibes, often finishing each other's thoughts. Still, Cronenberg pointed out that it took some convincing to get Mortensen to agree to the part of Nikolai. "He plays hard to get," the director said. "I'm always very reticent until I have a handle on it," Mortensen said. "I wanted to make sure I had the proper time to prepare." Mortensen researches his characters exhaustively. To understand mobster turned small-town family man Joey in "A History of Violence," he took a road trip through the Midwest and spent time recording costar Maria Bello's uncle, a Philadelphia native, to nail his accent. for "Eastern Promises," Mortensen set out alone for Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Ural Mountain region of Siberia, spending weeks driving around without a translator. (The actor speaks Danish and Spanish fluently and can get by in four other languages.) Mortensen studied the gangs of the vory v zakone (thieves in law). He read books on Russian prison culture and the importance of prison tattoos as criminal r?m? He perfected his character's Siberian accent and learned lines in Russian, Ukrainian and English. During filming, he used worry beads made in prison from melted-down plastic cigarette lighters and decorated his trailer with copies of Russian icons. Mortensen's work ultimately became the foundation for the role, prompting some changes in the script and even guiding Cronenberg's direction. The actor credits Cronenberg with granting him the creative freedom to push his characters into surprising places. Cronenberg said he couldn't work any other way. "I really invented myself as a director," Cronenberg said. "A lot of directors are very territorial and they don't really want to hear anything from other people, especially actors." "They don't want to admit they don't know something," Mortensen said. "It's a matter of control and fear," Cronenberg concluded. Instead, he asks actors to "come play in my sandbox." "Once you accept that childlike-ness," he said, "everything else becomes more clear." Mortensen's 360-degree nudity in the fight scene is a prime example of how their relationship aided the film. Despite its complexity -- hand-to-hand combat among three guys in a compact and very slippery space -- they rehearsed only a few hours and then captured the fight in just two days. "I knew I was in good hands as far as the director went," Mortensen said. "It wasn't an exploitation. . . . After that fight, my character knows everything's different. There wasn't any other way to do it. So let's get on with it. The sooner we got it over with, the quicker I could heal." "The makeup guy would say, 'Have you seen how swollen Viggo's knees are?' " added Cronenberg. "I said, 'No. Don't tell me that.' " Recalling his vigorous and bruising staircase sex scene in "A History of Violence," Mortensen quipped, "It's revenge for Maria Bello."]]>
In Cronenberg's first film, the young director is already demonstrating his trademark clinical remove. Dealing with a futuristic world in which medical experiments are being conducted in human sexuality, Stereo touches on Cronenberg's recurring themes of the relationship between sex and violence, bodily distortion and the perils of scientific experimentation.
Crimes of the Future (1970)
A companion piece to Stereo, this is another experimental film. The plot revolves around a journalist, Adrian Tripod, investigating the death of nearly all the earth's women, an event which appears to be a corporate conspiracy linked to teenage prostitution. Cronenberg shot this in his hometown Toronto, and his photographic approach shows the influence of Jean-Luc Godard.
Shivers (1975)
Cronenbergs first larger-budget film, Shivers (originally titled They Came From Within) uses a gory zombie storyline to present a critique of 1970s sexual and social mores. A crazed scientist devises a parasite to increase the desire for sex and violence, and then tests it on his young mistress – who is unfortunately sleeping with most of the men in the apartment building. She turns them all into zombies. Cronenberg can be seen making a cameo as the shoulder of someone stabbed by Nurse Forsythe.
Rabid (1977)
Cronenberg recruited porn star Marilyn Chambers to be the lead in his second zombie outing. After a motorcycle accident, Rose (Chambers) undergoes a risky plastic surgery procedure whose nasty side effect is an insatiable bloodlust. In her hunt for fresh blood, she infects every amorous male she meets with her disease, turning them into zombies as well. When Sissy Spacek, Cronenberg's first choice for Rose, turned down the part, Cronenberg made a nod to her by including a poster of Carrie in the film.
Fast Company (1979)
In an unexpected career move, Cronenberg left behind allegorical horror to take on this more conventional drama set in the world of drag-racing. The plot is a straight-ahead tale of the nice versus the nasty on the track, but Cronenberg puts his energies into the (almost sexual) depiction of the high-powered cars. In a tragic irony, Claudia Jennings, the ex-Playboy model who played the hero's girl, died in a car crash recently after completing the film.
The Brood (1979)
Widely regarded as Cronenberg's first great film, The Brood has an emotional intensity and gravity previously unseen in his work. Recently separated from her husband, mentally ill Nola (Samantha Eggar) goes to a psychiatric retreat run by celebrity shrink Dr Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), whose innovative methods of releasing their rage have horrific consequences. Cronenberg wrote this during an acrimonious divorce with his first wife, who Eggar's character is supposedly based on.
Scanners (1981)
This was Cronenberg's first big commercial hit, and remains many fans' favorite. Almost a take on the X-Men, it's about the “Scanners,” ostensibly normal humans with telepathic gifts who can zap people at will, and who are either good or evil – apart from, that is, the film's hero, Cameron (Stephen Lack), who is charged with infiltrating the evil group's ranks. The film was possibly inspired by a chapter in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch about the telepathic “Senders.”
Videodrome (1983)
In his follow-up to the commercial success of Scanners, Cronenberg began to explore more psychological and sexual material. A cable TV boss (James Woods) comes across Videodrome, a show in which women are tortured and killed, and becomes obsessed with it and its creators after discovering that what he is seeing are real snuff movies. The media expert in the film, Brian O'Blivion, is a character based on Marshall McLuhan, who was one of Cronenberg's college professors.
The Dead Zone (1983)
Amongst a rash of Stephen King adaptations in the 1980s, Cronenberg's intelligent and restrained addition to the subgenre stands out. After spending five years in a coma, teacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) discovers he can see people's futures, which is a horrific burden rather than a blessing. This was first time in Cronenberg's career that he did not have friend Howard Shore compose the film's score, a result of studio politics.
The Fly (1986)
After The Dead Zone, Cronenberg remained in the studio system with this remake of the ‘50's B-movie horror classic. Brilliant scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) works on a teleportation device, but transforms into the mutant “Brundlefly” after a fly accidentally shares the transportation pod with him. Cronenberg appears in a cameo as a gynaecologist.
Dead Ringers (1988)
One of Cronenberg's most celebrated films, it was adapted from the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland. Elliot and Beverly Mantle (both played by Jeremy Irons) are identical twin brother gynaecologists whose close-knit relationship unravels when a woman (Genevieve Bujold) unexpectedly falls for Beverly, the shy, socially awkward one. The film was to be called Twins until Ivan Reitman, a friend and former collaborator of Cronenberg, announced he was making a film starring Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger with the same name.
Naked Lunch (1991)
The marriage of Cronenberg's cinema of psychological and physiological horror to Beat writer William S. Burroughs' seminal novel was an inspired one. Cronenberg uses just as much of Burroughs’ own life as his novel in a fittingly fevered tale of insect exterminator Bill Lee (Peter Weller), who accidentally kills his wife and then escapes to Interzone, a fantastical city where he can finally fulfil his desire to write. Though there are some exterior desert scenes, Cronenberg shot the entire film on a huge soundstage in Toronto.
M. Butterfly (1993)
Almost as baffling a career move as Fast Company, Cronenberg's decision to make this lavish adaptation of David Henry Hwang's stage play was met with bemusement by critics. In China in the 1960s, a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) falls for a female singer in the Beijing Opera (John Lone), who is, in fact, not only a man in drag but also a spy out to discover foreign political secrets. Hwang rewrote his own work for the screen, making this one of the few films Cronenberg has directed which he has not also had a hand in writing.
Crash (1996)
Unquestionably Cronenberg's most controversial and incendiary film, Crash provided tabloid journalists with fodder long before any of them had seen it. Based on J.G. Ballard's novel, it dealt with a group of people whose sexual fetish is participating in car crashes. The film won the hearts of the esteemed Cahiers du Cinema magazine, whose critics voted it as their favorite movie of 1996.
eXistenZ (1999)
With Cronenberg at his lightest and most playful, eXistenZ has strong echoes of the director’s previous films, particularly Videodrome. Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), the designer of a virtual-reality video game that players plug into by using a “bio-port,” finds herself on the run from anti-game campaigners inside eXistenZ, the game she created. The strange capitalization in the title is because two of the film's producers are Hungarian, and the word “isten” means “God” in Hungarian.
Spider (2002)
From a script by Patrick McGrath (adapted from his own novel), Spider is another claustrophobic, internalized literary adaptation in the vein of Naked Lunch. Ralph Fiennes plays Dennis Clegg, a mentally ill man living in a halfway house in London but occupying a headspace where he is tormented by troubled memories of his past and the fractured confusion of the present. Cronenberg unexpectedly received the script from McGrath, decided he wanted to direct it after only a few pages, and deferred his salary to ensure it got made.
The History of Violence (2005)
Cronenberg's cinematic re-imagining of John Wagner and Vince Locke's graphic novel was his most lauded film since Crash. A small-town restaurant owner, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), becomes an instant hero and media sensation when he kills two men about to murder one of his waitresses. The incident, however, raises questions about exactly who Stall really is, and the storyline allows Cronenberg to examine the nature of violence. Cronenberg ended up radically cutting the pivotal scene of Stall's heroics as he was worried it glorified rather than examined violence. ]]>
Crime syndicates in the former Soviet Union are known as the Russian mafia or mob or the Red Mafiya. These criminal organizations are ruled by godfathers known as Vori v Zakone (“Thieves in Law”). But the Kremlin, which battles the public perception that the term “Russian mafia” is a tautology, simply prefers to call it “the so-called Russian mafia.”
To the Kremlin’s consternation, Russian mobsters — that is, Russian-speaking criminals from what was once the Soviet Union — have become movie producers’ go-to villains. This cinematic typecasting has gotten so bad that American observers have even publicly sympathized with the Russian government’s image problems. At a Kremlin-sponsored news conference, Alexander Vershbow, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, commented on a 2003 opinion poll that found that many Americans view Russia as a crime-infested nation. Saying he was “saddened” by the results, Vershbow continued, “Sometimes the stereotypes reflected in this poll get reinforced by Hollywood films which often have as the bad guy somebody from the Russian Mafia.”
Since Arnold Schwarzenegger starred as a Moscow cop hunting a Georgian drug dealer in Walter Hill’s 1988 thriller Red Heat — a camp classic in Russia due to its pidgin Russian and crude stereotypes — there have been more than two dozen films featuring Russian mobsters as bad guys. The sub-genre includes James Gray’s Little Odessa (a hit man returns home to New York’s Russian community in Brighton Beach to do a “job,” and see his family); Martin Campbell’s James Bond re-invention GoldenEye (Russian mobsters steal a futuristic weapon); Philip Noyce’s The Saint (Russian oligarchs stage a cold fusion swindle); John Landis’ Blues Brothers 2000 (Dan Ackroyd seeks revenge on the Russian mafia, which burnt down his nightclub); John Frankenheimer’s Ronin (Robert DeNiro plays a freelance intelligence agent hired to make sure a dangerous MacGuffin doesn’t fall into the Russian mob’s hands); Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day (Denzel Washington must pay back a gambling debt to the Russian mafia… or else); and, finally in David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises, in which Viggo Mortensen plays a mysterious up-and-comer in the Russian mafia in London.
Yes, in the years since The Godfather films, the Russian mafia has stolen film villainy from its Italian brethren. And, distressingly, in the real world, their actual crimes are even more colorful. At the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002, they bribed a French judge to ensure the Russians a gold medal in pairs figure skating. In 1997, the Russian mob attempted to sell a Colombian drug cartel a decommissioned Soviet submarine for use in drug-smuggling operations. And then there are the current fears that the Russian mob will gain access to the former Soviet Union’s nuclear arsenal and sell parts of it on the black market to terrorists. Warns the FBI, “If Russian organized crime could help foreign crime networks to gain access to nuclear material or other fissile weapons then the scenario becomes truly frightening.”
Tsarist Origins
Organized crime has existed in Russia since the end of the 19th century. The Russian Revolution put a dent in its operations but did not do it in. In Soviet times, criminal syndicates ran the black market in league with corrupt government officials. Many of these syndicates were — and are — based not on family affiliation as with the Italian mafia but on networks first established in Stalin’s Gulags, where gang members were identified by an elaborate system of tattoos designating syndicate affiliation, criminal specialty and, even, sexual proclivity.
Yet while the mob existed in the Soviet era, it did not thrive. Russian criminal syndicates were kept in check by those same authorities with whom they collaborated. That changed in the late ’70s and ’80s as the Soviet Union, burdened by a crippling military budget, a failing agricultural system and an inefficient industrial sector, began experiencing economic instability. In 1991, the Soviet Union quietly broke up, its leadership convinced that their fortunes would be better served by a switch to a free-market capitalist economy.
The Russian mafia saw an opportunity in the confusion that followed the dissolution of the Soviet state and the sudden opening of its economy. Their Soviet-era criminal networks intact, the Russian mafia soon found itself a transnational organization with operations that extended into the 15 former Soviet republics and the countries of the Eastern bloc.
Taking advantage of the endemic economic insecurity of the early ’90s, the mafia were able to were able to bolster their ranks by hiring muscle — former KGB agents, special forces soldiers back from the failed war in Afghanistan, and Soviet-era athletes, like marksmen and wrestlers, who had lost their state sponsors. And mob leaders were able to vastly increase their fortunes as they bought in on the Kremlin’s post-Soviet fire sale of state enterprises. Today, the mob controls vast sectors of the Russian economy.
In January, Alexander Yelin, of the Interior Ministry’s department on organized crime, told the Russian daily Izvestia, “Our analysis shows that more than 2,000 industrial entities have fallen under criminal control.… Criminal leaders and active operatives… are aiming to put their money into business, aiming for political power.” He estimates the number of Russian mafia groups at 450 with a total membership of 12,000. (Another Russian crime expert put the number of groups at 10,000 with a membership of 300,000 — most of who work as private soldiers guarding mob bosses and their assets.) Those groups are part of larger regionally based crime syndicates ruled by a hierarchy of mob bosses — the Vori V Zakone — who rose to power in the Soviet Era.
Vladimir Ovchinsky, who tracked organized crime in Russia for Interpol in the late ’90s, put it this way: “A very large part of the Russian economy has criminal origins and a number of former godfathers are now locomotives of the Russian economy.” And in March, in a speech leaked to Novye Izvestia, the Moscow-based daily, Rashid Nurgaliyev, the head of the Interior Ministry, and as such Russia’s top police official, said that Mafia-controlled industries include fuel, energy, metals, timber and fisheries.
As a result of this mob control, the Russian economy suffers from both a lack of healthy competition (it is almost impossible for Western companies to do business in Russia) and political corruption, which protects mob enterprises from state oversight. Like in the corruption-plagued nations of sub-Saharan Africa, the government is consequently unable to afford and deliver basic human services.
These mob-controlled enterprises launder their money in mob-controlled banks which then shuffle the assets to bank havens such as Switzerland. Of the 1,200 banks in Russia, about 200 are considered legitimate enterprises. The rest are thought to be criminal fronts.
All of which has made banking a shadowy, not to mention dangerous, enterprise in Russia. In 1995, at the height of what has been termed “the Russian gold rush,” 13 high-ranking bankers were assassinated in Moscow alone. In fact, Russian government officials in 2003 estimated that 5,000 contract killings occurred across Russia. Gennady Gudkov, a member of the Duma (Russian parliament) security committee and a reserve officer in the FSB, put it this way: “Combating organized crime is a general social problem. Where are members of criminal groups recruited? They are recruited from unemployed youths who are ready to tear anyone apart for $500.”
According to Interior Minister Nurgaliyev, the Mafia control almost 10 percent of Russia — particularly Moscow, St. Petersburg, Siberia and the south. In other words, the mob controls the richest and most productive areas of the largest country in the world. For example, until recently the Siberian city of Vladivostok was ruled by Mayor Vladimir “Winnie the Pooh” Nikolayev who owns some of eastern Russia’s largest timber, seafood and meat processing companies. Nikolayev became mayor in 2004 after his main opponent “tripped” on a hand grenade outside his office days before the election.
The largest and most powerful Russian criminal enterprise is the Solntsevskaya bratva [brotherhood], based in the Moscow suburb of Solntsevo. A 1995 FBI report described it as the most powerful Euroasian crime group “in the world in terms of wealth, influence and financial control.”
Solntsevskaya has about 5,000 members and is said to make its money from drug trafficking, prostitution, gun smuggling and racketeering. Paul Tatum, an American who was the joint owner of the Radisson-Slavyanskaya Hotel in Moscow, allegedly ran afoul of Solntsevskaya when he refused to sell his share in the hotel to his partner. In November 1996, he was shot in the Moscow subway 11 times in the face and neck. His two bodyguards stood by and let the killer get away.
The Business of Crime
Jews (or, at least, people who claim to be Jewish), Georgians and Chechens are disproportionately represented in the Russian underworld. In Soviet times, with Slavs in control of the institutions of government, the only way for non-Slavs like Jews to gain personal wealth was to operate outside the Slav-controlled legal structure. Consequently, enterprising Jews, Muslims and members of other ethnic minorities gravitated to the shadow economy, establishing criminal enterprises that then thrived in the post-Soviet free-market era. For example, the largest Chechen mafia group is called Obshina and is said to specialize in kidnapping, bank robberies and white-collar crime.
With easy emigration to Western Europe, Israel (where anyone who claimed Jewish ancestry could get a passport) and the United States, the Russian mob soon established outposts in Germany, London, Israel and the United States, where they set up headquarters in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Anthony Colannino, deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, maintains that gangsters from the former Soviet Union, are now the largest ethnically based crime group in the United States. He told the Guardian of London:
[The Russian mafia] includes ex-KGB officers, former special forces and government officers. They’re very good at computer crime, electronic balance fraud, insurance fraud, pimping, narcotics, loan sharking, racketeering. … Unlike the old Italian mob, who would send flowers to your wife after they’d killed you, they’ll kill you, your wife, your children, your uncle, your cousins, your neighbors. They’re bloody ruthless, they really are.
The Russian mafia deal in drugs, guns, gambling, black gold (caviar) and, most famously, sex slaves—primarily women, but also children and young men. The Vori v Zakone are said to seal their business deals by sharing their favorite prostitutes.
The market in human beings is less risky—and more profitable—than other forms of illicit trade. In 2002, the Russian mafia earned annual revenues of about $7 billion a year from trafficking in an estimated 160,000 women to China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the United States (via Mexico). Elena Mizulina, a member of the Russian Duma who helped pass the law that outlawed human trafficking—in 2002!—explained: “The profits of the slave trade are bigger than those from drugs.”
Typically, the women are lured out of their home countries with promises of good jobs in the West. Then their passports are confiscated, and they are held as prisoners in mob-controlled brothels. Some sex slavers are said to break women of their unwillingness to work as prostitutes by bringing them in groups to watch a “show murder” of a woman who refuses to work. The captive women are further kept in line by being told that if they cooperate with law enforcement officials their whole family will be killed, which in the case of the Russian mob is not an idle threat.
Women from the former Soviet Union can sell for up to $15,000 depending on the quality of the “product.” Over the years, their prices decrease and it is rumored that those women who are no longer sexually marketable are sometimes killed and their organs harvested for the illegal transplant market.
David Harrison of the Sunday Telegraph of London told the story of Irina Valinsky, a 21-year old Lithuanian who worked in London six days a week at two apartments and a massage parlor having sex with between 25 to 30 men each day. The men are charged between $300 and $800. She turns almost all of the money she makes to her Russian “owner.”
Harrison wrote:
Like most trafficked women, Irina was duped into coming to Britain and held under threat of violence to her and her family. She was “excited” when she landed a job as a waitress in London after replying to a newspaper advertisement in Vilnius.
But, once in England, she was introduced to an Albanian who took her passport and said he had paid [$8,200] for her—and that now she would be working for him as a prostitute until she had paid it all back.
“That first night he raped me, to break me in,” she said. “I thought about escaping but he never let me out of his sight. He hit me in the face, and his friends raped me. I lost the will to run away.” After a year Irina was sold to her current [Russian] pimp. … I ask her what would it take for her to flee this life of sexual servitude. She stares at a kitsch painting of a child on the wall and says, wearily: “I don't know. It is dangerous. They would get me or my family. What else could I do? Where could I go?
Transnational Criminal Organizations
The reach of Russian organized crime transcends national borders, and for historic reasons is particularly strong in Eastern Europe. But above all, the Russian criminal and business elite (and the line between the two is a fine one) have gravitated to London (a.k.a. Moscow on the Thames), which has three things going for it. London has a long established Russian community, it is Europe’s banking capital and it is not in the United States. When asked by ABC News why Russians flock to London rather than New York, Aliona Muchinskaya, of Red Square PR, replied, “Honestly, are you joking? It was the Cold War. America was the biggest, you know, biggest enemy.”
Still, there is significant Russian mob activity in the U.S. The Russian Mafia arrived here in the ’70s and set up shop in areas where Russian immigrants had settled, principally the Brighton Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn and parts of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles.
Among the Russian mob’s more notorious villainy in America were the crimes committed by a gang led by Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas. The two men, from Russia and Lithuania respectively, moved to Los Angeles with a scheme they hoped would earn $100 million for themselves and their as yet unknown “bosses.” The plan was to kidnap rich people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, record their voices, murder them (after all, they were witnesses) and then use the voice recordings to extort ransoms from their families.
Their first five victims were Russians living in Southern California in the fall of 2001. They kidnapped them, held them for ransom and finally strangled them. One of the victims reportedly refused to die so Mikhel stood on his chest. Among those killed were George Safiev (president of the Matador Media, a film production company) and Nick Kharabadze (CEO of Matador and son of a famous Georgian actress Ruiko Kiknadze.)
The mobsters disposed of the bodies by dumping them in the New Melones Reservoir near Yosemite National Park in Northern California and had planned to continue doing so until the corpses were “stacked on top of each other,” as they were reported to have boasted. But rotting bodies have a tendency to rise to the surface, which, lacking cement shoes, one of the corpses did, only to be discovered by a 5-year-old boy, his father and grandfather out on a fishing trip. The crime exposed, the two men were eventually arrested. At their trial, prosecutors, in asking the judge that he protect jurors by keeping their identities secret, said that these “horrendous crimes” had been done “within the structure of a violent Russian criminal organization.” In January of this year, after the prosecution presented 117 witnesses, the two men were convicted in federal court and sentenced to death.
Mobster to Oligarch
When Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent and head of the KGB’s successor organization the FSB, came to power in 2000 as President Boris Yeltsin’s handpicked successor, the killings decreased, and gangsters ceased to dominate Russian society as they did in the “Wild East” days of the mid–’90s. But that does not mean the mafia disappeared.
Anvar Amirov, an expert on relations between the state and the business community, put it this way: “We have reached the stage where our Don Corleones want their sons to occupy seats in the Russian senate [the upper house of the Duma]”
Indeed, the difference between a regular Russian mobster and many members of Russia’s newly rich, ruling oligarchy is one of class—and scale. After all, more money can be made controlling, say, the Russian nickel industry than running a sex trafficking ring.
“In today’s Russia, gangsters, in the straight Mafia sense, have turned into legit tycoons or merged with the state,” says Fred Weir, a Canadian journalist who has reported from Moscow for the past 20 years. Or as, Stephen Handelman, author of the 1995 book Comrade Criminal: Russia’s New Mafia, recently told CNN:
In 1992, … the Russian gang system, the Russian gang network, was really in control of many parts of the economy. Effectively, that began to fade after about five or six years of turf battles. Many of the leading gangs and godfathers were killed in this competition. What happened was a kind of curious thing. Russian crime… reverted back to its original state, which was inside the government, inside official systems, which took control of a lot of the economic levers of the country and began to profit from them. So the kind of violence that we began seeing after 1996 or 1997, in fact, when President Putin came into office … is a kind of war of the clans inside the Kremlin and its various subsidiaries.
Indeed, in the early ’90s, after the break up of Soviet Union, connected Russian public officials backed by the muscle and expertise of organized crime syndicates fought among themselves for control of the newly privatized industrial riches. Those who emerged from these battles still standing are immensely wealthy. In 2004, Moscow was home to 33 billionaires, more than any other city in the world. Today, 53 Russians control an estimated $400 billion in capital—an amount equivalent to one third of Russia’s GDP. These oligarchs in league with Kremlin officials (who often earn a tidy outside income by sitting on the oligarchs’ corporate boards) rule Russia. vFighting Back
On February 20, the official Russian oversight body, the Public Chamber, issued a much anticipated report on corruption. At a press conference, Andrei Przhezdomsky, a member of the Chamber’s subcommittee for combating corruption, said, “[T]he system of governance is corrupt at all levels. … [T]his is the worst threat to government, and unless resolute measures are taken to fight corruption, we will be unable to resolve any other serious issue, either in the economic, or the social, or the political sphere.”
With actions like the arrest this year of “Winnie the Pooh,” the Putin administration has made a show of cracking down on the Russian mafia. In March, the mayor of Vladivistock was apprehended, charged with using government funds to pay his bodyguards and using government planes to take his family on expensive vacations. (He had previously been arrested for beating a local official and threatening to kill another.) It was big news in Russia because Nikolayev was the most significant government official ever arrested.
More recently, it has slapped the wrist of Mikhail Prokhorov, a 42-year-old, six-foot-six playboy (and Russia’s fourth richest man with a net worth of $13.5 billion) who controls much of Russia’s nickel industry. In February the nickel czar was arrested in France in relation to an investigation into an international prostitution ring, but he was released without charges. It seems he had imported a planeload of prostitutes for his Orthodox Christmas party in the French Alps—an indiscretion that is said to have damaged his friendship with Vladimir Putin.
In general, however, the Russian government has not proven up to the task of mob control. As for the future, Jeffrey Robinson, Russian mafia expert and author of The Merger: How Organized Crime is Taking Over The World, conclusively believes that the Russian mafia has hooked up with organized crime syndicates around the world and formed a “wealthy cabal destined to become the most powerful special interest group on earth.”]]>
COSA NOSTRA
The Sicilian Mafia, commonly known as “Cosa Nostra” (aka “Our Thing”), is arguably the most famous and mythologized of all crime syndicates. There are many conflicting ideas as to its origins. Some imagine its roots in medieval times, others even claim an early Imperial link, but most historians agree that the Mafia came into its own in the 19th century paralleling Italy’s own formation of national identity. In Sicily, where the Mafia is most deeply rooted, some historians suggest that the lawlessness that erupted after the 1848 revolution there seeded the ground for organized crime. Gangs that were hired to protect private estates stayed on, collecting “protection” in ways not all that different from the mob today. Over time these groups organized themselves into families that help criminal sway, generation after generation.
In the ’30s and ’40s, things changed. Mussolini’s violent and criminal regime saw the traditional Mafia as little more than competition. As such, many organized crime leaders stayed underground, joined the government or emigrated to fresher markets. Joseph Bonanno (aka Joe Bananas), for example, fled Italy to set up business in America, soon rising to become head of one of New York’s infamous “five families.”
The Italian Mafia’s explosive rise to power occurred after the war, when governmental chaos and economic instability made criminal enterprises easy, if not in some places, necessary. Many accuse the U.S. post-war occupation forces of supporting the Mafia in order to suppress local communist parties. Others have seen a even more sinister link between the CIA, local mafia organizations and international drug routes. In any case, the Italian Mafia during this post-war period expanded their local criminal network into an international syndicate, working with the French and others to bring heroin from Africa and the Middle East to Western Europe and America.
While Italians have not been as cinematically enamored of their Mafia as Americans are, there are a number of significant films dealing with the Mafia. Alberto Lattuada’s Mafiosa (1962) provided a comic turn on the institution, and other contemporary films, like The Best of Youth, included the Mafia as a back story. Only a few, like Ricky Tognazzi’s hard-hitting 1993 La Scorta about a mafia-fighting magistrate, take the Cosa Nostra head on. It would take the Americans to make the Mafia movie stars in their own right.
AMERICAN MAFIA
While the American Mafia owes much of is structure, mythology and talent to the Italian –– specifically Sicilian –– Mafia, it has also created a history all its own. One of the original incarnations of the American Mafia was the appearance of “The Black Hand” movement. While forms of the “Black Hand” can be traced back to 18th century Sicily, the group took off in 19th century America as a kind of criminal welcome wagon. Secret gangs would send letters, literally signed by the image of a black hand, extorting money from newly landed citizens, thus creating an ongoing revenue stream as well as a properly terrorized public. In 1890, the Mafia gained public attention when the gangland slaying of a police superintendent in New Orleans brought media attention and government scrutiny to local Italian criminal gangs.
It was not, however, until the ’20s, when prohibition gave the Mafia their most powerful business initiative that the organization really took off. In Chicago, Al Capone rose to become a national figure by selling bootleg liquor and killing anyone who got in his way. Elsewhere every city developed their own crime families, often with the result of mob wars breaking out between competing families.
In New York, the severity of the wars between the families forced the organization to centralize power, starting with the ascension of Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Soon the local families would give way to a national, even multinational, organization. In the next few decades the Mafia, while maintaining their secrecy, grew to be a shadow government connecting the local “made man” to the national figures. While organized crime’s bread and butter remained traditional crimes, like extortion, prostitution, fraud and drugs, its business interests soon grew to incorporate many seemingly legitimate industries and union activities.
In 1951, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver held a series of congressional hearings that explored the scope of organized crime in America. The “Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce” did little to deter organized crime, but the nationally televised spectacle did succeed in further mythologizing the Mafia, with J. Edgar Hoover famously promising to wage war on the organization. In 1957, the accidental discovery of an international Mafia conference in Apalachin, New York, in which over 100 bosses from across America and Italy converged, made apparent the global reach and structure of organized crime in America. Then in 1963, Joe Valachi broke the Mafia rule of Omertà (or silence), testifying before a congressional committee on the organization and structure of the secret organization. Despite exposes, congressional hearings, police crackdowns and numerous documentaries, the mafia continues in America. Its fiercest competition now comes not from the government but from the intrusion of other national crime syndicates onto its turf.
Since the advent of cinema, Americans have been willing to pay good money to see mobsters get it in the end. The earlier silent screen versions depicted street gangs, and then in the ’30s, especially at Warner Brothers, gangster films like Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931) took over. Although such films hinted at the shadowy existence of a mob, few dealt specifically with the mafia. It was not until Joseph Valachi publicly gave details about the Costa Nostra that films, including the 1972 drama The Valachi Papers, started depicting the mafia as an historical entity. As such, the ‘70s saw the wave of mafia films like The Godfather and The French Connection dealing with the actual organization. As the HBO hit series The Sopranos continued to prove, the mafia never loses its appeal to audiences.
’NDRANGHETA
Relatively unknown for most of the twentieth century, the ’Ndrangheta(pronounced “en-drang-ay-ta”) in the last 25 years has emerged as one of the most violent criminal forces in Western Europe. More and more bolded headlines announcing audacious murders on the streets of European capitals can be traced back to Calabria, that dusty stretch of Italy at the very southern tip (or toe) where the ‘Ndrangheta hail from.
In the 1970s, the ’Ndrangheta, which hitherto had restricted most of its criminal activity to the Calabrian region, began a campaign to extend their influence throughout Europe. A ferocious and bloody gang war brought to power a new generation that pushed more extreme criminal activity. They started off by kidnapping noted Italian businessmen and investing their profits in a slice of the European heroin market. Eventually, through ties with the Colombian drug cartels, the ’Ndrangheta took over the cocaine market. Now, Italian officials estimate that 80% of cocaine entering Europe is brought in by the ’Ndrangheta.
THE YAKUZA
In Japan, the most notorious crime syndicate, the Yakuza, exists at all levels of Japanese society. There are a number of theories as to the origins of the group. Some historians link the group to the gangs of 17th century samurais, which during peacetime took to stealing (ala Robin Hood) from the rich to support the poor villagers. In truth, the gangs more likely set up shadow governments that extorted money from everyone. The name itself defines a hand of cards –– or more specifically 8 (Ya) 9 (ku) and 3 (sa) –– three cards that add up to 20, a losing hand of hana-fuda. Many take this card-game name to suggest a criminal pride in being dubbed outsiders, losers, and discarded.
The modern Yakuza sprung after World War II, when the black market conditions facing Japan spurred on criminal adventurism. Rather than taking cues from traditional Japanese folklore and costumes, the Yakuza turned to western images of gangsters to define their look of slicked short hair, sunglasses and shiny suits. Much like the Russian mafia, Yakuza sport elaborate tattoos. But unlike the Russian tattoos, which operate as a secret language and resume, Yakuza tattoos (or “irezumi”) are full-body, colorful emblems of their identity. In addition, bearing the tattoos demonstrates in themselves a rite of passage, because they are administered through a lengthy and painful process in which ink is inserted beneath the skin by bamboo or steel needles.
Differing from most criminal organizations, the Yakuza are not a secret society. Their local offices are often out in the open, their numbers are in the phone book, and they keep a high profile in politics and entertainment. As such they have shied away from overt criminal activities (such as theft) and focused instead on abusive business practices, like loan sharking (banking), extortion (insurance), and fraud (marketing), as well as claiming a stake in high profile entertainment venues, like professional wrestling and pornography, and big-money deals, like real estate and export. Rounding out their business portfolio are narcotics and prostitution.
While their socially accepted claim to being a business guild permitted them to operate openly in Japanese culture, recent violent and highly publicized skirmishes have started to turn public opinion. In 1992, a five-person attack on filmmaker Juzo Itami after a negative portrayal of the Yakuza in his feature Minbo no Onna (The Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion) lead to a government crackdown. In 1995 the government passed the “Act for Prevention of Unlawful Activities by Criminal Gang Members,” which was aimed to curtail, if not stop, some of the Yakuza’s more brazen criminal behavior.
The effect of such crackdowns has been, among other things, to push the Yakuza overseas. In last few decades, the Yakuza have reached out to America. Their main outpost is Hawaii, a halfway point in bringing crystal meth into the U.S. and exporting firearms to Japan. In Los Angeles, they have set up allegiances with Chinese and other Asian gangs, while in Las Vegas, they have been hired by the American mob to set up Japanese tourists. One of the most publicized infiltrations of the Yakuza into the U.S. economy involved Prescott Bush, the uncle of President George W. Bush, who was paid about $500,000 to arrange a 1989 deal by which a Yakuza front company bought a controlling interest of two American corporations.
Like the American mafia, the Yakuza have been a popular film subject. A staple of post-war Japanese film, the Yakuza were raised to philosophical levels by ’60s pop director Suzuki Seijun, who created an absurd form of mob existentialism in films like Branded to Kill. In the ’70s, the glorified violence of Yakuza turned violent and gritty. And by the ’90s they become figures of deep psychological conflict, as in Takeshi Kitano’s Hana-bi (Fireworks).
TRIADS
Triads, the Chinese mafia brand, followed a complex route to its modern status as a crime syndicate. Begun in the 16th century, it arose up as opposition party to the ruling Manchu dynasty. Like with many other criminal organizations, the triads started as a quasi-military political organization that slowly descended into crime after its originating conflict had ended. By the 19th century, the British coined the term “triad” to label these various criminal gangs based on the three-sided symbols that often sported.
By the time the Communists took control of Mainland China in 1949, the Triads had migrated to Hong Kong and Taiwan, often setting up close connections with local politicians and the police department. Through the ’60s and ’70s the Triads grew in power and size, becoming a formidable force in Hong Kong and Taiwanese culture. When China took over sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997, the government officially welcomed the groups with the proviso, “As long as they are patriots, concerned with maintaining the prosperity of Hong Kong, we should respect them.”
For years, triads have been a mainstay of Chinese cinema, appearing as the subject matter of many great Hong Kong directors, from John Woo to Johnnie To. Indeed the Chinese filmmakers, following the lead of Hollywood B-movie directors, turned the crime film into a new art form. Recently American directors has been returning the favor by re-adapting Chinese mafia films, like The Departed, Martin Scorsese’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of the Hong-Kong film Infernal Affairs.
TONGS
Tong is the name applied to Chinese organized crime groups in America, although Tongs emerged originally as business organizations. The first, begun in 1874 in San Francisco, emerged to protect Chinese merchants from abusive white business practices. But as with many other criminal organizations, what began as protection quickly turned into extortion. Never a secret society, Tongs operated openly, often working out of “the lodge” (which often doubled as a gambling center). The word “tong” means, in fact, “hall” or “gathering place.”
As Chinese immigrants spread across America, so did the different Tongs so that nearly every mid-sized American city reported some level of Tong activity. In major cities, like Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco, the fierce competition between groups boiled over into outright war, often waged out in the public and in the streets. The appearance of axe-wielding Tong gangs spurred on the term “hatchet men” to describe the members.
In recent years Tongs have been involved in a range of criminal behavior from local extortion (or protection money) and drugs to prostitution, smuggling immigrants and sex trafficking.
Hollywood has long used the Tongs as a subject of fear, ridicule and horror. One of their first film appearances was in the 1928 Buster Keaton silent comedy The Cameraman, in which Keaton tries to photograph a Tong War on New York City’s Mott Street as chaos breaks out around him. In 1932, Edward G. Robinson played a Tong member out for revenge in The Hatchet Man. Tongs continued to appear in Hollywood plots as nefarious, secret forces, always hovering on the margins of society. The British-made horror movie Terror of the Tongs (with Christopher Lee) demonstrated one of the more obvious mixings of genre with xenophobia.
INDIAN MAFIA
The various criminal groups that emerged in Indian industrial cities in the 1940s have been dubbed the “Indian Mafia.” Mostly hooked into traditional clan groups throughout India, the Mumbai mafia has become most noted for their overt influence on the business of Bollywood. Not only do they launder money through the financing of Bollywood films, they become active participants in their production. Regular investigations into the Mumbai film industry recount issues of extortion, murder and hard-balling salary negotiations with actors and directors with threats of violence. ]]>
With A History of Violence and now Eastern Promises, you’ve made two films that have each examined the role violence plays within specific cultures. In A History of Violence, you told the story of an everyday American husband and father who resorts to violence to protect his family. The new film, Eastern Promises, is set within a more exotic culture: the world of the Russian mafia in London. What unites, if anything, these stories given their vastly different backdrops?
I suppose my interest primarily is in enclosed, hermetic, sealed cultures -- or subcultures within other cultures, whether they have to do with violence or not. And whether [these communities exist on] a small scale or an invented sci-fi scale, I think [my interest] comes from my existentialist philosophy, the underpinnings of which say that there is creative will involved in our understanding of reality. In other words, people invent their own realities, or, they combine to make a collective reality. Whether it’s a small town in Iowa that has its own understanding of reality, or Russian émigrés in London who have their own understandings of reality, for me it’s always an interesting study. And, of course, the more colorful or intense a subculture is, the more obviously dramatic it is. As George Bernard Shaw said, “Conflict is the essence of drama,” and when you are dealing with a crime family, as in Eastern Promises, you immediately have conflict. In this case, because the conflict [involves] crime, the conflict is not just psychological but physical as well, which means violence. So, I approach violence kind of through the back door. I don’t think it’s my primary subject, but it ends up being a subject.
A History of Violence was set in a kind of archetypal small-town America. Were you intending your depiction of the Russian crime world in London in this new film to have a similar mythic flavor, or were you interested in the documentary specifics of this world?
When you’re doing something that’s sci-fi, it’s almost like you’re inventing the whole universe. You’re inventing new rules of physics and new psychologies. It’s thrilling and exciting but it’s also difficult, and you have a built-in problem, which is that of credibility and connection with your audience. But when you deal with something that already has a mythic quality to it, your audience begins with a level of understanding. And Russian culture certainly has a lot of mythology built into it. It’s a very rich culture, very old. It’s really not European. Europeans think of Russians as Asian, and Asians think of Russians as Europeans. Even its version of Christianity doesn’t match up with too many other versions of Christianity. So, even though North Americans are not as familiar with [Russian culture], there are many people in audiences around the world who will start with a higher level of connection to “Russian-ness” when they see this movie. For North Americans, it’s a trip into an exotic, underground world that’s full of texture, detail, characters and languages. And because [Russian culture] is so rich, we were able as filmmakers to go into other things. Of course we did a lot of research, but there is also a lot of invention in our version of this Russian mob.
What kind of invention?
Well, we have a ritual in a restaurant in which the main character is inducted into the mob, and some of those elements we invented. But some of them we didn’t, like the importance of tattoos in Russian prisons, which is well documented. Research on [Russian prison tattoos] was an important part of getting our script to click into focus. In Russian prisons you don’t exist if you don’t have tattoos. A tattoo is like your passport, your identity, the story of your life written on your body. No one will trust you if you don’t have that passport. Based on this research, the scene where Nikolai is inducted into the mob became a scene of reading and commenting on tattoos and their meanings, but I don’t know that [this criminal induction has] ever actually happened in quite this formal, ritualized way.
One of the film’s most talked about scenes will undoubtedly be the centerpiece fight scene, in which Viggo’s character, Nikolai, who is nude in a steam bath, is attacked by two knife-wielding Russians. How did you choreograph and execute this scene?
One of the problems with [shooting] that scene was always going to be nudity. Having to be careful of nudity would have been a big problem. If Viggo had been the kind of actor who was worried about being dignified or vulnerable, I would have had to try to shoot the scene with what, him wearing his towel all the way through? Or, from the waist up? Fortunately, Viggo is pretty fearless, and he said, immediately, “I’ve got to do it nude.” It came down to a matter of trust between us, and because we had developed that trust on A History of Violence, I didn’t have to worry then about [him being uncomfortable being nude on camera].
For me, then, the first thing about a fight scene like this one was the space – where would it be happening? Carol Spier, the production designer, and I found this wonderful steam bath location, but then just after we found it they renovated it and completely destroyed all the old textures -- the old tiles, leaky pipes and rusty stuff that gave it such great visual appeal. So, we had to build [the steam bath] on a stage. The first thing I did with Carol was to make sure the spaces offered a lot of possibilities for interesting angles, lighting and the flow of action. Once I had the model for the set then I talked to the stunt coordinator [Julian Spencer] who was going to work with the three actors involved. We never used stunt doubles, by the way. He worked only with Viggo and the actors who played the two Chechens and no one else. I said [to the stunt coordinator], “Here’s where this scene will start -- I’m going to leave this character here in the previous scene, and then I want [the fight] to flow through here and use this area over there and end here.” And then he worked out with the actors exactly what the fight would be. They’d rehearse in a rehearsal hall with the set marked on the floor with tape. Every week I’d come in and they would show me what they had developed. And I’d say, “Well, that’s a bit corny, this a bit unbelievable, try this, and how about that?” And, “Remember that book we read about Russians who were trained in that commando killing technique?” We posited that this character of Viggo’s might have received that kind of training and therefore could do those moves. And it gradually developed.
One of the questions the stunt coordinator asked initially was, how was I going to shoot the scene? Was it going to be quick, impressionistic cutting like in the Bourne movies, where you don’t really see anything or know what you’ve seen, or was it going to be more like A History of Violence where you can see everything and it is much more, what I would call, realistic? You can justify all those different ways of shooting an action scene, but basically it’s a subjective, intuitive thing. It’s a feel. My philosophy is that the pleasure of any movie is that the audience gets to live in a safe way the life of somebody else, and so I wanted the audience to feel that they were there, that they were in this fight. That to me mean means not quick impressionistic cutting but a kind of realistic flow that is physically grounded in the body. Once the stunt coordinator knew that, he knew that everything he had the actors do had to be credible, had to be something that could really happen. There could be no quick cutaways or swish pans where you wouldn’t know what’s going on. And all of these things came together when we shot the scene, which took us three days.
This is the third film in a row that you haven’t written after having scripted most of your previous movies. What made this script something you wanted to do, and once you sign on to a film you haven’t written, how do you make it your own?
Well, I don’t bother trying to make it my own in the sense of, you know, the “Capra touch” and all of that. A director is the huge filter that everything passes through. You are making two or three thousand decisions a day in prep and when you are shooting, and they all come from your sensibility, taste and judgment. I know that [any one of my movies] will have a lot of me in it, so I don’t worry about “making it my own.” I’m just trying to get the most exciting juice out of a project as I can. And, as I’ve said many times, you make the film to find out why you’re making the film. You don’t really know up front what compels you to spend two years of your life making a film, but you tend to find out at the end, in retrospect. Sometimes it’s not until you’re doing interviews that you begin to be able to articulate what it was about a project that intrigued you enough to spend that much time on it.
What, then, specifically, intrigued you about the script for Eastern Promises?
A good script will induce you to contribute to it, to be creative. And in this case, Steven Knight has a very good ear for immigrant speech and a great sense of multiculturalism, the idea of subcultures living within other cultures. [These ideas] were very present and attractive to me in the script for Eastern Promises. Another of the strengths of Steven’s scripts and this one in particular is that they avoid the clichés of the mob movie. [This script] somehow subverted those cliches while being able to still use the strengths of narrative and suspense that are innate within the mob movie. ]]>
Watching Cronenberg's films, we might justifiably react in the same way: his stories evoke worlds that are manifestly unlike ours, confronting us with horrors and extremities that, as “ordinary people,” we might prefer not to contemplate. Yet it doesn't take much reflection to realize, with alarm, that Cronenberg's imagination ruthlessly corrodes the dividing line between the ordinary and the alien, the familiar and the nightmarish, “our world” and its underside.
In his four-decade career as a director of feature films, David Cronenberg has systematically confounded notions of the proper, the canonic, and the “healthy” in filmmaking. These days a regular, highly respected fixture on film festival red carpets, the Toronto-born director remains a provocateur, long after starting out in the guise of a “disreputable” film scene interloper. His early features, such as Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981) were violent, lurid, seemingly nihilistic genre exercises, working within (and using to their own advantage) the financial and generic limitations of low-budget exploitation cinema. Set in stylized, futuristic versions of Cronenberg’s Canada, these were stories of parasites and mutations that caused society to implode in orgiastic blood lusts (Shivers, Rabid); of homicidal creatures spawned from human rage (The Brood); of warring telepathic sects (Scanners). These brutal narratives used disturbing, even sensationalistic tactics to make their effect: extravagantly ghoulish special effects, most famously the exploding head in Scanners, and in Rabid, the casting of then-notorious porn star Marilyn Chambers in a role that turned the routine titillation of sex cinema violently inside out.
These early films established Cronenberg's thematic obsessions, as well as his style; despite the subject matter, their execution was detached and restrained, often deliberately oppressive. Cronenberg's surpassing fascination was with the “other” –– with unruly psychic and physical forces attacking the human body and destroying social cohesion. Yet it was not the invading “other” that was so threatening in these stories, but the familiar. In Shivers, for example, the parasitic creature invading an apartment complex was not as purely terrifying as the actions of the residents, awakened by it to their own extremes of rage and erotomania.
These early films display a dispassionate, altogether scientific interest in extremes, in the outer limits of what comprises the human. These undeniably lurid, excessive films were not just out to scare or disgust, but themselves comprised a sort of philosophical research. "I'd like to make a philosophical cinema," Cronenberg remarked in one interview, "but I'm looking for metaphors and imagery that will express some of these things."
Cronenberg also established himself early on as a fabulist, his radically anti-realist narratives delineating their own self-contained universe. It is a universe ruled not by received concepts of good and evil, law and crime, authority and anarchy, but by scandalous pulsions and obsessions, and often by occult forces, conspiracies, and crypto-scientific shadow institutions. These films suggest that the thirst for knowledge is accompanied by a drive to destruction and chaos, yet Cronenberg suggests that this Promethean drive is one we can't afford to repress. "I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know," he has commented.
Following his early apocalyptic visions, Cronenberg headed towards a more intimate though no less confrontational engagement with the drives and desires of the individual. Videodrome (1983) follows to its extreme a scenario of what might happen if, as censors and moral guardians endlessly warn, the moving image could “infect” the viewer, like a parasite infecting its host. Max Renn (James Woods) not only finds his desires perversely affected by a taboo TV station specializing in nightmare sex and violence, but finds his body mutating accordingly, his chest opening up to reveal a vaginal slot for fleshy videocassettes. This grisly –– yet in a bizarre way, utopian –– merging of flesh and technology persists in Cronenberg's films, right up to eXistenZ (1999), in which characters jack into the video game of the title via sockets at the base of their spines. Crash (1996), based on J.G. Ballard's novel, similarly imagines an erotic meshing of human and machine bodies, with fragile flesh aspiring to the seeming durability –– and ultimately, spectacular destructibility –– of automobiles.
In some ways Cronenberg's most approachable vision of the mutated body is 1986’s The Fly, which takes the sci-fi premise of the 1958 B-movie and reworks it into an unexpectedly poignant essay on mortality and our horror at our own vital functions. The film endorses science's drive to knowledge at any price: its hero Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), even as his body metamorphoses horribly after being genetically spliced with an insect's, insists on dispassionately following his own decay to its limits. The Fly remains a key film in the cycle that ’80s critics dubbed “Body Horror”: a strain of fantasy chiming with, if not necessarily stemming directly from, contemporary anxieties about AIDS and its related opportunistic diseases.
Cronenberg's fascination with psychological as well as physical states became fully apparent with 1988's Dead Ringers, about the self-destructive folie à deux between identical-twin gynecologists, both played by Jeremy Irons. While the film maintained certain idiosyncratically ghoulish shock elements, notably its range of avant-garde gynaecological tools, Dead Ringers proved most disturbing in its exploration of pathological co-dependency and rivalry between siblings, each brother at once determining and eroding the other's identity.
From Videodrome on, many Cronenberg films display a hallucinatory ambiguity, with reality, nightmare and media-generated imagery –– whether from television, computer games or the literary imagination –– disconcertingly flowing together in a single stream of fantastic logic. In Videodrome, the reality inhabited by Max Renn is engulfed by the nightmares of the TV he watches, until it is impossible to tell one realm from the other. Similarly, the surreal and sometimes farcical chase narrative of eXistenZ finally proves to be a consensual hallucination, the product of a video game; without a doubt, this film is Cronenberg's most direct commentary on the pleasures and terrors of cinema itself.
Elsewhere, a comparable blurring takes place between Cronenberg's imagination and those of the writers he draws on. In Naked Lunch (1991), the creatures and geographies of William S. Burroughs's book are transformed from written metaphor into concrete special-effects apparitions, while elements from the writer's biography are seamlessly folded into a horribly vivid exploration of the heroin-fueled, science fiction-inflected “Interzone” of Burroughs's verbal universe. In Crash too, an ostensibly realist universe –– in which people have names, jobs, ordinary relationships –– borders on a perverse domain ruled by absolute fetishistic desire; yet there's never any clear barrier to be crossed, no warning signs marking the point of transgression. It is this thoroughgoing, troubling indeterminacy that surely made Crash so threatening to those who called for its ban in the UK.
By the same token, reality, imagination and illusory memory seep into each other in Spider (2002). One of Cronenberg's most controlled and introspective films, Spider, adapted by Patrick McGrath from his own novel, is about a schizophrenic (Ralph Fiennes) who attempts to unravel the mystery of his traumatized past while at the same time weaving his own distorted web of fantasies around it.
It is an unmistakable mark of Cronenberg's auteur status that pretty much any material directed by him acquires his idiosyncratic imprint. His work is recognizably “Cronenbergian”, whether it originates in adapted literary material or in other writers’ scripts. This is certainly true of his two most recent films, A History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), which although ostensibly unrelated, and scripted by two different writers –– respectively, Josh Olson and Steven Knight –– come across very much as companion pieces. Cronenberg's first ventures into crime narrative proper, they both explore the tenuous division between over-ground and underground society, and the role of male violence in both. In A History of Violence, Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen), the quintessential American small-town "quiet man," is feted as a hero after defending his community against invading thugs. It then emerges that his identity as a peaceful family man hides his past life as a violent hoodlum. His wife (Maria Bello) is horrified, yet she soon finds herself responding sexually to his reawakened dark side.
Eastern Promises again stars Mortensen, this time as Nikolai, foot soldier in a London-based Russian crime syndicate. Drawn into the gang's orbit is Anna (Naomi Watts), a midwife attempting to discover the identity of a young Russian girl who has died in childbirth. Anna and her family find themselves threatened by a violence that is utterly alien to their sheltered vision of the world, but she is also attracted to the ambivalent Nikolai, a glamorous but hard-to-read figure of menace who, like Tom Stall, is not what he seems at first glance.
The old Cronenberg theme of the body returns in Eastern Promises in a strange new guise though the film’s use of Russian criminal tattoos. These are the medals of a hard man's survival and violent triumphs, making his flesh an instantly readable open book. When Nikolai receives the star tattoos that will make him a “made man” in the Russian mob, he comments, “I am dead already... Now I live in the zone all the time.” Cronenberg's distinctive contribution to cinema, through an unpredictable yet surprisingly cohesive career, is to remind us that we all live much closer to the “zone” –– of desire, of taboo, of the turbulent unconscious –– than we like to admit. ]]>
The scene takes place in the backroom of a London restaurant. Ready to advance up the ladder of the local Russian mob organization, Mortenson’s character, Nikolai, demonstrates his fealty to thug life by showing his bosses the body art that can only be earned by having lived the life of a hardcore criminal.
But is the scene just another example of unbridled creativity from a director, who, after all, once imagined a future in which a VHS player might be located in one’s abdomen?
No, says filmmaker Alix Lambert, whose documentary Mark of Cain is a definitive look into the symbolism of Russian prison tattoo art. “You would learn everything about a [Russian prisoner]” by scrutinizing their tattoos, she says. “What prisons they sat in, what crimes they committed, what position they held in prison, and what their personal proclivities were. Under the thieves’ code, if you are a high-ranking prisoner, you want those tattoos –– they would afford you a higher status.”
While tattoos are common in gang and criminal life across the world, the symbolism of Russian criminal tattoos is particularly highly developed, says Lambert. “We have prison tattoos here, gang tattoos, but there are 40 tattoos, tops,” she notes. “Russian prisons have entire dictionaries of tattoos –– it’s an incredibly detailed, rapidly evolving language.”
Prior to the filming of Eastern Promises, Mortenson discovered Lambert’s doc, a short version of which had screened on ABC’s Nightline, and showed it to Cronenberg, who was inspired to elevate the importance of the tattoo storyline in the script. “The scene where Nikolai is inducted into the mob became a scene of reading and commenting on tattoos and their meanings,” Cronenberg remarks.
Eastern Promises key makeup artist Stephan Depuis was charged with overseeing the authenticity of the film’s foray into tattoo culture. He hired the London-based effects makeup specialist David Stoneman, who was given two weeks to produce the temporary tattoos that would be applied to Mortenson. Stoneman, with his partner Helen Morley, runs the specialty firm makeup, which has supplied makeup materials to such films as Spiderman 3, The Departed, and the last three Harry Potter films. The team has also created ephemeral body art that has been worn on screen by the likes of Angelina Jolie, Natalie Portman, Elijah Wood and The Rock.
Using as reference material Danzig Baldaev’s Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia, Stoneman drew the designs by hand and then digitally scanned them into the Photoshop software program to create four separate color layers for the silkscreen printing process. “This was very time consuming,” Stoneman says, “and meant working long days and quite a few all-nighters.”
“The tattoos are basically a sandwich of an ultra-fine top or carrier coat, that holds all the pigment in place; a design layer made up of skin-safe four-color process colors; and then the adhesive layer,” Stoneman continues. “This is all attached to a very absorbent layer called ‘transfer release paper.’ When ready to use the tattoos are trimmed around the edges and the design is placed paper side up onto the skin. The back of the paper is wetted for ten seconds, and the whole design is transferred onto the skin. A wet sponge is then pressed directly onto the tattoo to force the design onto the skin. Once dry this gives the tattoo much more realism; it gives the appearance that the tattoo is in the skin and not sitting on the surface.”
Stoneman’s work is convincing both on screen and within the film’s storyline –– the authenticity of Nikolai’s body art succeeds in moving the chauffeur up the criminal ranks. But, as Lambert details in Mark of Cain, in the real world the culture of Russian prison tattoos is rapidly fading. Her film, which uses its study of body art to delve into a whole range of cultural, behavioral and public policy issues, evokes a fin de siecle era of Eastern bloc criminality, a time in which crime, criminals and the art of tattooing are not what they used to be.
Largely shot in Russian prisons in the towns of Perm and Samara, Mark of Cain begins by depicting the Russian prison system as a Theater of the Absurd in which the social codes of everyday society are violently exaggerated. “Downcast,” or submissive, prisoners are forcibly tattooed with the word “slave.” High-ranking prisoners, meanwhile, are guaranteed a good night’s sleep in the monstrously overcrowded cells by the words “don’t wake me up” they are privileged to have tattooed on their eyelids.
As the film progresses, the meanings Lambert extracts from the tattoos, which are drawn by prisoners on each other with homemade ink guns pumping a mixture of soot and urine, begin to change. For prisoners the tattoos are powerful statements of identity, but one Russian critic of the penal system claims they are actually a deliberate method of social control. They have the effect, he argues, of spreading a drug-resistant form of TB engineered to suppress the prison population.
By the film’s end, the tattoos’ original, complex iconography is, like many things in the new, post-Soviet era, in danger of extinction. A new generation of criminal doesn’t recognize –– or respect –– the potent history behind these inked images. “There’s a division between the older prisoners and the younger ‘new money’ ones,” Lambert says. “[A prisoner] used to say, ‘I want this tattoo,’ but it was something he had earned.” She discusses a younger prisoner who asked for a tattoo of a heart pierced by a knife: “He didn’t realize that it meant that he was a hired killer, so he wound up burning it off. The alternative would have meant actually becoming a hired killer, and that’s too demanding. And a lot of new criminals aren’t even getting tattoos –– they might want to go to university after prison.”
Lambert, who, most recently, was a producer and writer for the HBO series John from Cincinnati, achieved her extraordinary access to the Russian prison system through a combination of feet-on-ground perspicacity and old-fashioned charm. “I traveled to Russia and hired a Russian crew, but in Moscow, we got the runaround,” she says. “But when you get to places like Perm, the prisons are family-run businesses, and the people who run them are profoundly bored. They’d always initially tell us ‘no,” but if you’d hang out, have dinner, and drink vodka, the answer could change…”
Lambert also has a couple of tattoos, and she said those earned her some cred with both wardens and prisoners –– as did her Brooklyn heritage. “At the White Swan [prison], the officials got really excited that I lived in Brooklyn,” she says. “They made me show them my driver’s license and said that Brooklyn was a big place for Russian organized crime!”
Mark of Cain is currently available directly through Lambert’s own site, Pink Ghetto Productions.. ]]>
Viggo Mortensen spielt nach A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE nun in TÖDLICHE VERSPRECHEN - EASTERN PROMISES bereits zum zweiten Mal eine Hauptrolle unter David Cronenbergs Regie. Seit seinem Leinwanddebüt in Peter Weirs preisgekröntem Film DER EINZIGE ZEUGE (1985) hat Viggo Mortensen in fast 50 Filmen sehr verschiedenartige Charaktere verkörpert. Zusammen mit den anderen Darstellern von Peter Jacksons Oscar-Gewinner DER HERR DER RINGE: DIE RÜCKKEHR DES KÖNIGS (2003) erhielt er den Screen Actors Guild Award für Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Mortensen hat mit Regisseur Sean Penn INDIAN RUNNER (1991) gedreht. In Brian De Palmas CARLITO'S WAY (1993) stand er mit Al Pacino und Sean Penn vor der Kamera und in Jane Campions THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996) spielt er einen Verehrer von Isabel Archer, die von Nicole Kidman dargestellt wird. Viggo Mortensen hat u.a. mit Regisseuren wie Ridley Scott (DIE AKTE JANE, 1997), Tony Scott (CRIMSON TIDE, 1995), Gus Van Sant (PSYCHO, 1998) oder Agustín Díaz Yanes (ALATRISTE, 2006) zusammengearbeitet. Momentan laufen die Dreharbeiten zu Appaloosa, bei dem Viggo Mortensen unter der Regie von Ed Harris die Hauptrolle übernommen hat. Der gebürtige New Yorker lebte mehrere Jahre in Venezuela, Argentinien und Dänemark, bevor er in seiner Heimatstadt ein Schauspielstudium bei Warren Robertson aufnahm. Währenddessen begann er, Theater zu spielen. Viggo Mortensen hat sich auch einen Namen als Poet, Fotograf und Maler gemacht. 2002 gründete er seinen unabhängigen Verlag Perceval Press, der Bücher und CDs mit und über Kunst, Poesie und Fotografie veröffentlicht. Perceval Press hat sich die Aufgabe gestellt, interessante Künstler und Autoren zu präsentieren, die auf dem Massenmarkt keine Chance hätten. In der Galerie "16 Track" in Santa Monica hat Viggo Mortensen seine eigene Landschaftsfotoserie zusammen mit den Bildern des isländischen Malers Gudni ausgestellt. Im nächsten Jahr sind in Island und Dänemark Ausstellungen seiner Malerei und seiner Fotokunst geplant. Er hatte Ausstellungen in der Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, in der Addison Ripley Gallery in Washington und der Robert Mann Gallery in New York City.
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Naomi Watts wurde für ihre Darstellung in Alejandro González Iñárritus 21 GRAMM (2003) sowohl für den Oscar als auch für den BAFTA, den Critics Choice und den Screen Actors Guild Award nominiert. Beim Internationalen Filmfestival in Venedig erhielt sie den Publikumspreis als Beste Schauspielerin. 2001 war für Naomi Watts das Jahr, in dem sie sich mit ihrer Doppelrolle in David Lynchs MULHOLLAND DRIVE international einen Namen gemacht hat. Der Film hatte bei den Internationalen Filmfestspielen in Cannes Premiere. Ihre Darstellung wurde mit einer Reihe von Preisen bedacht. So wurde sie von der National Society of Film Critics und der Chicago Film Critics Association zur Besten Schauspielerin gekürt. Auf der ShoWest wurde sie zum Female Star of Tomorrow gewählt, auf dem Hollywood Film Festival erhielt sie den Hollywood Discovery Award for Breakthrough Acting, und schließlich erhielt sie auch den Breakthrough Actress Award des National Board of Review. Naomi Watts spielte Ann Darrow in Peter Jacksons KING KONG (2005), wofür sie der London Film Critics Circle zur Schauspielerin des Jahres wählte. Weitere Hauptrollen spielte sie u.a. in Gore Verbinskis THE RING - DAS GRAUEN SCHLÄFT NIE (2002), in Merchant Ivorys EINE AFFÄRE IN PARIS (2003) und in John Currans We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004). 2006 produzierte sie mit demselben Regisseur The Painted Veil, in dem sie wieder die Hauptrolle spielte. Als ausführende Produzentin und Darstellerin der Anna hat sich Naomi Watts für Michael Hanekes Remake von FUNNY GAMES engagiert. Naomi Watts wurde in England geboren. Mit 14 zog die Familie nach Australien. Ihre erste Nebenrolle spielte sie in John Duigans FLIRTING - SPIEL MIT DER LIEBE (1991). Der Kurzfilm "Ellie Parker", in dem sie die Titelrolle spielte und den sie auch produziert hatte, wurde 2001 auf dem Sundance Film Festival gezeigt. 2005 hatte die Langversion ELLIE PARKER - SCHAUSPIELERIN ebenfalls in Sundance Premiere.
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Vincent Cassel ist einer der prominentesten Schauspieler Frankreichs. Seine Karriere begann er, damals noch Student der Fratellini Circus School, bereits mit 17 Jahren als Ballett-Tänzer. Es folgte eine Zeit, in der er sich dem Straßentheater widmete. Seine Liebe zum amerikanischen Kino der 70er Jahre führte ihn ans New Yorker Actor's Institute, wo er sein Schauspielstudium fortsetzte. Mit 20 kehrte er zurück nach Frankreich und arbeitete mit Jean-Louis Barrault am Theater. Cassels Durchbruch als Filmstar begann mit der Premiere von HASS (1995) bei den Internationalen Filmfestspielen von Cannes. Von nun an war Cassel ein international begehrter Star. Er spielte u.a. in Shekar Kapurs ELIZABETH (1998), Luc Bessons JOHANNA VON ORLEANS (1999), Mathieu Kassovitz' DIE PURPURNEN FLÜSSE (2000) und Christophe Gans' PAKT DER WÖLFE (2001). Für Jan Kounen stand er bereits zweimal vor der Kamera, und zwar für DOBERMANN (1997) und BLUEBERRY UND DER FLUCH DER DÄMONEN (2004). In SHREK - DER TOLLKÜHNE HELD (2001) lieh er Monsieur Hood seine Stimme. Cassel hat mit Steven Soderbergh OCEAN'S 12 (2004) und OCEAN'S 13 (2007) gedreht. Für seine Darstellung des Paul in Jacques Audiards Sur mes lèvres (2001) war er sowohl für den Europäischen Filmpreis als auch für den César nominiert worden. Vincent Cassel ist auch Chef der Filmproduktion 120 Films, die zuletzt Kim Chapirons SHEITAN (2006) produziert hat. In dem Film übernahm Vincent Cassel die Hauptrolle. Weiterhin hat er mit Regisseur Jean-Jacques Annaud Sa majéste Minor abgedreht. Zur Zeit arbeitet er mit Jean-François Ríchet an zwei Filmen, in denen er die Verbrecherlegende Jacques Mesrine verkörpert (L´Instinct de mort und L´Ennemi public n 1).
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Für seine Darstellung in Scott Hicks' SHINE - DER WEG INS LICHT (1996) wurde Armin Mueller-Stahl für einen Oscar nominiert. Die Screen Actors Guild nominierte die Schauspieler dieses Films für ihre Ensemble-Leistung. Der Schauspieler, Musiker, Maler, Autor und Regisseur Armin Mueller-Stahl, der in Ostberlin aufwuchs, wurde in Tilsit geboren. Nach seinem Studium spielte er ab 1952 an der Berliner Volksbühne. Er arbeitete währenddessen auch fürs Fernsehen. Seine erste Kinorolle spielte er in Gustav von Wangenheims HEIMLICHE EHEN (1956). Mit Frank Beyer arbeitete er sechs Mal zusammen: bei FÜNF PATRONENHÜLSEN (1960), KÖNIGSKINDER (1962), NACKT UNTER WÖLFEN (1963), DIE SIEBEN AFFÄREN DER DONA JUANITA (1973), JACOB DER LÜGNER (1975) und GESCHLOSSENE GESELLSCHAFT (1978). Mueller-Stahl machte auch mit seinen Darstellungen in Egon Günthers DER DRITTE (1972) und Roland Gräfs DIE FLUCHT (1977) auf sich aufmerksam. 1979 ging Mueller-Stahl in den Westen. Für Rainer Werner Fassbinder stand er bei den Dreharbeiten von LOLA (1981) und DIE SEHNSUCHT DER VERONIKA VOSS (1982) vor der Kamera. Für LOLA erhielt er den Deutschen Filmpreis. 1985 gewann er auf dem Montréal World Film Festival den Preis als Bester Schauspieler für seine Rolle in Agnieszka Hollands BITTERE ERNTE. Mit Patrice Chéreau hat Mueller-Stahl DER VERFÜHRTE MANN (L'Homme blessé, 1983) gedreht, mit István Szabó OBERST REDL (1985), mit Costa-Gavras MUSIC BOX - DIE GANZE WAHRHEIT (1989), mit Barry Levinson AVALON (1990), mit Jim Jarmusch NIGHT ON EARTH (1991) und mit Steven Soderbergh KAFKA (1991). Auch in Rob Bowmans AKTE X - DER FILM (1998) und Peter Kassovitz' JAKOB DER LÜGNER (1999) hat Mueller-Stahl mitgewirkt. Für seine Darstellung in George Sluizers UTZ (1992) erhielt er auf der Berlinale den Goldenen Bären. GESPRÄCH MIT DEM BIEST (1996), für den er das Drehbuch geschrieben hatte, und in dem er Adolf Hitler verkörpert, war seine erste Regiearbeit. Aktuell steht Armin Mueller-Stahl unter der Regie von Tom Tykwer in The International wieder mit Naomi Watts vor der Kamera. Vom Autor Armin Mueller-Stahl sind u.a. die Bücher "Drehtage" (1991), "Unterwegs nach Hause" (1996), "In Gedanken an Marie Louise. Eine Liebesgeschichte" (1998), "Hannah" (2004) und "Venice. Ein amerikanisches Tagebuch" (2005) erschienen. In diesem Jahr wurde Armin Mueller-Stahl für "hervorragende Verdienste um den deutschen Film" mit dem deutschen Filmpreis Lola geehrt.
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Clive Donners ALFRED DER GROSSE - BEZWINGER DER WIKINGER (Alfred the Great, 1969) war der erste Film, in dem die gebürtige Irin Sinéad Cusack eine Rolle übernahm. Es folgte die Hauptrolle neben Peter Sellers in Alvin Rakoffs Komödie HOFFMAN (1970). Am Anfang ihrer Schauspielkarriere stand ein Engagement am berühmten Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Bei ihren Auftritten mit der Royal Shakespeare Company erregte sie bald auch in London die Aufmerksamkeit der Theaterwelt, unter anderem mit ihrer Darstellung der Lady Macbeth, der Katerina in "Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung" und der Portia in "Der Kaufmann von Venedig". Am Broadway machte sie mit der Beatrice in "Viel Lärm um Nichts" Furore. Hierfür erhielt sie auch eine Tony Award-Nominierung. 1990 stand Sinéad Cusack im Londoner West End zusammen mit ihrem Vater, dem bekannten Schauspieler Cyril Cusack, und ihren Schwestern Sorcha und Niamh in Anton Tschechows Stück "Drei Schwestern" auf der Bühne. 1998 wurde sie sowohl vom Evening Standard als auch vom London Critics Circle für ihre Rolle in "Our Lady of Sligo" als Beste Schauspielerin ausgezeichnet. Auch für ihre Darstellung in Tom Stoppards "Rock'n'Roll" wurde sie wieder für den Theatre Award des Evening Standard nominiert. Ab 4. November 2007 ist sie in dieser Inszenierung am Broadway im Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre zu sehen. Mit ihrem Ehemann Jeremy Irons spielte sie in Stephen Gyllenhaals DAS GEHEIMNIS EINER LIEBE (Waterland, 1992) und in Bernardo Bertoluccis GEFÜHL UND VERFÜHRUNG (Stealing Beauty, 1996). Zu sehen war sie auch in Marty Feldmans DREI FREMDENLEGIONÄRE (The Last Remake of Beau Geste, 1977), Daniel Petries ROCKET GIBRALTAR (1988), Andrew Birkins DER ZEMENTGARTEN (The Cement Garden, 1993), James McTeigues V WIE VENDETTA (V for Vendetta, 2005) und John Boormans The Tiger's Tail (2006). Für diese Rolle wurde sie für den Irish Film and Television (IFTA) Award nominiert.
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Der Schauspieler, Schriftsteller und Maler Jerzy Skolimowski wurde im polnischen Lodz geboren. Er hat in Warschau Literatur, Geschichte und Ethnologie studiert, bevor er an der renommierten Filmschule in Lodz ein Regie-Studium aufnahm. Während seiner Studienzeit begann er mit dem Boxsport. Boxen war auch das Thema seines Films Boks (1961) und in Andrzej Wajdas DER UNSCHULDIGE ZAUBERER (Niewinni czarodzieje, 1960), für den er auch das Drehbuch schrieb, spielte Jerzy Skolimowski einen Boxer. Bevor er begann, Drehbücher zu schreiben, darunter Polanskis DAS MESSER IM WASSER (Nóz w wodzie, 1962), hatte er bereits mehrere Bücher mit Poesie und Kurzgeschichten veröffentlicht. Jerzy Skolimowski hat über 20 Filme als Regisseur gedreht, darunter auch SCHWARZARBEIT (Moonlighting, 1982) mit Jeremy Irons in der Hauptrolle. Sein Drehbuch zu diesem Film wurde bei den Filmfestspielen in Cannes ausgezeichnet. DER START (Le Départ, 1967) mit Jean-Pierre Léaud bekam den Goldenen Bären auf der Berlinale. TODESSCHREI (The Shout, 1978), mit Alan Bates und Susannah York, erhielt den Grand Prix von Cannes, und Das FEUERSCHIFF (The Lightship, 1986), mit Robert Duvall und Klaus Maria Brandauer, wurde in Venedig mit dem Spezialpreis der Jury für Robert Duvall prämiert. Mit Jane Asher und John Moulder-Brown hat er DEEP END (1971) gedreht, mit David Niven und Gina Lollobrigida KÖNIG, DAME, BUBE (King, Queen, Knave, 1972) und mit Michael York Success Is the Best Revenge (1984). Als Schauspieler arbeitet Skolimowski nicht nur in den eigenen Filmen. Unter der Regie von Taylor Hackford hat er WHITE NIGHTS - NACHT DER ENTSCHEIDUNG (1985) gedreht, und er hat auch in Tim Burtons MARS ATTACKS! (1996) eine Rolle gespielt. Mit Julian Schnabel hat er BEVOR ES NACHT WIRD (Before Night Falls, 2000) und mit Volker Schlöndorff DIE FÄLSCHUNG (1981) gemacht. Die Bilder des Malers Skolimowski wurden in vielen amerikanischen und europäischen Galerien ausgestellt. Seine Werke wurden auch auf der Biennale in Venedig gezeigt.
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INTERVIEW MIT DAVID CRONENBERG (QT, 6 min, ZEIT online)
Für die meisten seiner Filme hat Regisseur David Cronenberg auch das Drehbuch geschrieben, unter ihnen PARASITEN-MÖRDER (Shivers, 1975), ÜBERFALL DER TEUFLISCHEN BESTIEN (Rabid, 1977), 10.000 PS - VOLLGASRAUSCH IM GRENZBEREICH (Fast Company, 1979), DIE BRUT (1979), SCANNERS - IHRE GEDANKEN KÖNNEN TÖTEN (1981), VIDEODROME (1983), DIE FLIEGE (1986), DIE UNZERTRENNLICHEN (Dead Ringers, 1988), NAKED LUNCH (1991), CRASH (1996) und eXistenZ (1999). Folgende Filme hat Cronenberg nach den Drehbüchern anderer Autoren gemacht: DEAD ZONE - DER ATTENTÄTER (1983), M. BUTTERFLY (1993), SPIDER (2002) und A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE (2005), den er auch produziert hat. Auch TÖDLICHE VERSPRECHEN liegt ein Drehbuch eines anderen Autoren zugrunde. Wie kein anderer kanadischer Regisseur wird Torontos bedeutendster Filmemacher auf der ganzen Welt geschätzt. 2001 erhielt er den Ehrendoktor der University of Toronto. 1990 wurde ihm in Frankreich der Titel "Chevalier des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres" verliehen, 1997 folgte der "Officer des Ordre des Arts et des Lettres". Auch die Glamour-Welt verbeugte sich vor Cronenberg: 2005 war er bei GQ "Man of the Year". Auf dem Internationalen Filmfestival von Palm Springs erhielt er den Sonny Bono Visionary Award. Das National Board of Review verlieh ihm den Billy Wilder Award, und auf dem Stockholm Film Festival wurde Cronenberg mit dem Achievement Award geehrt. 2006 fungierte er als Kurator der Ausstellung "Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962-1964", die in der Art Gallery of Toronto stattfand. Retrospektiven der Arbeit von David Cronenberg wurden in Japan, in den USA, in Großbritannien, Frankreich, Brasilien, Italien, Portugal und Kanada gezeigt. Unter anderem wurden folgende Bücher über sein Werk veröffentlicht: "The Shape of Rage - the Films of David Cronenberg", "The Artist as Monster: The Cinema of David Cronenberg", "Cronenberg on Cronenberg". Auch die französische Filmzeitschrift Cahiers du Cinema hat eine Interviewserie mit Cronenberg veröffentlicht. Der Filmemacher hat an der University of Toronto studiert. Während dieser Zeit hat er zwei 16mm Kurzfilme gedreht, "Transfer" (1966) und "From the Drain" (1967). STEREO (1969) und Crimes of the Future (1970) waren seine ersten 35mm Arbeiten. In ihnen findet man bereits die Themen, die sein Werk charakterisieren, wie Gewalt und Sexualität, Veränderungen der Realitäten, Sozialsatire und biologischen Horror. Sein erster Kinofilm war PARASITEN-MÖRDER (1975), der seine Produktionskosten so schnell wieder eingespielt hatte, wie sonst kein anderer Film in der Geschichte Kanadas. Bald wurden seine Projekte wie VIDEODROME und DEAD ZONE - DER ATTENTÄTER größer und aufwendiger, und sie wurden auch von Hollywoodstudios mitproduziert. Es folgten DIE FLIEGE, ein Remake des gleichnamigen Horrorklassikers aus dem Jahre 1958, und DIE UNZERTRENNLICHEN, für den Cronenberg der Best Director Award der Los Angeles Film Critics Association verliehen wurde. Cronenbergs NAKED LUNCH (nach dem Roman von William S. Burroughs) bekam von der National Society of Film Critics den Preis für die Beste Regie. Diese, wie auch die Kritiker des New York Film Critics Circle, kürten sein Drehbuch zum Besten Drehbuch des Jahres. Der Film wurde auch acht Mal mit Kanadas Oscar, dem Genie Award geehrt (u.a. Bester Film und Bester Regisseur). Weiterhin erhielt Cronenberg folgende Preise: Spezialpreis der Jury in Cannes für CRASH und den Silbernen Bären auf der Berlinale für eXistenZ. Auch A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE erhielt eine Reihe von Auszeichnungen sowie zwei Oscarnominierungen, und zwar für den Besten Nebendarsteller (William Hurt) und für das Beste Drehbuch (Josh Olson). Seine neueren Kurzfilme sind "Camera" (2000) und "At the Suicide of the Last Jew in the World in the Last Cinema in the World" (2007), ein Teil von CHACUN SON CINEMA, dem Gemeinschaftsprojekt, das 36 Spitzenregisseure zu Ehren des 60. Geburtstags des Filmfestivals von Cannes gemacht haben. Und erst kürzlich wurde Cronenberg beim diesjährigen Filmfest Hamburg mit dem Douglas-Sirk-Preis geehrt. David Cronenberg hat auch in eigenen Filmen, wie auch in denen von anderen Regisseuren, als Schauspieler vor der Kamera gestanden, beispielsweise in Gus Van Sants TO DIE FOR (1995), Clive Barkers CABAL - DIE BRUT DER NACHT (Nightbreed, 1990) und Don McKellars DIE LETZTE NACHT (Last Night, 1998). 2008 wird Cronenberg im Pariser Théâtre du Châtelet eine neue Oper inszenieren. Als Vorlage dient sein Film DIE FLIEGE. Musik: Howard Shore. Libretto: David Henry Hwang.
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