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MARCH 2015 JB Hi-Fi
the years and the end result
a modern Hollywood Gothic
tells the interconnected lives of a fading star Havana
Segrand (Julianne Moore), her sleazy New Age
therapist (John Cusack) and his two children: his
estranged daughter (Mia Wasikowska),
who has just become Moore’s PA,
and his teenage son (Evan Bird),
the monstrous star of a tween movie
franchise.
“I just think he’s a brilliant
writer and we have been looking
to get together to do something
for years,” says Cronenberg of
Wagner. “It’s a story that is really of
the moment we are living in, culturally,
pop-culturally, technologically and in every
way, which I really admire. I think that is Bruce’s
strength. He is not afraid.”
The director is also full of praise for the fearless
performance of Moore as the movie star haunted –
literally – by her actress mother and the realisation
that her career is on the slide.
According to Cronenberg, a lot of actors don’t like
playing actors, but he says Moore enthusiastically
embraced the role. “She’s created a kind of glorious
monster, an earthy, unashamed monster,” he
continues. “She was never intimidated by Havana
“I kind of had a subliminal desire not to do a
movie about movie making, never mind
Hollywood, because I am not really a
Hollywood filmmaker,” says director David
Cronenberg with considerable understatement of
his latest work Maps To The Stars, a dark and
wickedly funny take on La La Land.
Although he has had some modest
mainstream success over his long
career – horror hits like Scanners
and his oddly moving remake
of The Fly, the brooding crime
thriller A History Of Violence –
the visionary Canadian auteur has
largely pursued an independent
path with his twisted tales of
obsession, and physical and mental
decay.
However, Cronenberg has long been a fan
of novelist Bruce Wagner and his acidic tales of
Hollywood, so when he read his original screenplay
Maps To The Stars, he was immediately hooked.
The origins of the story go back to the 1990s
when Wagner - then a struggling actor/writer
working as a limo driver, not unlike Robert
Pattinson’s character in Maps to the Stars - began
a screenplay encapsulating his experience of
Hollywood. He continued to refine the story over
16
FAME GAME
Like Bruce Wagner, John Cusack is
from a showbiz family; in fact, the pair
actually first MET when they both
appeared in the 1986 teen comedy
One Crazy Summer.
So he is no stranger to the dynamics of the
Hollywood lifestyle and the challenge of coping
with fame while a teenager – something that
his screen son Evan Bird struggles to cope with
in Maps To The Stars.
However, Cusack admits that the current
obsession with celebrity has now reached a
whole new level. “Back when I was starting
out, things were different,” he recalls. “It never
seemed to be about who was the highest paid
or what films grossed over the weekend. People
weren’t that interested in stalking celebrities to
the level of what they had for breakfast or what
mean things they said to someone else.
“That kind of celebrity-obsessed culture
was only born 10, 15years ago. If you wanted
to know things about an actor, you would
look into his work, the films he had made -
the admiration was a reflection of an actor’s
work, not his status.”
and was completely unafraid. Once she had her hooks
into this character, she required just the slightest bit of
guidance here and there.”
Unlike the characters in Maps To The Stars,
Cronenberg will probably always remain something
of a Hollywood outsider. However, he nevertheless
understands its addictive power. “The gravitational
pull of Hollywood is incredible,” he says. “It is like an
incredibly dense planet with crushing gravity. And the
closer you get to it, the harder it is to escape from it.
That is exactly the key to the movie, the pull of LA
– and Hollywood in particular – on these characters.
It grabs them, it magnetises them, it sucks them in –
and they can’t escape.”
When he read his
original screenplay Maps
To The Stars, he was
immediately hooked
Visionary director David Cronenberg charts the seamy
underbelly of Tinseltown in the black comedy Maps To The Stars.
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