Brandon Cronenberg: ‘We built a wax Andrea… | Little White Lies

Interviews

Bran­don Cro­nen­berg: We built a wax Andrea Riseborough’

24 Nov 2020

Words by Leila Latif

Portrait of a man with brown hair and eyes on a bright red background.
Portrait of a man with brown hair and eyes on a bright red background.
The genre prodi­gy talks per­fect cast­ing and prac­ti­cal effects in his lat­est shock­er, Possessor.

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.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.