Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux & David Cronenberg Break Down 'Crimes Of The Future' Surgery Scene

And I wasn't being too difficult.

I wasn't like doing a method actor.

I said, does anybody have a knife?

I need, I need to feel it.

And I was certainly willing to.

Yeah, he was.

In fact, you suggested, you said I do have,

and he brought out an array of scalpels,

and then said do you want to do a little?

I said, no.

He's lying as usual.

[Viggo laughing]

It's the basis of our relationship.

Hello, my name is Viggo.

David Cronenberg.

Lea Seydoux.

[David] And this is Notes on a Scene.

[suspenseful music]

[Lea] I remember that this was one of the first scenes

that we shot, I think.

[David] Yes.

I kind of understood the under meaning of it,

which is surgery is the new sex.

Oh my God. [Lea laughing]

I wish I had known that before.

Yeah.

So for me it was, actually, it's like a sex scene.

It's sort of suggested in the script

but also you can see the way that Lea is dressed.

She's in a very sort of subdued clothes before this,

but suddenly she's being a performer here,

and it's very sexy outfit, and she is seething with passion.

And this is the idea that surgery is the new sex

is for real in this world.

[suspenseful music]

[machinery whirring]

At this point, we're looking at an actual device

that we created, this sarcophagus called a SARK.

It's meant to be an autopsy module

that was an originally designed to do autopsies,

but it's now used for this performance artist,

played by Viggo.

The machinery in the movie is basically very organic.

The whole SARK unit, it's really, in some ways,

the star of the movie,

aside from these two, you know.

I made sure that I had a nice wide shot of it

and moving around it to get the textures,

which are very insect-like, or let's say lobster-like.

And you were concerned about the fact

that you weren't gonna be able to make the actual incisions

in my body.

It was disappointing, right?

That's correct.

So we knew that we were gonna have to do

a lot of VFX.

And right here, that plate that sinks and separates

and reveals Viggo's torso,

that is totally CG.

Tricky to get the right perspective,

the right blurriness of focus, and so on.

These dissection tool arms are also totally VFX.

We did build these and in other scenes they are puppeteered,

and they're physically puppeteered.

[haunting music]

[machinery whirring]

We shouldn't forget about the music,

because Howard Shore's music is so complex,

and adds a whole other layer of discourse to any scene.

If we look at the scene like this,

it's sort of weirdly peaceful,

but if you put the music on it,

it's very dynamic and dangerous and strange.

And the music really propels this scene in a way

that if you take the music off you don't,

it's a completely different scene.

Howard and I talked about the music being a sound effect.

I want the audience to not know

whether they're hearing a sound effect or music.

Are they hearing ambient sounds

from the city that we can't see

or sounds coming from the machine as it operates?

Or is it music?

You can't tell.

It's like an undercurrent.

Yeah, it's kind of ambience and undercurrent.

It's very disturbing, but also very provocative

and sensual at the same time.

Body is reality is a kind of mantra of the movie actually,

and this is a key scene making the audience

understand what that means.

[haunting music]

[machinery whirring]

She is controlling the module using this device

that's attached here.

In other words, she's playing it,

and she's operating all of these things

that you're about to see.

Even that module,

the lights on it and so on were CG after the fact.

We didn't build it to be electronically active.

It's just a kind of a spongy thing

that she, Lea, has to make it come alive

by playing it like an organ.

It needed to be central.

And because it's also very technical,

I had to imagine, of course,

because we, you did it in post production.

Yes, it was a basic design parameter of the movie.

And there are other machines

that are not really machine-like,

they're very organic, but they operate like machines.

We have a, what we call the Orchid Bed,

and we have the chairs, the Breakfaster Chairs,

which look very skeletal.

And it's all integrated.

This is what industrial design has been left with

in this sort of decaying world.

[haunting music] [machine whirring]

Now we did build a torso of Viggo

that was a very, you know, silicone.

It was very realistic,

and thought that we might be doing the surgery on that,

but we discovered that it could work

using Viggo's actual body.

We would then see him breathing

while the surgery was happening,

which, of course, would make it a lot more realistic

and was much better than using this inert torso.

So the surgery here though is a hundred percent CG.

I think the arms here are actually physical puppets

that were operated by rods,

and then we later took the rods out in post,

but the incision is CG.

And it was a question of finding the rhythm of it,

the depth of it, the blood, how much blood.

The blood was added, of course.

[haunting music]

[machinery whirring]

And now Viggo's character is acting not as you would expect,

but actually in a kind of erotic ecstasy.

And this is where we get the understanding

that we are seeing sex in public that happens to be surgery.

And so the connection between Lea's character

and Viggo's is meant to be kind of surgery sex.

I mean, it's a kind of an inversion of, well,

I don't know. I penetrate him.

I've heard of normal sex. [Lea laughing]

Deeply.

I don't really know what that is, but anyway.

[haunting music] [machinery whirring]

So we did have the arms actually pulling,

this was, we did create this torso with the internal organs,

and, at this point, the arms that are operating are puppets.

Well, we didn't talk a lot about it.

And the only thing I really asked, I said, it's pleasurable?

And he said, yes.

And I said, how much pleasure am I feeling, you know?

And he said, there is no limit.

[David and Lea laughing]

Did I say that?

Yes.

I was brilliant to say that.

[Viggo laughing]

[haunting music] [Lea breathing heavily]

It gives me two things to have artists

as central characters.

It gives me a chance to talk about art

from a perspective that maybe is not obvious or common,

but, at the same time, it allows me not to make a movie

about movie making, which would bore me totally.

So the performance artists here are the avatar,

the template of any artist who is passionate and aggressive

and ambitious, opening himself up, opening themselves up,

completely exposing themselves,

their most intimate inner workings,

offering them to an audience

which makes them incredibly vulnerable to rejection

to misunderstanding, to anger, and it basically,

therefore, is the model of what an artist is.

And I can be talking about that at the same time

as talking about the evolution of the body and sexuality.

So it gives me a couple of levels to be working on

at the same time.

[haunting music]

[candy wrapper crinkling]

And now we have Scott Speedman, who's eating a bar, which-

Synth bar.

That synth bar is very crucial.

I'm so excited to make that mark.

[Lea and Viggo laughing]

It actually seems to be an odd thing.

Why is this character eating a chocolate bar

in the middle of this surgery?

Is it significant?

Well, it turns out to be very significant,

because it's a bar that would be toxic

to a normal human being.

But to those who have started to transition

into an evolved human

who can actually process toxic materials like plastic,

it becomes their food and their sort of rebellion,

to suggest that this is a society

in which there's a kind of combination

of radical modern technology,

but the basis of society has really started to crumble.

And there's kind of really old tech that's left.

There are no cell phones, for example.

There are no cars in the movie,

and yet you have something as weirdly sophisticated as this,

which if you play it, you know, you can see that

that would be rather a difficult thing to actually create

that she's controlling it.

Is it wifi?

We don't know exactly how it's working,

but we get the feeling

that society has started to crumble in a major way,

and part of that is expressed through old technology

being the only kind of technology that continues to work.

[haunting music]

Now we are seeing the removal of an organ.

Now, the idea is that what Viggo's character is doing

is creating new organs in his body spontaneously.

He doesn't think he's controlling them,

and they're being removed after being tattooed

by Lea's character.

So the idea is that these organs are considered

to be dangerous in this new society,

because they suggest the evolution

of a new kind of human being

that might be not actually human.

And so to make sure they keep track of it,

we have the National Organ Registry,

and part of that is tattooing these organs

so that they can be identified and classified.

And it's really part of a government trying to keep control

of some strange things that are happening in the population.

But for these two,

it also becomes part of their performance art.

And the tattooing becomes an artistic statement.

These organs represent kind of weird internal organ

rebellion against normality.

Just the fact that people are deciding what to do

with their own bodies-

And that they are in control of it,

and they're deciding whether to remove these organs

or allow them to continue to grow.

And of course it has, strangely and sadly,

has huge political repercussions right now.

When I wrote it 20 years ago, I wasn't thinking

of that specifically, but this is always a go round

about who controls the bodies of the citizens.

You know, who controls women's bodies,

who controls the bodies of transgender people.

You know, it's like, are you allowed to do that?

Can the government actually tell you what to do

with your body or not,

even if it doesn't affect anybody else?

It becomes a kind of a hot button.

So this is a big deal.

The audience is gasping.

They're excited.

Viggo is in ecstasy because finally, you know,

this is the apotheosis of his creativity.

[machinery whirring]

I don't make a movie with an agenda.

I'm really suggesting possibilities

and things that I find interesting and complex

and maybe disturbing.

Just saying, these are strange, interesting things

that I've thought.

I'm making it into a narrative.

Then I'm inviting you to come along with that

and see how you react.

I mean, you might not have the same reaction

to these ideas and images as I did,

and that's perfectly okay too.

I think all art is political innately,

because all art comes from a very specific moment

in culture and time and intellect.

I don't mean it's political in the sense of, you know,

right wing/left wing, but sometimes those things do overlap,

and suddenly something emerges as being significant

when it was never really intended that specifically.

So, that happens.

And this is basically the relationship that we've had

with each other, frankly.

[Lea laughing]

Although it is looking very familiar, right?

So that's interesting.

You can continue now.

[crew laughing] [David and Lea laughing]