STACK NZ Mar #60

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FEATURE

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Visionary director David Cronenberg charts the seamy underbelly of Tinseltown in the black comedy Maps To The Stars .

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.”

• Maps To The Stars is released on March 25

“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

the years and the end result is a modern Hollywood Gothic that 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

wickedly funny take on La La Land. Although he has had some modest mainstream success over his long career – horror hits like Scanners

When he read his original screenplay Maps

and his oddly moving remake of The Fly , the brooding crime thriller A History Of Violence –

To The Stars , he was immediately hooked

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

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