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CANNES, FRANCE: Kristen Stewart runs her hands through her peroxide blonde hair, looks to the ceiling and appears confused – in deep thought, perhaps – as she recalls the first David Cronenberg movie she ever watched. She admits she’s nervous.
“My heart is really going. Honestly, it’s pounding,” she says to a room full of journalists inside the Palais de Festival in Cannes. “It was Crash and I was probably far too young to watch it. I felt like I was going to get into trouble.”
Her new film Crimes Of The Future explores a time in the not-too-distant future where humans are learning to adapt to a synthetic environment and thus are using surgery to alter their biological makeup and produce new organs. The brilliant, cannot-keep-your-eyes-off-of-her Léa Seydoux stars as an avant-garde artist named Caprice who performs open surgery on her partner’s organs (the latter played by Viggo Mortensen) to an audience.
Stewart is in the role of Timlin, a hyper-enthusiastic underground investigator from the National Organ Registry who obsessively tracks the artist’s movements. To her, the duo are the key to the next phase of human evolution, and indeed the next faze of sensuality and sex. There’s many scenes where the characters, including Timlin, are turned on by the poking about and removal of someone’s internal organs. Yes, surgery is the new sex.
Here is a clip from the movie:
It’s obscure and gory and weird – Mortensen’s character, Tenser, literally sleeps in a womb-like bed suspended in the air – and Stewart is well aware that a Cronenberg film isn’t for everybody. if fact, at its premiere here in Cannes, a number of people walked out, even though it got a seven-minute standing ovation at the end.
“I know some people say [David Cronenberg’s] films are difficult to watch,” Stewart says, who is wearing a red tweed CHANEL jumpsuit. “Every single gaping, bleeding, pulsating image – every bruise in his movies – it makes my mouth open. Like I want to lean towards it, it never repulses me ever. Everything about what [David] does – and this could be dead wrong – but the way I feel it is through a really visceral desire. That’s the only we’re alive. It’s real pleasure sex. It’s so honest in the way that it allows you to zoom out on the world we live in, and that’s hard to do sometimes.”
“I spoke to [David] on the phone before we decided… or whatever, before he decided to put me in his movie, miraculously,” she continues, looking down nervously and getting her words muddled. “And I was like, ‘I have no idea what this movie is about but I’m so curious to be making it with you and figuring it out.”
“And I’m sure you know what it’s about,” she adds, gesturing to Cronenberg. “But all the actors spent every single day after work being like, ‘What are we doing?’”
The room erupts into laughter, with a collective understanding that most people at the premiere the evening before found this film a little strange. But strange doesn’t mean it was bad.
“But then I watched the movie last night and it’s so crystal clear to me; it’s so exposing. I love [David’s] movies.”
The legend director – who actually wrote this script “in 1998, 99” but failed to get it financed at the time – calls Crimes Of The Future a “meditation on human evolution.” “Specifically the ways in which we have had to take control of the process because we have created such powerful environments that did not exist previously,” he writes in a director’s statement to press.
“At this critical junction in human history, one wonders – can the human body evolve to solve problems we have created? Can the human body evolve a process to digest plastics and artificial materials not only as part of a solution to the climate crisis, but also, to grow, thrive, and survive?”
The man raises some good questions.
More on Stewart and Seydoux’s red carpet looks from the Crimes Of The Future premiere here.
