Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with a little report on the David Cronenberg panel at Comic-Con where he discussed A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE with screenwriter Josh Olson.

This won't be a big report as Cronenberg was fairly adamant at keeping discussion about anything more than the first act under wraps. They did show a clip from the film, which I'll get in to in a minute.

Cronenberg arrived onstage to great applause. It was actually the most packed panel I've been to so far, although it seemed that they had to post sentry guards to keep people from storming the "Closed due to capacity" doors for the Bruce Campbell Spotlight right before Cronenberg's panel.

Screenwriter Josh Olson came out and for a couple minutes geeked out on Cronenberg. He was totally one of us, still almost disbelieving that a project of his was directed by David Cronenberg. He actually said the studio was fucking with him when they first told him Cronenberg was interested in the project, taking that news as a joke when they really got some studio hack for the film.

TIDBITS:

-Budget was $32 million, the biggest budget Cronenberg has ever worked with.

-Cronenberg didn't know that A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE was based on a graphic novel until he was deep into preproduction. He thought it was an original script.

-The film is radically different (barring the first 15 minutes) than the graphic novel upon which it is based. I'm actually surprised there wasn't any vocal disapproval of this bomb dropped... guess it shows the amount of respect Cronenberg has with the fan community.

-Cronenberg never rehearses his actors, nor does he storyboard. He prefers to give the actors as much freedom as possible to make their characters their own. He feels that storyboarding takes away one of the actors' biggest tools: his body, that it only leaves the actor free to say the dialogue differently.

-Howard Shore's score for the end credits of A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is "to die for," according to Cronenberg.

-Cronenberg's next project was to be a movie called PAINKILLERS, a script he wrote 5 years ago that he recently tried to breath new life in to, however it didn't come together for him. So, currently he's movie-less.

-THE FLY DVD has the deleted scenes including the "infamous cat-monkey scene." He said the FLY SE DVD is great, the documentary apparently incredible.

CLIP:

The clip was the entire hold-up scene from the trailer, the event that sets off the whole story. There's a young guy and an older guy that decide they need some cash, so they decide to stick up poor Viggo's little diner in Buttfuck, Nowhere USA. Big mistake.

This whole scene is cleanly shot, however it comes off extremely disturbing. The younger guy takes Viggo's wife (I think) who is a waitress and is told to make an example out of her. He held his hand against the terrified girl's mouth to silence her screams. When he takes his hand away, he wipes the spittle on her front, over her breasts, then smells his hand. This isn't done sexually, but it felt that this poor woman was more violated than if she had been raped on-screen. I don't know how Cronenberg did it, but it was really disturbing.

Coffee pot is smashed, people get shot and Viggo gets a knife through the foot shortly before he gruesomely head-shots the knife wielder. There's a great cut-away to show the bad-guy's jaw exposed, the exit wound from the headshot.

This got a cheer from the crowd and when the lights came back up Cronenberg said, "I think we have a special audience here."

We were also told that there are similar scenes of such disturbing imagery in the film.

It seems that everyone and their mother has seen this and I'm dying to catch it. David Poland, moderating the panel, seemed hellbent on giving away plot points, but luckily we didn't get too much thanks mainly to the efforts of Olson and Cronenberg.

I was lucky enough to spend about 15 minutes informally talking to the master himself after the Con closed and he was genuinely awesome. We talked mainly about Oliver Reed and how they worked together on THE BROOD. Apparently despite Reed's reputation for being a drunkard and lunatic (he even got arrested for prolongingly exposing himself at a restaurant the first day he arrived in Canada to shoot) he was purely a professional on the set, taking Cronenberg, the script and the movie very seriously.

He was later told that Reed will act that way if he truly respects the director and the project. If he doesn't, then he lives up to his reputation. Cronenberg took that as an honor and great compliment to him that Reed worked so professionally with him.

That's it on the Cronenberg panel. I'll be back with tons of goodies. Tomorrow is V FOR VENDETTA, HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE, CARS, SKY HIGH, FOUNTAIN and more. Thanks to Kraken for taking the pics, thanks to Gordon Paddison for the meeting and thanks to David Cronenberg for entertaining a rabid fan.

Be back tomorrow!

-Quint