From David Cronenberg: Clinical Trials, which will be published this month by Abrams Books.
The Portuguese producer Paulo Branco met Don DeLillo at the Estoril Film Festival. It was Branco’s son, Juan Paulo, who suggested that his father option DeLillo’s 2003 novel Cosmopolis and that Cronenberg be the one to direct. Though Cronenberg was familiar with several of DeLillo’s other works, he hadn’t read Cosmopolis, but after finishing it, he agreed to helm the project. Cronenberg wrote the screenplay in six days.
The propulsiveness of DeLillo’s 224-page novel aided in this speedy turnaround. In it, Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old billionaire moneyman rides the length of 47th Street in Manhattan inside his “Prousted” limo, seeking to get a haircut as he destroys his personal wealth by shorting the Japanese yen. Cronenberg’s changes to the plot were minimal: he removed a scene in which Eric walks onto a film set (too meta) and changed the currency in question to the Chinese yuan (the new threat from the East). Colin Farrell was originally selected to play Eric and Marion Cotillard to play Elise, but they both dropped out. Cronenberg then reached out to Robert Pattinson, who accepted the role.
To prepare his crew for the extremely intimate shoot—the vast majority of Cosmopolis takes place in Eric’s soundproofed stretch limo—Cronenberg asked them to watch Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (a film set inside a tank) and Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot (a film set almost entirely inside a submarine). Though the production used two limousines (a real one and one that came apart in twenty-one different ways), the enclosed space meant that the camera was typically mere inches away from the actors.
Things were also complicated by the international cast, whose members were flown in a day or so before their scenes were shot and left immediately after. There were no rehearsals, and costume fittings were tricky, save for Pattinson’s; his character wore only Gucci suits. Every shot was completed in one or two takes. And the shoot was made even stranger by real events that soon took place in the outside world: the Occupy Wall Street protests, whose partisans mirrored the rat-throwing anti-capitalists who shake Eric’s limo; the emergence of the London Whale, a then-anonymous trader whose hedging caused JPMorgan Chase to lose more than $6 billion; and Rupert Murdoch’s getting hit in the face by a fake pie (a paper plate covered in shaving cream) while delivering testimony to Parliament.
Cosmopolis came and went quietly. The film, which cost $20.5 million to make, earned only $7.1 million worldwide. In art-house cinema, the importance of the box office was beginning to matter more than ever, and by this measure, the film was a failure. It marked a turning point in Cronenberg’s career; fans who’d been reared on his movies started reviewing them negatively. Knifeman, his series about a visionary eighteenth-century surgeon, was abandoned; a series based on Scanners died on the vine and a series based on Dead Ringers was later produced without him. Instead, Cronenberg completed Consumed, his first novel. Published in 2014, the book follows Naomi and Nathan, a gadget-obsessed, unscrupulous photojournalist couple who investigate the case of Célestine Arosteguy, a famous French philosopher who fucked her acolytes and whose body was discovered partially eaten. AMC (in 2017) and Netflix (in 2019) both expressed interest in turning Consumed into a series, though neither followed through. Regarding Netflix, which also passed on Crimes of the Future (2022) and a series version of The Shrouds (2024), Cronenberg told the Globe and Mail: “My experience with [Netflix] was exactly my experience with studios. . . . They’re bright, literate, they know stuff. But underneath they’re afraid. They say, ‘We love your work.’ Then you give them something, and they say, ‘We want to work with you, but not on this.’ ”
