At the Movies with Governor Tom: Eastern Promises

Since this post concerns a David Cronenberg film, it's only fitting we kick it off with a disturbing image. Okay. There's this handsome Russian guy named Soyka getting a haircut in a London barbershop. It's a couple days before Christmas. The barber is this bald Russian guy named Azim. So there's Azim snipping away at Soyka's hair. The two of them make small talk, laugh at each other's jokes (while we read the subtitles). All seems perfectly mundane. One of the topics Azim brings up is his nephew Ekrem. We're not exactly sure why, but he keeps talking about how Ekrem seems weak and insecure. After a couple minutes of banter, into the barbershop walks Ekrem. Uncle Azim wastes no time in picking on the poor boy, who looks barely old enough to drink. It seems Azim is goading his nephew into doing something. Suddenly Soyka realizes what that something is. He tries to get up, but Azim keeps him pinned to the chair while young Ekrem uses a barber's razor to slit Soyka's throat. The camera does not turn away. Nothing is left to the imagination. We watch as Ekrem, making his first kill, struggles at first, then sinks the razor deep enough into the flesh to ensure Soyka's demise.

If you recognize that scene, then you've already seen Eastern Promises, director David Cronenberg's most recent film and his follow-up to 2005's A History of Violence. If you haven't seen Eastern Promises, don't worry. I haven't spoiled anything for you. That scene doesn't give away too much but does brace you for the next 90 minutes. I had already seen Eastern Promises when it originally came out three or so months ago. The main reason I saw it again last night was the promise of seeing David Cronenberg in person afterward for a Q&A. Ever since he made that remake of The Fly back in '86 with Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, I've made it a point to see everything Dave comes out with. You don't understand. The Fly is one of my all-time favorite movies. When it first came out on tape, I made a copy of it using the Beta and VHS machines my dad had in the living room. And then I would watch The Fly literally every day. I was in fifth grade at the time. Ten years of age. And I've been a Dave fan ever since, so the promise of finally seeing him in person was, in the words of Robert Palmer, simply irresistible.

Let me tell you a little more about Eastern Promises before I get to the Q&A. Again, don't worry, I won't give the good stuff away, but it's important you get at least a flavor of what to expect. This is especially important if you've never seen a David Cronenberg production, as he can be a bit bloody and in your face at times. Did you see A History of Violence? Then you know what I'm talking about.

After that poor schmo Soyka gets bumped off in the barber chair, we cut to this 14-year-old Russian gal named Tatiana wandering around London barefoot and nine months pregnant. When she walks into a pharmacy, she barely has enough life left to ask for help before she passes out on the shiny tiles, bleeding from the womb.

Her delivery at the hospital is where we meet our film's protagonist, a thirtysomething blonde named Anna (Naomi Watts). She works at the hospital as a midwife. While she saves the baby, she can't save poor Tatiana, who passes away just before midnight. Anna takes the baby home with her, as well as two of Tatiana's belongings. One is a business card for a Russian restaurant called Trans-Siberian. The other is a diary, written in Russian, which Tatiana had been keeping since the days before she emigrated to the U.K. Those two possessions are what catapult the innocent Anna--reeling from a recent breakup and living back at home with Ma, Uncle Stepan, and an unfulfilled nesting instinct--into the world of the Russian mafia.

When she goes to Trans-Siberian, she meets the head guy there, a very grandfatherly Russian man named Semyon, played by the inimitable Armin Mueller-Stahl. She very innocently asks if he's ever heard of a girl named Tatiana. Of course he denies it, and he also immediately recognizes Anna as a first-generation Russian. You see, Anna's full name is Anna Ivanovna Khitrova. Her pa, now dead, was an immigrant. Uncle Stepan was Pa's brother. While she's there, we are also introduced to Semyon's son Kirill (French actor Vincent Cassel from Ocean's 12, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, and several fine French flicks like Read My Lips) as well as a guy named Nikolai, the family driver and cleaner. And by cleaner, I mean that Nikolai is the one who has to dispose of all the corpses Semyon et al leave in their wake. Playing Nikolai is, you guessed it, Viggo Mortensen, Dave Cronenberg's leading man from A History of Violence. Semyon is awfully disturbed to hear that Tatiana had been keeping a diary, although he doesn't explain to Anna why he would care. Still, he cares, and he'd be very grateful if she handed the diary over to him for safe keeping. That way, he could messenger the little book to Tatiana's family back in Russia. Yeah right. Tell me another story.

Anna might've entered this world innocently, but that doesn't stop her from getting the creeps every time she's in Semyon's presence. No matter how paternal he tries to be and no matter how much borscht he tries to spoon-feed her (literally and figuratively), even if the borscht is like Dad used to make, Anna can't help feeling irked by the old codger. Thank God for Uncle Stepan. While he can be as disagreeable as hemorrhoids sometimes, he is family and he does want to help his niece. He translates enough of the diary to paint Anna a fairly stark picture of Tatiana's fate. Talk about innocent. You think Anna got in over her head? As we say back in Jersey, fuhgeddabout it. Tatiana had toughed out such a depressing world back in her motherland and arrived in London with hopes bright and fresh as an English heath in the spring after a drizzle. And then those hopes were dashed to shit in a Grade A shitty way. Hearing this only confirms for Anna what a jerk Semyon and his son Kirill are. As for Nikolai, he remains a mystery. He's practically inseparable from Kirill, which should make him a creep by default, right? Well, yes and no. Telling you too much about Nikolai would spoil a good half of the plot twists this flick's got to offer. Don't worry, though. By the end, you'll know what happened to Tatiana, who the father of her baby is, why Soyka was killed in the opening scene, and just how Nikolai figures into all this.

Now for the Q&A. The screening was held at the ArcLight Sherman Oaks, which is where I saw Persepolis four weeks ago. The guy sitting up front interviewing Dave was the same guy who intereviewed Marjane Satrapi: Scott Foundas from LA Weekly. One thing I should say right off the bat about Dave? He's hilarious. You'd never know it watching his flicks, as they can be a bit dark to say the least. But he's nothing like that. In his sixties now, his hair's all white and he talks with that nerdy kind of voice. He's like one of those guys in high school who has to make the bigger kids laugh lest they pick on him. I should know, I was sorta one of those very nerds. When he came out and took his seat on those fold-out director's chairs up front, he said he never used director's chairs on the set because they weren't good for the ol' back. Also, that bottle of water at his side must've been a Godsend. He could barely field one question before taking a sip.

Dave kicked things off by talking about how he got into this project in the usual way, with his agent sending him the script. Apparently his agent gets sore at him sometimes because Dave usually turns everything down. When the screenplay for Eastern Promises landed on his desk, it made him sit up and pause. The script is by Steven Knight, whose career got a jolt in the fall of 2003 with Dirty Pretty Things. If you haven't seen that, please do yourself a favor and chuck it on the ol' queue. Like Eastern Promises, it's set in a world within London that few people see, in this case the world of illegal immigrants so desperate not to be deported that they'll sell an internal organ or two for expedited naturalization. The main character is a Nigerian cab driver named Okwe. By day he drives cabs, by night he works the front desk at a hotel. When he does have time to sleep, he does so at the apartment of a conservative Muslim Turkish woman named Senay (pronounced shin-EYE). Okwe can't get his own place, you see, partly because he can't afford it and also because he's an illegal. Senay may be legal, but she sure as heck doesn't want to go back to Turkey. Letting Okwe bunk with her puts her at a lot of risk, but don't you know she's got a crush on him. The whole plot kicks off when Okwe, working that hotel desk one night, finds a human heart plugging up the toilet in one of the guest rooms. Things only get hairier from there. Anyway, see it. Playing Okwe was Englishman Chiwetel Ejiofor, whose career has blasted off since then: Serenity, Melinda and Melinda, Inside Man, Children of Men, Talk to Me, American Gangster. And playing Senay was French actress Audrey Tautou, most famous for playing the lead in Amelie. She also starred opposite Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code. Dirty Pretty Things was her first English-language role, but ironically her character wasn't French but Turkish. And she's absolutely brilliant.

Steven Knight also penned the script for last year's Amazing Grace, the biopic about William Wilberforce, played by Welshman Ioan Gruffud (Mr. Fantastic from the Fantastic Four flicks). Steve actually wrote Eastern Promises before Dirty Pretty Things, but it languished at BBC's development hell for years (yes, the Brits have a development hell that rivals Hollywood studios'). Dave took to the script and immediately thought of Viggo for the role of Nikolai. This got him excited because he and Viggo had become close pals making A History of Violence, and Dave wanted an excuse to work with him again. That's not to say he thought the script was perfect, however. It's quite common for a director to like a script and agree to do it and still make lots of changes. Dave made a couple of big ones. I won't give too much away if you haven't seen it, but suffice it to say that there's a pretty major plot twist at the end of the film involving Viggo's character. Well, in Steven Knight's original draft, that plot twist was revealed about halfway through the script. Also, the relationship between Viggo and Naomi Watts became, ahem, much more significant in the original draft, but Dave changed that as well. Thank God he made both of those changes or else this would have been a very different film, and not nearly as good.

Another aspect of the story that appealed to him was that it showed a part of London's multiculturalism. Coming from Toronto as he does, Dave is very aware of how a big city can be a mishmash of different cultures and how that mishmash invites pluses and minuses, one of the latter being the "exotic" criminals who show up and build nests in their new home towns. Apparently London really does have a Russian underworld that goes toe to toe with a Chechan underworld, and Dave liked how Steven Knight really milked that dynamic for all the drama he could.

One of the biggest challenges in realizing the story was that the four most prominent Russian characters in the film were played by non-Russian actors. You've got Viggo, who's half American and half Danish. You've got Vincent Cassel, who's French. Then there's Armin Mueller-Stahl, a German. And finally there's Polish actor (and sometime director) Jerzy Skolimowski as Naomi Watts' Uncle Stepan. Although it is interesting to note that Armin Mueller-Stahl is from a part of Germany that is now a part of Russia. Anyway, so all four of these guys had to learn at least some Russian and how to sound convincing when they spoke it. And it wasn't classroom Russian their characters spoke, but street Russian. Dave had two language coaches on the set at all times. The first was to make sure the actors sounded convincing when they spoke Russian, the other to help them sound convincing when they spoke English with Russian accents. Armin Mueller-Stahl had the roughest go. Apparently his tongue just couldn't wrap itself around the Russian "L" sound.

Speaking of Viggo being half Danish (his dad was from Denmark, Mom's a Yank), Dave talked about how multicultural Viggo is. Or at least multilingual. Dude spent the first 11 or so years of his life in Argentina, so his Spanish is perfect. He's also fluent in French and of course Danish and even speaks passable Swedish and Norwegian. Dave joked that sometimes it gets annoying seeing how easily Viggo can pass from one language to another. He said it was hilarious watching Viggo on a Danish talk show promoting Eastern Promises. The host of the show wanted Viggo to extinguish a cigarette on his tongue just like he does at one point in the film. Viggo promised to do it if the host would do it too. First, though, he explained to the host how to do it without suffering extreme agony. Then they each lit a ciggy and put them out on their tongues sans mishap. Bravo!

At any rate, apparently all the hard work by the two Russian coaches paid off. The most significant stamp of approval came from a Russian critic on YouTube called Purring Kitty. She's usually bored and/or irritated by non-Russian actors trying and failing to be Russian, such as Harrison Ford in K-19: The Widowmaker. But when she saw Eastern Promises, she couldn't stop raving about Viggo. Dave got a lot of satisfaction out of that, as he'd been dreading her reaction.

As for his methodology, Dave sort of goes against tradition in that he doesn't storyboard or rehearse with the actors at all. Like John Sayles, he's done 16 features now, and he's pretty much gotten comfortable with doing it his own way. That would include letting the actors inhabit their environment fully. He'd let them get into wardrobe and then tell the crew to get lost so it would just be him and the actors. The wardrobe was just as important, if not more so, than the sets. Shoes are very important, Dave said. The audience doesn't think about it because they're too busy following the story, but for an actor, shoes are everything. How an actor moves can say a lot about their character, and the kind of shoes an actor wears when in character of course directly influences the movement. For Eastern Promises, the watches worn by the main characters were also important. The poster advertising the film features Viggo's hands clasped together showing tattoo work as well as a big shiny watch sort of protruding from under the cuff. The watches in this film say a lot about the people who wear them. Kirill, for instance, wears a watch the size of a dinner plate. Dave even showed us his watch, which looked uncannily like the watch on the movie poster (propped on an easel right behind him). As for the tattoos adorning Viggo, Dave said they don't mean what you might think. One of the tattoos on the movie poster shows a setting/rising sun over water with the Russian word for "north." In this case, though, north is supposed to mean white supremacy. The cross on Viggo's chest has nothing to do with religion. It's about persecution. And all the church spire tattoos symbolize the prison time he's done.

Speaking of the actors, Dave said that one common misperception people have about movie making is that the director always meets the actors before production starts. That's almost never true. For instance, he'd never met Naomi Watts in his life until the first day of principal photography. If there hadn't been any chemistry between her and Viggo, he would've been doomed. The best he could do was watch all of her films ahead of time.

Someone in the audience wanted Dave to talk about how the theme of identity crops up in all of his films. If you've seen any of Dave's films, you'd know what this guy means. I mean really, take your pick: Dead Ringers, The Fly, Spider, M Butterfly, A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, any of them. Each in their own way deals with someone having identity issues. Elaborating on his fascination with this theme, Dave talked about how every morning when we wake up, we have to remind ourselves of who we are. He considers being human a very creative act that requires an enormous expenditure of energy. It's amazing to him how someone could craft a second complete identity to be assumed at any time, or how someone could completely shed an identity and take on a new one. One example of the latter would be Viggo's character from A History of Violence (Philly mob hitman Joey Cusack becoming nice fella Tom Stall).

Someone was also interested in knowing what, if any, input Dave had on the marketing of his films. First of all, it depends on the movie and especially on who is in charge of the marketing and distribution. For Eastern Promises, that role fell to Focus Features. What they did was come up with a whole array of posters from which Dave was invited to pick his favorite. That's when he picked the one with the clasped tattooed hands and the watch. One poster he talked about that was a definite no-no showed Viggo and Naomi Watts standing in front of some famous London landmark, like the Tower of London or Big Ben or something. Dave said such a poster would've been awful. He'd gone out of his way to show parts of London people didn't know about. The last thing he needed was a poster showing a part of London everyone knew about but which never made an appearance in the film.

At one point in the film there's a scene where Viggo fights a pair of ruffians. Much blood is spilled a la Cronenberg, with little left to the imagination. During the screening on this night, some chuckling could be heard in the audience when that scene took place. During the Q&A, someone asked Dave what he thought about people laughing at that scene and laughing at violence and gore in general. Dave said he didn't worry about it because laughter comes in all flavors. It doesn't always mean the person thinks something is funny. Personally, I thought the laughter at that particular scene I mentioned was more of a defense mechanism because the images are quite disturbing. Dave called that the laughter of nervousness.

This one twentysomething guy at the very front asked Dave about perpetuating stereotypes about Russians and Ukranians. In particular and ever since the Cold War ended, it was this young buck's opinion that Russians and Ukranians are always depicted in an unfavorable light. The men always seem like criminals, and the women always seem like prostitutes or abuse victims. Dave wasn't too worried about it. In fact, he had fun with the question. At first he was like: "Of course they're all criminals." He cited Vladimir Putin as being TIME's Man of the Year. "Would you want Putin to be your judge?" he said. Seriously, though, he said that obviously Eastern Promises wasn't trying to perpetuate any bad stereotypes. The waiter in Trans-Siberian wasn't a crook. The elderly women dining at the restaurant weren't crooks. At any rate, it wasn't an issue to him. Apparently the guy asking the question didn't think there'd been one instance of a film since the end of the Cold War wherein Russians or Ukranians were portrayed in a positive light. This made me very tempted to point out to him the 2005 film Everything Is Illuminated. Based on the novel of the same name, it's about a Jewish American guy (played by Viggo's Lord of the Rings costar Elijah Wood) traveling to Ukraine to find the gal who saved his grandpa during WWII. I didn't say anything, though. It would've made me look like a heckler or something, and this guy had already done enough heckling for one night.

And finally, would there be a sequel? Dave didn't dismiss the idea. He'd done so much research for Eastern Promises that it had been impossible to get it all into 90 minutes. That means he still has a ton of stuff he could use for a follow-up story. Plus, it would mean getting to work with Viggo again. As I said, they've become close pals. Even Focus Features would be behind him if he wanted to make a sequel. Man, with all that going for him, here's hoping.