Exclusive: Sci-Fi Horror Hybrid Alive in "Splice"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Tuesday, 22 June 2010 01:53

Written by Brad Balfour

Every year at the Sundance Film Festival, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation gives out special awards to filmmakers and screenwriters who craft a project with a scientific underpinning. Minus its creature, Splice could have been one of those films with its forceful depiction of actual science at work.

Best known for his debut feature Cube in 1997, American-Canadian Vincenzo Natali masterminded his latest, Splice. Genetic modification scares the bejeezus out of people. They don't want to allow such manipulation of humans, and least of all, cloning. But in Splice, the implications of such fiddling go beyond mere medical expediency. This hondling (okay, "manipulating" in Yiddish) creates a being beyond human control.

Famed young scientists Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) have a talent for splicing DNA from different animals into bizarre hybrids for medical purposes. But in this science fiction-horror film, they go a step too far: They splice in human DNA. Their corporate backers are aghast. So Clive and Elsa experiment in secret, and Dren (Delphine Chaneac) is the result.

She is an amazing creation whose rapid life cycle takes her from baby to adult in a matter of months. Clive and Elsa struggle to keep "her" a secret, but their connection to their "offspring" devolves from the scientific to the personal. Ultimately, Dren exceeds the couple's wildest fantasies -- and their most terrifying nightmares.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, to a nursery school teacher/painter mother and a photographer father, Natali is a cultural hybrid (with Italian and English coding in his DNA). Raised in Toronto, Canada, he attended the Ryerson University film program before getting hired as a storyboardist at the Nelvana Animation Studios.

Cube became a worldwide success, grossing $15 million in France, emptying wallets in Japan and breaking box office records for a Canadian film. It took Best Canadian First Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Natali went on to direct 2002's Cypher and Nothing in 2003 before finally getting Slice pieced together.

Following its release, writer/director Natali's next efforts are expected to be an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's futuristic novel High Rise and a 3-D remake of the Wes Craven comic-book-based horror film Swamp Thing for producer Joel Silver. The Hollywood Reporter recently announced, however, that Natali was to replace Joseph Khan as director of the highly anticipated adaptation of cyberpunk author William Gibson's 1984 masterwork, Neuromancer.

As a certified sci-fi geek, I was psyched for a verbal poke around Natali's past and future film lab.

Q: Rather than worrying about narrative implications, you err on the side of the fantastical, creating a creature that serves a science-fiction fan. Wrong or right?

VN: I always felt the most human character of this film was going to be Dren. And really, if there's something special about the film, it's the fact that it's about how the monster emerges in the humans.

Unlike a lot of Frankenstein-type stories it's not about the creature escaping into the world and wreaking havoc. It's the opposite. It's about how the scientists cage their creation and it becomes a catalyst for opening dark doors to dark places within themselves.

Q: Did it create dark places for the cast as well? Were there anguished debates?

VN: No, it was a surprisingly happy set actually. I was probably the only one who was anguished because it was such a tight shoot. But I had a lovely cast; they were very supportive of me and the making of this film. They have to do some pretty scary, transgressive things, and never bat an eye. They were very much into it all the way through.

Q: I can imagine the debates between you and Sarah Polley, who is a political activist as well as an actor and director. Obviously you had to cast a Canadian for funding purposes. But besides that, Polley is the perfect person for a film with any kind of political implications.

VN: Right. Sarah was always on the top of my list, regardless of her nationality, because she's so intelligent on the screen and I needed actors who we could believe are brilliant geneticists while still being attractive. Also you have make an emotional connection to the characters, even when they're doing really transgressive, horrible things.

Sarah was just great to work with. I really respect the fact that, in spite of being an excellent writer/director, herself, she came to the film purely as an actor and treated me with tremendous respect. She's a lovely person. They're all great people.

Q: What was the discussion like?

VN: If you were in on some of the rehearsals, you would have thought we were making a Generation X romantic comedy because we were really talking about the characters and their relationship to one another and not so much about the morality of the science or anything like that.
That kind of came along for the ride.

It was very important for me with Clive and Elsa that we believe this couple, that we like them, that we understand the dynamics of their relationship, because they're fairly complicated. That was mostly where the discussion took place.

Other than that, Sarah and Adrien just got it. When Sarah read the script, to be perfectly honest, all modestly aside, she said there was no role she's ever read for that she wanted more. She didn't read for the role, we offered it to her, but there's no role that she had read that she wanted more than Elsa. She just got it and I think the same was true of Adrien.

Q: Polley isn't known for her science-fiction film roles but Adrien certainly is, having done King Kong. That must have been an interesting pair; that was another transgressive situation. Did he appreciate the irony? Did that have an influence on your choice?

VN: No I don't think so. I cast Adrien for exactly the same reason as Sarah in so much as I thought he comes across as highly intelligent, a little bit geeky, and really lovable, and kind of hip too. I'm willing to bet that Clive in the film is about as close to the real Adrien as any part he's ever played, minus sleeping with a mutant. But he's a very affable, lovable person, much like Clive.

So that was really my motivation for casting him. It was good that he did King Kong because he understood the technology and understood what it means to work with creatures, real and imagined. And that was essential because Dren, much like Kong in the film, is a character, she's not hidden in the shadows, she's part of the fabric of the story.

Q: I read that you found the actress who played Dren on the street, but then she came in for an audition.

VN: It's confusing.

Q: I would have gone to Cirque du Soleil to cast that person.

VN: We wanted to go to Cirque du Soleil, but they won't share their performers. They wouldn't let us. They wouldn't share names or anything because they want to keep their talents. I met a girl from Cirque du Soleil once, and she took me to one of their secret performances, so that was interesting. That was years ago.

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