Brandon Cronenberg On “Building A Language Of The Hallucinatory” in ‘Possessor: Uncut’

It’s the perfect crime. With the aid of nefarious-looking equipment, an assassin trained for expert mental acuity can remotely seize control of a patsy’s mind and use their body to carry out the hit, leaving nothing to connect the real culprit to the job. The new film Possessor (aka Possessor Uncut) follows the icy-veined Tasya Vos (Andrea Riseborough), one such puppeteer fulfilling a contract gig trickier than she anticipated. She sneaks into the brain of the unwitting Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott) with plans to shoot the guy’s prospective father-in-law, only he’s not so easily stuffed down in his own consciousness. So begins a battle of wills represented in stunning, delirious aesthetic terms, with reality distorting itself into frightful new shapes as the divisions between their selves start to blur. The human face has never been quite so malleable, stretching and peeling and imploding in haunting displays of grotesquerie.

We have Brandon Cronenberg to thank for all the impending nightmares. Reared at the intersection of sci-fi and horror (yes, of the Toronto Cronenbergs, son of David), he’s spent his working life interrogating questions of the physical form and its limits, with futuristic circumstances under which our own flesh and blood can turn on us. His 2012 feature debut Antiviral imagined a world in which ordinary citizens pay to be infected with celebrities’ sicknesses — as of last month, an eerily prescient concept — and now he’s doubled down on his fascinations with deterioration and reconstruction. As it just so happens, the first a person notices when chatting with the guy is his eyebrow piercing, a fitting fusion of skin and metal.

Cronenberg got on Zoom with Decider from his home quarantine in Canada to sort through the particulars of this twisty, twisted film. From the prestidigitation of his all-practical-effects approach to hassles with the ratings board, it’s been a bloody, viscera-strewn labor of love.

DECIDER: A lot of what I think makes this movie interesting — the visual abstraction, the mental interiority, the whole cerebral element — must have made it difficult to convey in the early stages. Was it a hard sell, getting this financed and made?

BRANDON CRONENBERG: It all happened very slowly. Took a good while to get it made, and part of that was the financing. There’s a certain kind of straightforward sci-fi/thriller aspect to the thing which makes it digestible to people on some level, but at the same time, it was also obvious that you couldn’t communicate in a script what we had planned for the actual film. So much of that only came through experimentation with my cinematographer Karim Hussain and the effects artist Dan Martin. It’s very visual, and a lot of what’s worthwhile about the film — if there’s anything worthwhile about it — isn’t in the basic narrative. It’s all in the execution.

In that case, what’s the script look like?

To be honest, most of it is a series of paragraphs that are relatively short and vaguely allude to nightmarish imagery. Pulsating, deforming, and so on. Among my close collaborators, that’s a shorthand for “we’ll figure that out later through trial and error.” Process is so much of it for us. Over the years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time with Karim just playing with camera effects, discovering techniques through happy accidents and building a language of the hallucinatory. There’s no way to write that, and that’s what I like about practical effects: you get to stumble upon things through process, and that’s inherent to what I want to do, from a filmmaking perspective.

Talking technical aspects, how did you start to conceive of the design and style for the machinery and equipment in the film?

In the beginning, I was looking at real neuroscience quite a bit, experiments done in the ’50s and ’60s by this one doctor Jose Delgado, but also more recent technology like BrainGate and other brain-machine interfaces. When we started talking, the early designs had a much more pragmatic look. It’s kind of funny — people say it looks very retro, but when you look at real neuroscience tech now, it looks even more retro. It’s so prototypical, all physical, wires everywhere. It’s designed totally for function. No casing. It doesn’t look like Apple, doesn’t look like Black Mirror, because it isn’t meant to be a consumer product. The only thing is that, at a certain point of the process, some aspects weren’t interesting enough visually. The helmet she wears during the procedure, for instance, it’s such a central image and needed something more striking than the real-world equivalent, which was almost too mundane. Toward the end of development, we shifted that one into somewhere slightly more fantastical.

You mentioned practical effects. On a complicated shot like the melting-and-reforming of the body, how much of that happens in camera, and how much of it is digital augmentation after the fact in post-production?

Oh, it’s one hundred percent practical. No CGI in that sequence at all. It was a combination of makeup effects devised by Dan Martin, melting wax torsos that were very well-painted, some camera trickery, video feedback, lots of tricks. But nothing digital!

What would you say was the most involved undertaking, of all the surreal things we see onscreen? Was there a major challenge?

I’m not sure, to be honest. To me, that’s the fun stuff. I guess it’s all challenging, but it never feels like a problem. The things that feel like problems to me are more like spending a long time waiting for your financing to come together because the film hangs in the balance. That’s just normal independent filmmaking stuff, nothing special or unique to me. The unusual challenging aspects of this film were the most enjoyable.

One point of clarification on something: the film’s being released as Possessor Uncut, and there’s a title card at the top stating that it hasn’t been modified from its original version. Is there reason for us to believe it would’ve been? What’s going on there?

This is the unrated director’s cut, the complete film. There does exist an R-rated cut that’s slightly toned down to achieve that rating. Fortunately, I’ve had a lot of support from our distributors and producers in pushing the complete cut as the definitive version of the film. But some places, some platforms, they won’t accept an unrated version, so you’ll see the R-rated cut getting out there over time. If you’re picking up the Blu-ray at Wal-Mart, for example. Some stores have a policy, regulations about that kind of thing.

In terms of graphic imagery, were there things you had to fight for to keep in your cut? Was there anything you couldn’t negotiate for?

Surprisingly, by the end of it, everybody just let me do what I wanted. [Laughs.] I don’t know why! In development, there were a lot of discussions, and there’s always a fear around content pertaining to penises or violence. You talk through what’ll be okay, but once we started shooting, everyone seemed happy with the footage we were getting. Lot of support from producers, across the board, it just seemed like everything was clicking. I really didn’t have to do much fighting.

If you start rooting around for metaphorical subtext, the premise of this movie lends itself to the actor-director relationship, the way Tasya and her supervisor Girder work together. To what extent is this a personal film for you?

It’s a personal film, but not from a directing/acting standpoint. Though what you’re saying, I definitely spoke about that with Andrea, this idea of a real-world equivalent to possessing another person. It’s a very rich analogy for acting, so that was helpful for her to draw from. There was an element of a drone pilot combatting PTSD in there as well. On a personal level for me, though? At the start of writing, I was going through a bit of a strange time, a lot was in flux, and I was finding myself waking up in the middle of the night, feeling that I was sitting up into someone’s life. I wanted to construct a character that can operate in that context. I thought of this as a film about someone who may or may not be an imposter in their own life. This was a way of talking about how we create narratives and characters in order to function.

This film has one of the more memorable sex scenes in recent vintage, in which Tasya and the man she’s possessing merge bodies. What’s your take on her relationship to gender, which seems a bit more fluid than it is for most?

As someone who does this professionally, she must necessarily have an intricate relationship to gender and to sex, having experienced inhabiting someone else’s body. It’s a broader thing than that, it’s a broader relationship to an identity that isn’t immutable. Gender had to be part of that, and so I wanted to not shy away from that during the sex scene.

By that same tack, it seems significant to me that the first body we see her take over belongs to a woman of color.

To be completely honest, I didn’t specify a race in the script for that character. We weren’t looking for anyone in particular during casting, but Gabrielle Graham gave a fantastic audition, by far the best. She really captured both the nuanced emotional aspects of the scene and the physicality of it. I cast her for those reasons, and yet I understood that if that character is now Black, that can be seen as adding another layer of meaning to the corporation’s action and how they operate. But that’s the truthful answer.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to watch Possessor (Uncut)