David Cronenberg Talks To The Sunday Times About Calming Down A Nervous Robert Pattinson

Cosmopolis is Cronenberg’s most prescient film yet. The mercurial director tells Kevin Maher about capitalism, phone-hacking and calming a manic Robert Pattinson
It’s the early erotic climax of David Cronenberg’s new movie Cosmopolis, and it features teen heartthrob Robert Pattinson playing Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager. Packer is staring deeply into the eyes of his financial director, Jane Melman (Emily Hampshire). The pair banter. They talk about foreign finance ministers. They joke about Melman’s water bottle. They even discuss the ubiquity of sexual impulses.
There’s just one thing awry, however. And it’s the fact that Packer is also on all fours, with his trousers down, in the middle of a protracted and hugely squelchy six-minute prostate examination.
This, of course, is very Cronenberg. For the man who gave us exploding heads in Scanners and sexualised body scars in, well, everything from Rabid to eXistenZ, is famed for both his perverse desire to subvert expectations and for his thundering belief in the tyranny of biology — “We can never escape from the reality of the human body!” is a favourite mantra.