...for nights on end last fall so he could make movie about people who are sexually aroused by car wrecks.

A driver picked me up around midnight under the Gardiner Expressway. A cop opened a barrier blocking an entrance, waved us through, and we drove up a ramp onto a dark, completely deserted stretch of highway. The Crash crew was set up near the Don River overpass, preparing to shoot the movie's climactic post-accident scene. Four wrecked cars were artfully strewn along the roadway, doors buckled, windshields smashed, engines crumpled. The pavement glittered with crushed glass and twisted metal. The centerpiece of the scene was a bus with a black Lincoln Continental jammed right into its side, tires sticking out, like a giant beetle pinned on it back. It was as if the two vehicles had died mating. Above us, the guard rail of the elevated east-bound lane was shredded, making it look like the Lincoln had torn through it and nose-dived into the bus.

"Welcome to my playground," said Cronenberg, who looked thrilled to be there. "It's beautiful, isn't it?" Well, yes. The set amounted to a vast art installation, a tableau of fastidious wreckage laid at the feet of the city. The whole scene has an eerie, post-apocalyptic glamour--the orange expressway lights reflected in the murk of the Don River; the constant screech of starlings, thousands of them nesting in the expressway's tattered Stonehenge pylons; the downtown skyline standing as bright as an open fridge in the background. A scene, you might say, from a Cronenberg movie.

By the time I saw Crash unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival last May, I was certainly primed for it. I had read the book (the coldly provocative cult novel written by J.G. Ballard in 1973). I'd also spent a couple of hours interviewing Cronenberg in Toronto. Even then, the movie came as a shock. It was like watching a foreign film from my own country, a brilliant but forbidding film about characters whose emotions are frozen in a hind of narcotic code, and who try to overcome a pathological sense of disconnection by literally ramming each other.

In Cannes, many of those who walked into Crash cold felt they had been blind-sided. It was an accident waiting to happen, a collision between an audience who has no idea what to expect and a director who had thrown the rules of the road out the window. It is still hard to say what happened at the point of impact. Premiering on the final Friday of the Cannes festival, Crash was the most keenly anticipated movie of the competition. Here was a highly respected auteur, making his first official appearance with a controversial film containing more sex scenes than any mainstream movie...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Take One
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