Body work - interview with author J.G. Ballard and director David Cronenberg - Interview

And as you've said, to begin with, one's rather stunned by it all. Then this kind of grave's humor comes in, and one saunters around with a head under one's arm and isn't touched by it. But then, as you begin the process of dissecting the human being - particularly the face, where you uncover all the facial muscles that give expression to the character - you begin an extraordinary exploration of another individual in the most intimate possible way. All that I fed straight into my own fiction, and, to some extent, I still do.

AH: You've called Crash a "cautionary tale." What were you cautioning against?

JB: Well, cautionary tales take many forms. One of the most famous of all, Swift's "Modest Proposal," employs the deadpan approach. It seems to embrace the very subject that is the target of Swift's anger. I'd like to think that Crash lies in the tradition of that type of cautionary tale. I mean, when I was writing Crash, I certainly didn't think I was writing a cautionary tale. What I thought I was doing was following certain trends that I saw inscribed in the sensation-hungry, rather affectless landscape that was emerging in the '60s. I was following these trends that I saw inscribed across the graph paper to the point where they seemed likely to intersect, you know, way off the page. I saw this new logic, a nightmare logic, emerging, and this was what I was exploring. I was, in a sense, carrying out an autopsy before the cadaver was cold.

What Crash does - it's particularly noticeable in the film - is remove the moral framework that reassures the spectator that these horrific scenes are, in fact, constrained within some system of moral value. And I think that unsettles people, because they ask questions - I mean, "Do the filmmaker and the writer really believe that auto wrecks are erotically stimulating?"

AH: What was happening in your life while you were writing Crash? Was there anything out of the ordinary?

JB: No, my private life was very modest. Because I'd been widowed in 1964, I spent the years bringing up my three children. And I lived - and still do - what appeared to be a totally bourgeois life. I was never in the drug scene. People would come here to interview me, in the heyday of Burroughs and all that, and they would expect to find a miasma of child molesting. And they would find this, you know, rather sober figure - I hope sober - bringing up three children, with a golden retriever and a cat. But I think it was a very good background against which to explore the external world.

AH: What were your initial responses when you first read Crash?

DC: I found it very hard going. Brilliant but very cold, and very monotone. Deliberately so, you know, and very humorless, which Ballard himself isn't, and which his other works are not. That sort of unrelenting aspect of it was, in a way, part of its charm. But it also made it very hard to read in one sitting. I stopped reading about halfway through, and didn't pick it up for another six months, and then finished it. At that point, I thought, "Well, it's certainly very powerful, and it certainly does put you in a very strange space - one that you haven't ever been in before - but I can't see making it into a movie." I mean, it just didn't seem like there was a connection. In retrospect, though, everything seems obvious, and a lot of people thought it was an obvious match. The woman who sent it to me was a film journalist, and she said, "You should make this into a movie."