Beyond the Multiplex

Well, with his hair slicked back and all that black leather, you barely recognize him. People who only know him from "Lord of the Rings" and your previous film may be wondering, "So where's Viggo? And who is this Russian dude?"

That's right, and I'm sure that's one of the attractions for Viggo. This guy is a Russian. He comes from Yekaterinburg in Siberia. He's got to walk like a Russian, he's got to think like a Russian. He speaks English with a Russian accent and speaks Russian fluently. What I've heard from all the Russian journalists so far was that Viggo is perfect, totally convincing. Which is incredibly gratifying. Until we vetted it for some Russians, we didn't know whether what we had done with our Russian consultants had worked. That's been a nice validation.

When you first read Steven Knight's script, what was in it that made you think this was potentially a David Cronenberg movie?

Well, you see, there you've added something that I never add. I'm serious. I don't think about "Is this a David Cronenberg movie?" Because I have no idea what that is. I try to totally forget what I am or what I'm perceived to be, and what people's expectations might be based on my other movies. I think that's very deforming, it will distort your perception. On the contrary, I'm reading this script and I'm in the audience: "Wow, these characters are amazing. They're exotic but real. I've never known anything about this subculture. The streets of London in this movie are not going to be any streets of London you've ever seen in a movie before. The textures, the ancient hostilities brought to the new country, the betrayals, the lack of trust but the need to work together in a criminal globalization." All that was really intriguing and it felt connected to what's going on in Russia today, while still being a fiction, a drama. It really felt relevant.

Of course you have mostly shot in Canada before, and most of your films are set there. This was mostly shot on the real streets of London, right?

Well, there were some major sets: Semyon's restaurant was a set, and the bathhouse [where a major and bloody fight scene takes place]. We did spend a lot of time in the streets of London, but they were the mean streets of London. They were the streets that tourists don't go to. Our English crew loved where we were shooting. They told me, "This is the real London, this is the London that we know. It's where we live."

I was thinking of a line from an early Public Image Ltd. song, "A side of London the tourists never see."

That could have been our theme song.

Something also struck me here: It's been said that to be an English-speaking Canadian is to belong to a culture that's partway between the United States and Britain. You've been bouncing back and forth across that divide: "Spider" was set in London in the '50s. "History of Violence" was set in Middle America. Now you're back to London again. I'm sure that wasn't precisely intentional.

No, it wasn't, but it's true that Canada's relationship to England is quite different from that of the U.S. We started from the same point, but we never cut those ties. We never had a revolution. I mean, we still have the queen on our money! Our relationship to Britain is more congenial, and we feel more connected. The resonances of that relationship are much different.

I was talking with another critic last night about the question of whether this film should be considered realistic. I think I have two answers. Obviously you spent a lot of time and money making the clothes, the settings, and the accents appear authentic. On the other hand, all your films, including this one, seem to exist in a time and space and reality that is your vision, rather than in some objective real world.

Well, how could they not? If you're doing a documentary you're doing a documentary. But as Michael Moore and Ken Burns and all those other documentarians will tell you, they think they're doing fiction anyway. It's a creative thing, an illusion of reality. As a director, you make 2,000 or 3,000 decisions a day that are unique to you. They flow through your nervous system, your culture, your background, your education, your visual sense. You cannot avoid that filtration system. It filters out other people's versions of reality and you don't have to struggle to make it your own. There's no way to avoid it, frankly, because of the nature of what directing is, or certainly the way I perceive it.

But I love being in those real streets. I love owning the streets at night. My favorite thing is shooting in the streets at night when everybody else has gone to bed and there's just us doing our thing. There's no hangers-on, there's no partying, it's just us. But then the streets become your set. It's all a set; the whole city is your set.

One point of connection between this film and "History of Violence" is that Viggo plays a character whose true nature is hidden from us. He's this career criminal, an almost stereotypical Russian gangster who does terrible things. But he has other dimensions we can't see.

Part of that is because we don't know what a man in that position would really be like. Being the chauffeur to the boss' son in a crime organization means you've got to be pretty discreet and controlled, especially since the boss' son [Kirill, played by the French actor Vincent Cassel] is wild and volatile. You're there to take care of him and make sure he doesn't kill himself. You're controlled and you don't give much away, because it's not your show, it's his show. At the same time, you're ambitious, you want to move up, you're observing everything, you're calculating, you're planning your next move. Well -- would somebody like that have no sense of humor? Would somebody like that not flirt with a pretty girl on the street? Maybe he would. Would he have absolutely no kindness or gentleness? I'm not sure that he wouldn't, you know? I think that's just real; everybody is pretty complex. Even Stalin could be nice on a given day.

I understand he was highly sentimental, actually.

Well, Armin Mueller-Stahl said, when we talked about his character [the mob boss Semyon], "All monsters are sentimental." That's how they manage to express their emotions when on other occasions they have to be incredibly controlled and emotionless. So it goes into a strange and structured place; sentimentality is a very structured version of emotion. Viggo's character also -- it's not unrealistic to think that he might behave that way. Whether that indicates something more profound and deep or not is another question.

Next page: "This movie is about language"