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

AH: But when you first started becoming enthusiastic about cars, what did you see as their erotic potential, if any?

DC: A car has always represented sexual freedom, nowhere more so than in North America. And certainly for me, as well. I mean, it wasn't any of the obvious Freudian things - you know, the thrusting power of a V-8. I don't think anybody cared about that. The point was that you had a mobile little house that you could do things in - that was the power of it.

AH: It's often where teenagers first encounter the opposite sex.

DC: Oh, listen - there's a whole generation of people spawned in the backseat of a '55 Ford.

AH: Since filming Crash, do you find any personal resonance with Ballard's peculiar fetishization of the car wreck and its resultant injuries?

DC: This was one of the things I found so brilliant about the book - it would suggest things to you that, on the surface, were absolutely repugnant and impossible, and, by the end of it, were just business as usual. You realize that you had these things in you all along, and that it was revealing parts of you that were there, but that you had never been able to recognize. Of course, that's one of the primary functions of art, and Crash did that to me.

So, by the time I was making the film, these things were understood. And it hasn't really changed since then. What has changed is people telling me about their responses to the film - how they came out of the theater and suddenly traffic was totally different for them, and how it changed their perception of their vulnerability in cars, their relationship to cars, the violence of cars. And that feeling everybody has had, that very few people will admit, that they would love to have crashed into somebody - either out of anger, out of curiosity, or just out of some other strange impulse. Always, of course, repressing it, or mostly.

AH: Narratively, Crash reminds me a bit of noir films like Double Indemnity (1944), in that no one is innocent, even at the beginning. The ending you wrote into Crash Inserts some positive potential into Ballard's and Catherine's apparent downward spiral, and it seems the film has become more about a jaded married couple rediscovering one another. Did you sense that in the book, or was it your own notion?

DC: I did sense that in the book, and I felt that I was just making it explicit. But I think the theme of the movie is a little more extreme. At the beginning, they're not so much jaded as exhausted and in despair. Because the old forms have not been working for some time, they've just been accepting that and going through the motions. But when Ballard has his epiphany induced by this car crash, they embark on a very exciting and dangerous, and, to me, very positive process, which is the voyage of reinventing everything. And that, of course, is one of the things that's very disturbing to some people about the movie, because there is no moral stance taken by the filmmaker vis-a-vis the people in the film. In almost all Hollywood films that pretend to take a moral stance, everybody knows that the filmmakers aren't righteously indignant about the subject matter. It's part of the narrative structure that the character should be righteously indignant about something. It's part of the story development, part of his character's development. It's not really a moral stance at all - it's sort of a moral posturing, really. And so, in a weird way - but I think, a very direct way - I'm being much more morally honest in my approach to the film. I'm saying, "I want these people to go through this and see where it takes them."