David Cronenberg has offered up his thoughts on the backlash that the Oscar-winning film The Brutalist was on the receiving end of throughout awards season.
The Canadian filmmaker was at a London Soundtrack Festival talk with career-long collaborator Howard Shore to discuss some of the films they’ve partnered on over the years.
The two visionaries discussed M. Butterfly, Cronenberg’s 1993 film about a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) who becomes infatuated with a Chinese opera performer, Song Liling (John Lone). Their affair lasts for 20 years, and they subsequently marry, but Irons’ character is unaware or willfully ignorant that Liling is a man.
Cronenberg compared his editing of the film to the criticism surrounding Brady Corbet’s post-war epic when it was revealed that artificial intelligence was used on the film’s lead, Brody (who went on to win the best actor Oscar for his performance), to enhance the accuracy of his character’s Hungarian accent.
“I must confess, there was a scandal [with] The Brutalist,” the director began at London’s Royal Festival Hall. “There was a discussion about Adrien Brody… but apparently they used artificial intelligence to improve his accent. I think it was a campaign against The Brutalist by some other Oscar nominees. It’s very much a Harvey Weinstein kind of thing, though he wasn’t around.”
“We mess with actors’ voices all the time,” Cronenberg continued. “In the case of John (Lone), when he was being this character, this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice [to sound more feminine] and when he’s revealed as a man, I lowered to his natural voice. This is just a part of moviemaking.”
Cronenberg and Shore have collaborated on all of the former’s films, bar one, since 1979. At Saturday’s discussion, they unpacked movies such as The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), M. Butterfly (1993), Crash (1996) and most recently, The Shrouds (1994).
While the two stayed clear of any political talk, Shore did open up on incorporating a myriad of sounds into Cronenberg’s films, such as jazz in Naked Lunch or electric guitar in Crash. “What I like to think we tried to do is work around the frame,” the Canadian composer said. “It wasn’t going into the center of the image. [The music] was always the exterior. That’s where I was looking at, and I would do things to broaden and create more depth in the story.”
The duo go way back — they grew up in the same Toronto neighborhood and Shore would watch Cronenberg get around on his motorcycle. Now, the pair is in their late 70s (Shore) and early 80s (Cronenberg). Shore says his sound can be traced through the 16 films the pair have worked together on.
“After The Fly, I was seriously getting used to the opera sound,” Shore said. “And from Dead Ringers, it inherited the three horns of [Peter Jackson’s] Fellowship of the Ring. So there’s a connection between David’s film and Peter Jackson, and really, all through the late ’80s and ’90s, all the films I was doing, I was building up from David’s original concept. The films have been like a spine. You can see my work from beginning to end all through David’s films.”
With James Spader, Cronenberg even discussed the controversy around his daring 1996 project Crash, which was about a man aroused by car crashes. “The film caused a huge sensation [at the] Cannes Film Festival in 1996,” he said. “Alexander Walker was a very famous film critic here, said this was a film ‘beyond the bounds of depravity’, which of course I loved. We actually used in some our ads.” Shore added, prompting laughter from the audience: “I went to Spain after Cannes and I was on a desolate beach. Next to me, poking out under a rock, was a newspaper clip that had blown in from somewhere. I dusted it off and it said: ‘Crash: ban this sex-crazed film.’”
The filmmaker also said it “suits him” to not have received an Oscar nomination throughout his colorful career. “I’m Canadian… Oscars are an American thing,” he joked.
