Bran­don Cro­nen­berg: ​‘We built a wax Andrea Riseborough’

Eight years after his strik­ing debut Antivi­ral, genre upstart Bran­don Cro­nen­berg is back with with his sec­ond fea­ture Pos­ses­sor, an ultra-vio­lent, night­mar­ish film about mind-con­trol­ling assas­sins that flows on a gush­ing riv­er of blood and gore.

LWLies: It seems there were two paths avail­able to you as a film­mak­er. You could either do the exact oppo­site of your dad and make feel good rom-coms, or you could build on his lega­cy and go for body hor­ror, dystopias and tech­no­log­i­cal night­mares. What made you choose the latter?

Cro­nen­berg: There was only one option, nei­ther. It was to just make films that are hon­est to my own inter­ests and cre­ative impuls­es because to either delib­er­ate­ly embrace or reject what was expect­ed of me would be to be mak­ing films sim­ply in response to those expec­ta­tions and in the con­text of his career. My film­mak­ing is moti­vat­ed by the films that I want to make, and oth­er peo­ple can decide how they relate to my dad’s work.

Where did the con­cept for Pos­ses­sor come from?

Pos­ses­sor start­ed from a fair­ly triv­ial per­son­al place. I was on the press tour for Antivi­ral and when you trav­el with the film you’re build­ing this pub­lic per­sona and per­form­ing a ver­sion of your­self and this media self then goes off and becomes this oth­er char­ac­ter that has its own life with­out you. I ini­tial­ly want­ed to write a film about some­one who may be an imposter in their own life and use that as a way to talk about how we all build char­ac­ters and nar­ra­tives in order to oper­ate. The sci-fi and hor­ror ele­ments kind of built out of that.

How were the hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry sequences con­struct­ed? There are so many lay­ers of imagery and sound, where do you start?

Those scenes are entire­ly prac­ti­cal. They’re all a com­bi­na­tion of cam­era effects and make­up effects. There is a lit­tle bit of CGI in the film but those hal­lu­ci­na­tions sequences are prac­ti­cal. My cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er, Karim Hus­sein, and I spent a lot of time work­ing on cre­at­ing a kind of store­room of cam­era trick­ery over the years. The film was in devel­op­ment for eight years and we spent a lot of time just in his liv­ing room, play­ing with pro­jec­tors and pro­jec­tion feedback.

There are gels and lens­es, the flu­ids, and just any way that we could deform images until we had this bank of ideas. Then Dan Mar­tin, our effects artist, came on and had stuff he want­ed to try like the melt­ing bod­ies. We built a wax Andrea Rise­bor­ough. The paint­ing job and the wax is so incred­i­ble that it looks like a com­put­er effect. The last day of the shoot end­ed with just a bunch of melt­ing heads and hands.

How do you cast char­ac­ters like these? They have to be dis­tinct from one anoth­er, but almost two sides of the same coin.

To me cast­ing is just iden­ti­fy­ing actors who have that fan­tas­tic thing that makes me imme­di­ate­ly enthralled by them. Both Chris and Andrea have that thing where, what­ev­er they’re in, they’re mak­ing the most inter­est­ing choic­es. There’s always some­thing total­ly cap­ti­vat­ing and fas­ci­nat­ing about them. Also, because of the devel­op­ment process was so long we want­ed actors who were going to inject new life into those char­ac­ters and wait whilst I was writ­ing and get­ting the film off the ground, which they both did.

I found myself fas­ci­nat­ed by the archi­tec­ture and fur­ni­ture. What was the phi­los­o­phy behind the pro­duc­tion design?

The film is real­ly set in a kind of alter­nate real­i­ty. I didn’t want to set it in our time­line in the future, part­ly because that tech­nol­o­gy, although it could exist, and I spent a fair bit of time look­ing at the neu­ro­science behind it, is not some­thing that’s just around the cor­ner and I real­ly want­ed to use it metaphor­i­cal­ly rather than pre­dictably. I want­ed it to com­ment on who we are at the moment so I decid­ed just to set it in an alter­nate time­line where that tech­nol­o­gy devel­oped at a dif­fer­ent pace. We had to find a way to cre­ate a world that was some­how famil­iar, but at the same time felt a lit­tle bit alien.

So what’s next?

I have two films that are fair­ly far along in devel­op­ment. Infin­i­ty Pool, which is a kind of tourist resort satire with some sci-fi and hor­ror ele­ments and the oth­er is a hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry space-hor­ror film called Dragon.

Pos­ses­sor is avail­able on dig­i­tal plat­forms from 27 November.