Visit the official web site for Crash.

Cast

     James Ballard...........................James Spader
     Dr. Helen Remington.....................Holly Hunter
     Vaughan.................................Elias Koteas
     Catherine Ballard......................Deborah Unger
     Gabrielle...........................Rosanna Arquette

Filmmakers

     Writer/Producer/Director.............David Cronenberg
     Executive Producers.....................Jeremy Thomas
                                             Robert Lantos
     Co-Executive Producers..................Andras Hamori
                                                Chris Auty
     Co-Producers.........................Stephane Reichel
                                        Marilyn Stonehouse
     Director of Photograp................Peter Suschitzky
     Production Designer.......................Carol Spier
     Editor....................................Ron Sanders
     Composer.................................Howard Shore
     Costume Designer....................Denise Cronenberg

In his adaptation of J.G. Ballard's seminal 1973 novel, David Cronenberg provides some startling answers to these questions. In so doing, he ventures even further into territory mapped out in his previous films, exploring the extremes of behavior, revealing how endlessly adaptable the human organism is, and how perverse.

The immediate subject matter of Crash is the strange lure of the auto collision, provoking as it does the human fascination with death and the tendency to eroticize danger. Most motorists will slow down to stare at the scene of a collision; they may feel their pulses quickening and become exquisitely aware of the fragility of their own bodies. The characters of Crash carry this awareness a step further, cherishing and nurturing it. For them, a car collision is a sexual turn-on, and a jolting life-force they come to crave.

Television commercial producer James Ballard (James Spader) and his wife Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) have constructed a baroque marital sex life that is emotionally detached and relies heavily on their shared knowledge of each other's adulterous affairs. When Ballard is in a near-fatal car accident with Dr. Helen Remington (Holly Hunter), he reawakens to the possibilities of his own body, and is drawn into an exploration of the links between danger, sex and death.

The Ballards and Dr. Remington become involved with Vaughan (Elias Koteas), a renegade scientist obsessed with the erotic power of the crash, as witnessed by his head-to-toe scars. Vaughan introduces them to a strange crash-survivor subculture, a de facto cult of which he is the high priest. In addition to watching test collision films, Vaughan and his cohorts stage re-enactments of famous collisions, the cars charging each other like gasoline-fueled matadors. Among Vaughan's acolytes is Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette), who sports the physical mementos of her accidents (scars, leg braces, a full-body support suit) like fetish gear. In various cars and on various highways, Dr. Remington and the Ballards are steered toward a sexuality that gains potency and meaning from its head-on confrontation with mortality – and the knowledge that mortality must ultimately win.

Crash is a complex and frightening look at where the predictability and innovations of modern life have led us, at how dull our over-sated senses have become. Like the book, the movie is a cautionary tale of how we might adapt to the environment that we have ourselves created, sterile and isolated from nature. And, like the book, Crash unfolds without moral judgment, presenting an unflinching vision of a modern wild kingdom, man-made of concrete and metal.

Cronenberg, who has received international acclaim for films like The Fly, Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, has said that he made Crash to find out why he was making it. "It's a dangerous film in many ways. It does violence to people's understanding of human relationships, it does violence to people's understanding of eroticism. If people find it disturbing, I think that's where the disturbing element is.

"But I think that's a primary function of art," he continues. "To do violence to the little cocoon that we sometimes find ourselves enveloped in."

Crash had its world premiere at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where it sparked considerable debate and ultimately received a Special Jury Prize "For Originality, For Daring, and For Audacity." Since then Crash has continued to be the subject of acclaim and controversy. It won five awards at the 1996 Genie Awards in Canada, including Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for David Cronenberg. Other Genie Awards went to Peter Suschitzky for Best Cinematography; Ron Sanders for Best Editing; and the team of Tom Bjelic, David Evans, Wayne Griffin, Johan Laing, Andy Malcom, Dale Sheldrake and John Smith for Best Sound Editing. In addition, Crash also picked up the Genie's Golden Reel Award as the highest-grossing Canadian film of the year.

Fine Line Features is proud to present Crash, written, produced and directed by David Cronenberg, based on J.G. Ballard's novel. Crash stars James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger and Rosanna Arquette. Executive produced by Jeremy Thomas for RPC and Robert Lantos for Alliance Communications Corporation.

"This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!"

— a reader at J.G. Ballard's British publisher, upon reading Crash

The reader's advice went unheeded and since its publication in 1973, Crash has acquired a substantial underground reputation as an artistically challenging, profoundly unsettling vision of the imminent future. Ballard is best known for his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun, which was made into an Academy Award-nominated film by Steven Spielberg. However, Ballard is a writer primarily of imaginative, highly literate science fiction; his work has been compared to Burroughs, Genet and Rimbaud.

Crash is a novel of ideas, one that requires patience as well as curiosity. When Cronenberg first started it, over ten years ago, he read half and then put it down for six months. "The book is unrelenting. It's as obsessive as the people in it are obsessive and their responses to everything are not nearly what you would consider normal. But they're not abnormal either," he continues. "It's so strange. It's just very disturbing on that level."

Though Cronenberg initially decided he would not try to film Crash, Ballard's novel nonetheless stayed with him. Much to his own surprise, the director found himself suggesting the project to Jeremy Thomas while they were in the midst of filming Naked Lunch. Replied Thomas, "It's unbelievable that you say that — I optioned the book when it was first published."

Five years after that initial conversation, Thomas and Lantos announced the production of Crash at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. Holly Hunter, James Spader and Rosanna Arquette had already signed on to do the film. Said Lantos at the time, "In the hands of David Cronenberg and with this extraordinary cast, it's safe to say that Crash will be unlike anything anyone has ever seen on film."

Crash concerns the strange, often shocking, responses of a small group of people to the mortality they have confronted in car crashes. The characters discover a new sexuality, a new vitality, in their scarred bodies and wrecked cars. "Being simplistic," says Holly Hunter, who plays Dr. Helen Remington, whose husband is killed in the crash with Ballard, "Crash is about people who transform a destructive force into a primeval, erotic event."

Implicit in Hunter's statement is the understanding that Crash is not a simple story, or a simple movie. Cronenberg compares Crash to Dead Ringers, his haunting, acclaimed 1987 film about twin gynecologists. "If you describe what Crash is about in terms of narrative, just as with Dead Ringers, you're not really getting what the movie is about. This is not a high concept movie, where the plot is the movie."

As with Naked Lunch, the legendary William Burroughs novel which Cronenberg transformed into an acclaimed movie, many people considered Crash to be unfilmable, and not just for its frank sexual content. "The sort of ideology underpinning Crash is very difficult to put across and I think that's the great achievement of David's film of Crash — that he's actually expressed all the ideas that were in the novel in visual form." says Ballard.

The images of the film reveal a great deal, literally and figuratively: The length of scar down the back of a woman's leg is reminiscent of the seam of a mesh stocking; cars move in patterns that suggest flirtation, foreplay and climax; flesh and metal intertwine in the film's opening image of a woman's naked breasts embracing a twin-engine plane.

Perhaps one of the more unnerving aspects of Crash is that the characters rarely have sex face to face. Cronenberg notes that the rear-entry and anal couplings convey important information about the characters' emotional state. "It expresses that element of disconnection. It's a question of 'how do you have sex when you're not quite having sex with each other?' It felt right, getting both the actors looking toward the camera and not at each other."

Crash is equally frank in its examination of the strange possibilities for sex and human relationships in the artificial landscape of the machine age. Of course, we live in the machine age; sex in cars is hardly anything new. So, does Crash take place now? Like earlier Cronenberg films such as Scanners and Shivers, Crash exists in its own place and time, a world that resembles the present, but given what unfolds, must be the future. This sense of dislocation is also characteristic of Ballard's brand of science fiction, Cronenberg remarks. "The conceit that underlies some of what is maybe difficult or baffling about Crash, the sci-fi-ness, comes from Ballard anticipating a future pathological psychology. It's developing now, but he anticipates it being even more developed in the future. He then brings it back to the past – now – and applies it as though it exists completely formed. So I have these characters who are exhibiting a psychology of the future."

The director continues, "These people are actively trying to create a new form of sexuality, of eroticism. They've all experienced car crashes which have somehow unleashed a kind of erotic imagery that surprises them, and they try to incorporate it into their lives." explains Cronenberg. He emphasizes that the sexuality in Crash, all of it, is completely consensual. "There are no innocent bystanders in this movie."

Hunter agrees that conventional standards of morality and righteous behavior are not germane to the characters of Crash, who are responding to very primitive impulses. She points out that they are also taking a very unusual stance towards death, that event that is so inextricably linked with sex. "Mortality is unhesitatingly approached rather than avoided. There is an urging on toward a more intimate stance with mortality, rather than a denial of, or retreat from, it."

Initiating the characters of Crash into their brave new world is the renegade scientist Vaughan, played by Elias Koteas. Vaughan is obsessed with the erotic power of the collision of man and metal. He preaches that the crash is "a liberation of sexual energy that mediates the sexuality of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form."

Vaughan haunts collision sites and hospital corridors, looking for converts. Observes Cronenberg, "He seeks out people who have been in accidents, as he himself has been, because he knows their experience has made them susceptible to change. Vaughan informally gathers his little group of survivors together to help shape their experiences and ensure they retain the new awareness gleaned in the crashes."

3,000 miles of highway helped Koteas access Vaughan's unique character when the actor drove himself from Los Angeles to Toronto prior to the start of filming. "The odyssey allowed me to separate from the people and things in my daily life. It helped me plunge into Vaughan's loneliness, his separateness." Koteas explains.

It is through the character of James Ballard, played by James Spader, that the audience comes to know more about Vaughan's netherworld. Cronenberg was impressed by Spader's response to the script. "He said that he was afraid of it, as well as being intrigued, terrified and mystified by it. But he absolutely wanted to do it. So I thought 'he's my kind of guy.'" The director also liked Spader's sense of humor. "He did want to know who else was going to be in Crash. He said, "After all, I do fuck everybody in the movie.' I thought, 'He's going to be fine.' And by God, he was more than fine."

Spader, who was on the set every day during the 10-week shoot, describes Ballard as "both an observer of the life that's whirling around him and a sponge in that he absorbs that world and allows it to become part of himself. He's the eyes of the movie and to a certain degree, he carries the mantle of narrator. It's interesting that the author Ballard has given the character his own name."

Ballard the author confirms that this is no coincidence. "I think Crash is, in a way, my most autobiographical novel, notwithstanding Empire of the Sun which was actually about my childhood in Shanghai. Crash is an autobiographical novel in the sense that it is about my inner life, my imaginative life. It is true to that interior life, not the life I have actually led. As a novelist, and as the character in the novel, I was exploring this strange hoodlum scientist Vaughan and these extraordinary women."

The women of Crash are indeed extraordinary (especially in terms of current cinema) fully in control of their sexuality and their bodies. "Every one of the actresses in the film triumphantly brings off this task of responding to this strange logic that's unfolding," marvels J.G. Ballard. "They have to strip themselves, not just literally or physically, and not just by exposing their own emotions during sexual excitements, but they have to expose their inner dreams of what feminine sexuality is going to be in this new order that arrives."

From the beginning, Catherine Ballard, played by Deborah Kara Unger, is every bit her husband's equal in sexual experimentation, an explorer in ankle straps. Cronenberg calls the Ballards "the archetypal post-nuclear, post-technology couple."

As for Helen Remington, the widowed doctor becomes involved with Vaughan even before Ballard. Cronenberg notes, "She has an accident that makes her completely vulnerable to Vaughan, but she never loses her sense of control. She's always doing it."

For Hunter, who had wanted to work with Cronenberg since Dead Ringers, Dr. Remington was an ideal role. "What's so interesting about Helen Remington is that you see her instantaneous transformation on screen. Once a character in this movie is in a crash, they enter a mysterious realm."

The most severely injured character in that realm is Gabrielle, played by Rosanna Arquette. Gabrielle wears a black leather and chrome full-body support suit, has leg braces and walks with a cane. Yet, as Cronenberg points out, "Gabrielle is crippled but very sexual, and very sexy, in her so-called disability. She is a crucial element in the film because there's a humor, wistfulness and sadness in her character that isn't in any of their characters in quite the same way."

"Each character is profoundly fragmented, figuratively and otherwise." Holly Hunter believes. "Parts and pieces of each person have been left behind somewhere, and each one seems to be only subconsciously aware of the loss."

Ultimately, Cronenberg thinks the characters of Crash are trying to piece themselves back together. The final sequence reveals a new tenderness between the Ballards as they attempt to achieve a kind of parity. The sequence is not in the book; Cronenberg added it himself, with the author's approval. "We all felt that something had not closed, and then I came up with that scene and everybody was delirious. Crash works in a very oblique way. You don't realize, until the last scene, that these two people are in love with each other and that the whole effort of the film has been for them to find a way, odd though it is, to come back together."

Certainly, Crash is a film like none we've seen before. As Ballard describes it, "Watching it for the first time is an immensely powerful and jolting experience. Don't see the film through sets of colored filters inscribed with all sorts of moral preconceptions," he advises. "Crash is a totally honest film. It's honest about our basic emotions and our basic imaginations."

Though Crash can hardly be categorized as an action picture, the numbers involved in orchestrating its complex precision driving sequences are staggering. More than 200 picture vehicles and over 60 stunt drivers were employed; over 18 nights of shooting, the car rig traveled a distance of nearly 1,000 miles on eight different segments of Toronto freeway which, end-to-end, totalled a mere 20 miles.

Great care was taken to replicate the experience of a crash as it actually occurs. "Usually with car crashes, you just line up two cars and let them hit," explains stunt coordinator Ted Hanlan. "In this film, it's the opposite. The single biggest consideration we had was not how fast we could go, but how slow we could go to guarantee enough damage but not too much."

"I wanted to convey the response, immediacy and intensity of the crash." Cronenberg explains. "I think we've achieved a look, feel and understanding of the cars and the motion of cars which is pretty unique without being very obvious, flamboyant or grotesque."

For the head-on crash of Spader's and Hunter's characters, Hanlan needed to achieve what he calls a "surgical hit" — enough impact to damage a car severely enough that the audience would believe a person could go through a windshield and be killed, but that two people who are seat-belted to their driver's seats could impact and survive. One car was piloted by remote control to hit the other, which was being pulled on a reverse cable. The total sudden impact was equivalent to a car hitting a brick wall at 60 miles an hour.

In the film, Vaughan drives the "hero car," a 1963 black Lincoln convertible like the one in which John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Because Vaughan's car becomes increasingly battered over the course of the film, the production required six vintage Lincolns: three for driving, one for smashing, one cut in half for studio shots and one converted into a pickup truck on which to rear mount the camera to capture driver and passenger POV's. Only three other vintage automobile makes were used in the film — a 1955 Porsche Spyder, a 1950 Ford Tudor and a 1966 Buick. In keeping with the sterile and the predictable lives of the characters, most of the cars shown in the film are the ordinary cars encountered in everyday life.

Twenty-five automobiles were demolished or pre-wrecked for crash aftermaths. While preparing a multi-car pileup sequence, set director Elinor Galbraith gained some first-hand consumer knowledge. "We discovered why everyone should drive a Volvo. To achieve a front end crash with a limo, we had to cut the bumper off its posts, because the Volvo refused to crumple."

Attention also had to be paid to the physical after-effects of crashes. Production designer Carol Spier studied books of casualties at the University of Toronto's medical library for Vaughan's collection of accident memorabilia. "It makes you realize how fragile the body is and how fragile cars are." She also encountered a Vaughan-esque photojournalist who covered accidents and who ultimately provided her with authentic crash photos.

Spier shared her bounty with prosthetics designer Stephan Dupuis, who studied forensic medicine photos to recreate accident victims' wounds. He notes that the wounds in the film are not nearly as shocking as the ones he saw in the photos. Dupuis also researched the medical treatment of scars. His task was to replicate the healing process authentically, and in continuity, as with Spader's intricate stitches and bruises. He took molds of the actors' faces in order to fashion gelatin prosthetic appliances colored to match the actors' skin. The various stages of injury were then sculpted onto the small gelatins. "This process took three steps, starting with the initial cuts and abrasions, moving on to the swelling and bruising, to the final scar tissue." Thanks to the gelatins, the edges of the "scars" melt down into the skin. "I don't think you can tell where the scar ends and the actor's real skin begins."

James Spader · James Ballard

James Spader has established himself as a versatile leading actor, creating unforgettable, charismatic roles. For his portrayal of the enigmatic Graham in Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape, Spader won the Best Actor Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1989. Most recently, he starred as a hitman in John Herzfeld's 2 days in the Valley opposite Danny Aiello.

In Roland Emmerich's science-fiction adventure Stargate, Spader starred opposite Kurt Russell and in Wolf, Mike Nichols' modern-day wolfman story, he starred opposite Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. Spader earned wide recognition for his performance opposite Susan Sarandon in Luis Mandoki's White Palace.

Spader's film career began with performances in such films as Pretty in Pink, Mannequin, Baby Boom, with Diane Keaton, Less Than Zero, with Robert Downey, Jr., Oliver Stone's Wall Street, and Rowdy Harrington's Jack's Back.

Additional credits include Curtis Hanson's psychological thriller Bad Influence, Phillip Haas' The Music of Chance with Mandy Patinkin, Mark Frost's Storyville, opposite Jason Robards and Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Nicholas Kazan's Dream Lover, and Herbert Ross' True Colors with John Cusack.

Born in Boston, Spader discovered acting while attending high school. After performing extensively in theater in Massachusetts, Spader moved to New York City to pursue his career where he studied at the Michael Chekov Studio and performed with the Actor's Studio.

Holly Hunter · Dr. Helen Remington

In 1993, Holly Hunter played the role of "Ada" in Jane Campion's The Piano, for which she won the Academy Award; the Golden Globe Award; the British Academy Award; the New York Film Critics Circle Award; the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award; the National Board of Review Award; and the Cannes Film Festival Award, all for Best Actress.

Her feature film credits also include Home For the Holidays; Copycat; The Firm (for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress;) Once Around; Always; Broadcast News (Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, New York Film Critics Circle Award, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award, the National Board of Review Award, the Berlin Film Festival Award - all for Best Actress;) and Raising Arizona, among others. Hunter recently completed filming A Life Less Ordinary for director Danny Boyle.

Hunter's television work includes HBO's "The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom," for which she won the Emmy Award for Best Actress, this role also garnered her a Golden Globe nomination in the Best Actress category. Hunter was awarded the Emmy for her role as Jane Roe in NBC's "Roe vs. Wade," and she also appeared in "A Gathering of Old Men."

Hunter made her Broadway debut in 1982 in Beth Henley's "Crimes of the Heart" and followed that with another Broadway play by Henley "The Wake of Jamey Foster." Other New York stage appearances include "The Miss Firecracker Contest;" "Battery;" "The Person I Once Was;" and "A Weekend Near Madison." Regionally, her theater credits include "A Doll's House;" "The Inspector General;" "A Lie of the Mind;" "Buried Child;" "Artichoke;" "Eden Court;" and "Ghost On Fire," among others.

Hunter also co-produced and starred in "Control Freaks" her sixth acting collaboration with playwright Beth Henley; and produced Ray Barry's "Mother's Son," all at The Met Theatre in Los Angeles. Recently, Hunter joined with seven other artists to found "The Loretta Theatre," a new performing company in Santa Monica.

Elias Koteas · Vaughan

Elias Koteas has appeared in several films by the renowned director Atom Egoyan, including Exotica, winner of the International Critics Prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. Koteas also received a nomination for Best Actor at Canada's Genie Awards. Among his many feature film credits are Francis Ford Coppola's Gardens of Stone and Tucker: The Man and His Dream and Some Kind of Wonderful. In addition, he has acted in the ABC miniseries "Onassis: The Richest Man in the World," HBO's "Sugartime" and TNT's "The Habitation of Dragons." A native of Montreal, Koteas entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1981, and joined the Actors Studio upon graduation.

Deborah Kara Unger · Catherine Ballard

Born in Vancouver, Deborah Kara Unger was the first Canadian accepted into the prestigious Australian National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney Australia. Upon graduation, she acted in the award winning television drama "Bangkok Hilton" with Nicole Kidman and Denholm Elliot. She made her feature film debut in the AFI nominated Prisoners of the Sun (Blood Oath), with Bryan Brown and Russell Crowe, followed by her critically acclaimed performance in Whispers in the Dark, with Alan Alda and Anabella Sciorra. Additional credits include David Lynch's Hotel Room as well as roles in the following upcoming films: No Way Home opposite Tim Roth, and Keys To Tulsa (Tornado) with James Spader, Eric Stoltz, and Mary Tyler Moore. She recently completed principal photography for David Fincher's The Game with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn.

Rosanna Arquette · Gabrielle

In her eighteen year career, Rosanna Arquette has made a mark in both independent and mainstream projects. Her most recent credits include Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and David Salle's Search and Destroy and the upcoming Gone Fishin'. She has worked with such directors as John Sayles (Baby It's You) and Martin Scorsese (After Hours, and the director's segment of New York Stories), and Lawrence Kasdan (Silverado). She received the British Academy Award for her work in Desperately Seeking Susan.

Arquette was nominated for an Emmy for her portrayal of "Nicole," murderer Gary Gilmore's jailbait girlfriend in the 1982 adaptation of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. She has also starred in the television movies "The Wrong Man," "Black Rainbow" and a remake of "Johnny Belinda."

David Cronenberg · Writer, Producer and Director

David Cronenberg's films have won him awards and recognition around the world. A true auteur, Cronenberg is represented by a uniquely personal body of work, films he wrote and directed: Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), Fast Company (1979), The Brood (1979), Scanners (1981), Videodrome (1983), The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988) and Naked Lunch (1991). He has also directed The Dead Zone (1984) and M. Butterfly (1993).

Cronenberg was born in Toronto on March 15, 1943 to a journalist father and pianist mother. He began writing and submitting science-fiction and fantasy stories to magazines at an early age. Although none were accepted, young Cronenberg received encouraging letters from editors that urged him to keep writing.

He entered the University of Toronto Science facility, but switched to English Language and Literature a year later, graduating in 1967. While at school, he became interested in film and produced two 16mm shorts, Transfer and From the Drain. By the end of the decade, he had shot two 35mm films, Stereo and Crimes of the Future. Those films introduced some of the themes and preoccupations that would characterize much of Cronenberg's later work: biological horror, sexual unease, over-arching technology.

Cronenberg made his first commercial feature film in 1975. Shivers (aka They Came From Within or The Parasite Murders) featured horror legend Barbara Steele and was a gory tale of marauding parasites. It became one of the fastest recouping movies in the history of Canadian film and has acquired a tidy cult since its release. Cronenberg's next film, Rabid, starred Marilyn Chambers and made $7 million on a production investment of just over half a million. The director's third effort, Fast Company was inspired by his own passion for cars and racing.

The Brood, starring Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar, was an artistic breakthrough for Cronenberg. The film was psychologically intense rather than action-oriented, with well-delineated characterizations and vivid imagery that caught the attention of many critics. Cronenberg broadened his audience with his fifth picture, Scanners, about the telepathic powers of an underground society. Variety listed Scanners as the number one box office film in North America on its opening week in 1981.

Cronenberg continued to explore the abuse of technology in Videodrome, which starred James Woods and Deborah Harry. Andy Warhol hailed the 1983 movie as "The Clockwork Orange of the 80s." The film delves into the clandestine operations of a secret underground organization that uses television as the ultimate weapon. Blurring the boundaries of reality and consciousness, the film is a high-tech, hallucinatory satire dealing with violence, technology, sexuality, and horror of the body.

The following year, Cronenberg released his adaptation of Stephen King's best-seller, The Dead Zone. As he had with James Woods in Videodrome, Cronenberg proved himself here to be an exceptional director of actors, drawing a remarkably moving performance from Christopher Walken as a man cursed with the ability to see into the future of those he touches. The Dead Zone earned several Edgar Allen Poe Award nominations in the U.S., as well as three prizes at the Avoriaz Film Festival.

Mel Brooks then approached Cronenberg to direct a remake of the 1958 Vincent Price film, The Fly. With co-writer Charles Edward Pogue, Cronenberg re-conceptualized the horror classic, telling the story of a scientist whose genes and molecules become fused with those of a common housefly during an experiment in matter transmission. Co-starring Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, The Fly was both a commercial and an artistic success, working as both a horror film and a love story. It won an Academy Award for Special Effects and a jury prize at the Avoriaz Film Festival. Cronenberg also acted in the film, playing a gynecologist in a terrifying fantasy sequence with Geena Davis.

Gynecology resurfaced in a most arresting fashion in Dead Ringers, Cronenberg's most naturalistic movie up to that point. The film starred Jeremy Irons in a bravura performance as identical twin doctors who increasingly assume one another's personalities and lives. The movie is one of Cronenberg's most stunning excursions into the darker side of human pathology, for which he received the Best Director Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Society.

In 1989, Cronenberg began writing the screenplay for his version of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. For artistic and practical reasons, the script was not a literal translation of Burroughs' hallucinatory classic. Cronenberg fused elements from Burroughs' fiction with details of the writer's life to create a meditation on the sometimes dangerous act of creation. Naked Lunch's incredible cast included Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands and Roy Scheider. The film won eight Genie Awards for 1991, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Cronenberg's screenplay was also judged the best of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle and the Boston Society of Film Critics.

Cronenberg's next project reunited him with his Dead Ringers star, Jeremy Irons, for the film adaptation of David Henry Hwang's award-winning play "M. Butterfly." Irons again played a man obsessed; this time he is a French diplomat so blinded by love for a Chinese diva that for 20 years he doesn't realize that his inamorata is a man. Based on a true story, M. Butterfly co-starred John Lone.

Cronenberg's work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, beginning in 1983 at the Toronto International Film Festival, and including tributes at the Edinburgh Festival, France's Metz Film Festival and at the Cinematheque Francaise. New York's Museum of the Moving Image held a retrospective of Cronenberg's films in 1992 to coincide with the release of Naked Lunch. The following year, Japan mounted an exhibition that included screenings of all Cronenberg's motion pictures, television films and commercials. In 1983, the Academy of Canadian Cinema published an anthology of critical essays about his work called The Shape of Rage — The Films of David Cronenberg; the book was updated in 1990 for distribution in Europe. In 1990, France bestowed upon the director its prestigious Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

Cronenberg has acted in a number of films over the years. He starred in Clive Barker's Nightbreed, and appeared in Gus Van Sant's To Die For, John Landis' Into the Night, and Trial By Jury with Armand Assante. He has also directed two docu-dramas for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation television series "Scales of Justice."

DAVID CRONENBERG FILMOGRAPHY

1975: SHIVERS (aka THEY CAME FROM WITHIN)
1976: RABID
1979: FAST COMPANY
1979: THE BROOD
1980: SCANNERS
1983: VIDEODROME
1984: THE DEAD ZONE
1986: THE FLY
1988: DEAD RINGERS
1991: NAKED LUNCH
1993: M. BUTTERFLY
1996: CRASH

Jeremy Thomas · Executive Producer

As an independent producer, Jeremy Thomas has chosen to work with talented, idiosyncratic directors on highly individual films. His early credits include Mad Dog Morgan and Jerzy Skolimowski's The Shout, which won the 1978 Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. He has produced three films by Nicolas Roeg: Bad Timing (A Sensual Obsession); Eureka and Insignificance, as well as the legendary Sex Pistols opus, The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, directed by Julien Temple. Among his other productions are director Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence and director Stephen Frears' first feature, The Hit.

In 1986, Thomas produced Bernardo Bertolucci's epic The Last Emporer. A commercial and artistic triumph, the film won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Thomas' relationship with the Italian director has continued through their subsequent films The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha and Stealing Beauty.

Thomas' first project with David Cronenberg was the 1992 film Naked Lunch. He served as executive producer on Volker Schlondorff's The Ogre and on Mark Peploe's adaptation of the Joseph Conrad novel, Victory.

Robert Lantos · Executive Producer

Robert Lantos is chairman and chief executive officer of Alliance Communications Corporation, whose recent productions include acclaimed films by Atom Egoyan (Exotica) and Patricia Rozema (When Night Is Falling). Other Alliance features include Never Talk To Strangers with Rebecca deMornay and Antonio Banderas; Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves; Leolo, directed by Jean Claude Lauzon; and Black Robe directed by Bruce Beresford.

Alliance has produced many television series, including the computer-animated cartoon "ReBoot"™ on ABC, "Due South" on CBS and "North of 60" on CBC. Among several made-for-television movies, Alliance has made "Sword of Gideon," which was broadcast on HBO and starred Rod Steiger; and the NBC film "Woman on the Run: The Lawrencia Bembenek Story" with Tatum O'Neal.

With his previous companies, Vivafilm and RSL Entertainment, Lantos produced such

feature films as In Praise of Older Women, and Joshua Then and Now, starring James Woods.

Andras Hamori · Co-Executive Producer

Andras Hamori is president of Alliance Pictures, a division of Alliance Communications Corporation. His producing credits at Alliance include Never Talk To Strangers with Rebecca deMornay and Antonio Banderas; The Gate and The Gate II; Nowhere To Hide, starring Amy Madigan; and the ABC television movie "God Bless The Child," which received the prestigious Humanitas Prize. As co-founder of Accent Entertainment Corporation, Hamori produced the television films "Daughter of Darkness," with the late Anthony Perkins; "Storm and Sorrow," starring Lori Singer; and "Mrs. Arris Goes to Paris," starring Angela Lansbury, Omar Sharif and Diana Rigg. In 1993, Hamori produced Mesmer, directed by Roger Spottiswoode and starring Alan Rickman, who won the Best Actor Award at the 1994 Montreal Film Festival. Hamori's production of Ildiko Enyedi's Magic Hunter was selected for the official competition at the 1994 Venice Film Festival.

Chris Auty · Co-Executive Producer

Formerly a film critic for the London magazine Time Out, Chris Auty launched a UK film distribution company in 1985 which handled films by directors such as Federico Fellini, Peter Greenaway, Wim Wender and Spike Lee. He joined Jeremy Thomas' Recorded Picture Company in 1991 as managing director, a post he continues to hold. In the past four years, RPC has produced or co-produced eight films, including Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha and Stealing Beauty, and Bob Rafelson's Blood and Wine, which Auty executive produced for the company.

Stephane Reichel · Co-Producer

A 20 year veteran of the film industry, Reichel has been senior vice-president of production at Alliance Communications Corporation. since 1992. He was the executive in charge of production for Alliance's feature film Johnny Mnemonic, and was executive producer for the television series "The Mighty Jungle" and "Adventures of the Black Stallion." Reichel acts as supervising producer for the TV series "North of 60," "Due South" and is executive producer for "ReBoot"™. Reichel produced the feature film Black Robe, which won the Canadian Genie Award for Best Film. Among his other feature film credits are Quest For Fire, Children of a Lesser God, and Popeye.

Marilyn Stonehouse · Co-Producer

Marilyn Stonehouse has worked as producer, production supervisor and production manager on numerous projects for over twenty-five years. She was production manager on David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly. Stonehouse is a member of the Director's Guild of Canada.

Peter Suschitzky · Director of Photography

Crash is Peter Suschitzky's fourth film for David Cronenberg, and the third for which he has been honored with a Genie Award for Best Cinematography. Suschitzky also won Genie Awards for his work on Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch, his first and second films for Cronenberg. Suschitzky also shot Cronenberg's M. Butterfly, and most recently was cinematographer on Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!

Suschitzky has served as cinematographer on numerous feature films, including Immortal Beloved, The Empire Strikes Back, as well as John Boorman's Where The Heart Is and Leo the Last. He gained early acclaim for his work on the cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Carol Spier · Production Designer

Carol Spier has designed ten of David Cronenberg's films, beginning with Fast Company and continuing through The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly. She has won two Genie Awards for Best Achievement in Art Direction, for Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch.

Spier recently completed work on Joe's Apartment in New York City (where her bug experience with Cronenberg no doubt served her well). She served as production designer on The Santa Clause, Canadian Bacon and Consenting Adults. She was art director on Agnes of God and The Believers, as well as the award-winning PBS series "Anne of Green Gables."

Ron Sanders · Editor

Ron Sanders' work on Crash, earned him the 1996 Genie Award for Best Editing. Prior to Crash, Sanders edited eight films for David Cronenberg: Fast Company, Scanners, Videodrome, The Dead Zone, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly. Sanders' other feature credits include Johnny Mnemonic, Firestarter and Perfectly Normal. On television, he has edited HBO's "A Month of Sundays," "The Park Is Mine," and episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" and "Phillip Marlow Private Eye."

Howard Shore · Composer

This is Howard Shore's eighth picture with David Cronenberg. Shore also composed the music for The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers (for which he won a Genie Award), Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly.

He has written scores for such diverse films as Philadelphia, Big, The Client, Ed Wood, Nobody's Fool, Mrs. Doubtfire and The Silence of the Lambs (British Academy Award nominee). He is also well-known for his work as the music director of "Saturday Night Live," from 1975 to 1980. Shore's most recent scores include David Fincher's Seven and Al Pacino's Looking for Richard.

Denise Cronenberg · Costume Designer

Denise Cronenberg created the costumes for four previous David Cronenberg films: The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly. Other credits include: Moonlight and Valentino, The Long Road Home, William Friedkin's The Guardian, HBO's "Sugartime," and the television movies "Friends At Last" and "Murder Ordained."

Deidre Bowen · Casting Director

Deidre Bowen has cast numerous feature films, as well as television movies, miniseries and regular series. For David Cronenberg, she cast The Fly, Dead Ringers, Naked Lunch and M. Butterfly. Among her other feature credits are: Dan Petrie's The Assistant; Carroll Ballard's Fly Away Home; Denys Arcand's Love & Human Remains; and François Girard's The Red Violin and Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. Selected television movies and miniseries include "We the Jury," "Kissinger," "Tek War" and "She's Special." Bowen cast the television series "La Femme Nikita" and "Traders." She was also casting advisor to the Canadian Film Centre from 1989 to 1995.

J.G. Ballard · Author

James Graham Ballard wrote Crash in 1973. He is widely acknowledged as one of science-fiction's preeminent writers, and one of modern literature's most distinctive voices. As British novelist Martin Amis wrote in the newspaper, The Observer, "All we know for certain is that the novels he will write could not be written, could not even be guessed at, by anyone else."

Few people have had the kind of formative experiences that Ballard had. He was born on November 15, 1930 in Shanghai, where his father was the manager of a subsidiary of a British textile manufacturer. Shanghai was, as Ballard put it in a 1982 interview, "one of the most extraordinary and bizarre places on earth, a place where anything went, completely without restraints." The city's large population of foreign nationals lived in luxury, in American-style houses with air-conditioning, refrigerators and approximately 10 English language radio stations to choose from. Ballard himself lived in a house with nine servants and a chauffeur-driven Packard. All of the Chinese servants spoke English.

The sheltered lifestyle of Shanghai's foreign nationals did not end completely with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. At home, Ballard saw men and women dancing in their finery. Venturing into the battlefields around Shanghai, he saw dead soldiers and horses in the canals. These extreme and stunning juxtapositions — elegance abutted by death — formed the crystal of Ballard's imagination and gave him a lasting appreciation of surrealist aesthetics. The drained swimming pools, deserted suburbs and empty highways of Shanghai became the inspiration for the devastated worlds of his fiction. "Prewar and wartime Shanghai was a huge surrealistic landscape," Ballard explains.

"A continuum of disorder," is how Ballard describes the five years leading up to his family's internment in a Japanese prison camp in 1942. However, he notes that his memories of the camp are not unpleasant, given that there were 400 or 500 children there to play with. Thanks to the "magic of childhood," he was untroubled by the exploding shells overhead.

This strange and remarkable period was the inspiration for Ballard's 1984 semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun. It was made into an Academy Award nominated film by Steven Spielberg, starring John Malkovich and Miranda Richardson.

The Ballard family returned to England in 1946. Ballard studied medicine at Cambridge (at one time he considered becoming a psychiatrist), but never practiced. While at Cambridge, he entered a story in the university's crime story competition; it won. After Cambridge, he studied English for a year at London University, but was kicked out. Ultimately, he ended up joining the Royal Air Force out of a desire to learn how to fly. When he was sent to the RAF training base in Canada, Ballard discovered racks of science fiction magazines in the airbase cafeteria: "I've never looked back!"

Ballard began writing short stories; they were published (the first in 1956) in progressive science-fiction magazines like New Worlds and Science Fantasy. Ballard had married in 1955 and had become a father; to earn more money he got work editing scientific journals. While working at Chemistry and Industry, he had access to mountains of scientific papers, which were to become a major source of interest and a great influence on his work.

He wrote his first novel The Wind From Nowhere on a two-week holiday in the early 1960s. That led to a tie-in with Berkley Books, who published short stories collected from his magazine work. His 1962 novel The Drowned World brought Ballard commercial success and critical recognition, which was confirmed by the reception of The Terminal Beach in 1964.

An astoundingly prolific writer, Ballard's novels include: The Drought, The Crystal World, The Atrocity Exhibition, High-Rise, The Unlimited Dream Company, Hello America, The Day of Creation and Running Wild. His 1984 novel Empire of the Sun won England's Guardian Fiction Prize and the James Tait Black Award. A sequel to that book, The Kindness of Women, was published in 1991. His latest novel is 1994's Rushing To Paradise, and he recently published A User's Guide to the Millennium, a collection of essays and reviews.

In addition to his novels, Ballard has published several collections of short stories. Among them: The Terminal Beach, Vermilion Sands, The Voices of Time, War Fever, and Low-Flying Aircraft.

Ballard has lived in Shepperton, outside of London, since he moved there with his family in 1960. His wife Mary died in 1964 and Ballard raised their three children, Bea, Fay and Jimmy, now in their 30s.

J.G. BALLARD BIBLIOGRAPHY/NOVELS

1962: THE DROWNED WORLD
1962: THE WIND FROM NOWHERE
1964: THE DROUGHT
1966: THE CRYSTAL WORLD
1970: THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION
1973: CRASH
1974: CONCRETE ISLAND
1975: HIGH-RISE
1979: THE UNLIMITED DREAM COMPANY
1981: HELLO AMERICA
1984: EMPIRE OF THE SUN
1987: THE DAY OF CREATION
1988: RUNNING WILD
1991: THE KINDNESS OF WOMEN
1994: RUSHING TO PARADISE

SHORT STORY/ESSAY COLLECTIONS

1962: THE VOICES OF TIME
1962: BILLENIUM
1963: PASSPORT TO ETERNITY
1964: THE TERMINAL BEACH
1967: THE IMPOSSIBLE MAN & OTHER STORIES
1967: THE DAY OF FOREVER
1967: OVERLOADED MAN
1967: THE DISASTER AREA
1971: VERMILION SANDS
1976: LOW-FLYING AIRCRAFT
1977: BEST OF J.G. BALLARD — STORIES
1980: THE VENUS HUNTERS
1982: MYTHS OF THE NEAR FUTURE
1988: MEMORIES OF THE SPACE AGE
1990: WAR FEVER
1996: A USER'S GUIDE TO THE MILLENNIUM (essays)

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