David Cronenberg and Robert Pattinson are out and about promoting Cosmopolis, which means they're spending a good amount of their time not just talking about their movie but also getting hit with KStew and superhero questions. But Cronenberg ain't having it, and in particular he does not appear to be a big Batman fan… at all.
When asked whether he would consider making a superhero movie, Cronenberg responded as follows: "I don't think [directors] are making [superhero movies] an elevated art form. I think it's still Batman running around in a stupid cape. I just don't think it's elevated. Christopher Nolan's best movie is Memento, and that is an interesting movie. I don't think his Batman movies are half as interesting though they're 20 million times the expense. What he is doing is some very interesting technical stuff, which, you know, he's shooting IMAX and in 3D. That's really tricky and difficult to do. I read about it in American Cinematography Magazine, and technically, that's all very interesting. The movie, to me, they're mostly boring."
They're probably already burning him in effigy on some comic book movie forum somewhere, but Cronenberg doesn't stop there. When asked if he thinks "the subject matter prohibits the elevated art form," the helmer points to Hollywood as part of the problem.
"Anybody who works in the studio system has got 20 studio people sitting on his head at every moment, and they have no respect, and there's no… it doesn't matter how successful you've been," he says. "And obviously Nolan has been very successful. He's got a lot of power, relatively speaking. But he doesn't really have power."
Certainly Cronenberg knows the industry, and you can be sure he's had some crappy interactions with studio suits at one time or another. But his next quote paints him as being biased against comics in general, which sounds an awful lot like "Get off my lawn you darn kids" talk. That's disappointing from the guy who made films like The Fly and Videodrome -- not to mention A History of Violence, an R-rated adaptation of a comic.
"But a superhero movie, by definition, you know, it's comic book," he says. "It's for kids. It's adolescent in its core. That has always been its appeal, and I think people who are saying, you know, 'Dark Knight Rises is, you know, supreme cinema art,' I don't think they know what the f**k they're talking about."
All that said, he ends the conversation with the following: "As an actor, I would play Batman."
Now that's something I would love to see.
Via Next Movie
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