“I’m not a celluloid freak. I firmly believe in the superiority of digital cinema…”
When, in 1996, it was released Crash, a film adaptation of the homonymous novel by JG Ballard directed by David Cronenberg (Toronto, 77 years old), who was familiar with the trajectory of both creators could not imagine a more consistent alliance. Writer and filmmaker seemed two sensibilities destined to meet in an electrifying frontal collision like the one that would unite the destinies of the protagonist of the novel, explicit alter ego by Ballard, and Vaughan, an enigmatic character obsessed by the sexual power released in traffic accidents and by the fetishistic fascination of the wounds produced in the obscene communion between flesh and metal. And yet, the Ballard and Cronenberg thing was not exactly love at first sight. “I had not read anything of his at the time he published the novel Crash. I knew who he was, but I had not approached his work ”, says the filmmaker in a telephone conversation with EL PAÍS from his home in Vancouver. “It was producer Jeremy Thomas who asked me to adapt the novel in the eighties. I started reading it and I didn’t like it at all, to the point that I gave up reading. I didn’t go into his weird and clinical style at all and told Jeremy I didn’t want to adapt it. The fact is that Thomas and I became friends, a few years passed and I resumed reading and, at that moment, I realized that Ballard’s work was brilliant, in a sense I managed to understand the novel in a way that had not achieved before. And then I told Jeremy that if he was still interested in producing it, I was willing to adapt it, “he explains.
Source: https://digismak.com/david-cronenberg-i-firmly-believe-in-the-superiority-of-digital-cinema-culture/