Body work.

So concludes James Ballard, the conveniently named narrator of J.G. Ballard's novel Crash, while contemplating a tryst with the story's already damaged homme fatal, Vaughan, a brutal and charismatic ex-scientist whose current "project" documents grisly collisions between human flesh and Detroit dashboards. Just as Ballard found a green light for his darkest imaginings in the peculiar resonance of the car crash, David Cronenberg discovered in this "deviant technology" a new way "to show the unshowable," resulting in his most disturbing film to date. For those intimate with Cronenberg's imagery - exploding heads, vaginal stomach wounds, gynecological tools for "mutant women," giant roaches with talking anuses - the already elastic definition of "disturbing" has been stretched to the point of meaninglessness. Yet with Crash, Cronenberg has moved - as one typically tight-sphinctered British critic put it - "beyond the bounds of depravity." For Cronenberg aficionados, such censure functions as a tantalizing press release, for after all, one man's depravity is another man's cup of tea. If a Cronenberg film didn't mow down fifteen different notions of moral acceptability, then back up and plow them over again, it wouldn't be a Cronenberg film. Through Ballard's calmly psychotic source material, though, Cronenberg has distilled his primary theme - psychological and bodily mutation - dispensing with rebellious flesh and twitching viscera in favor of far more unnerving internal transformations.

Originally published in 1973, Crash is Ballard's grim report on the emergence of what he calls "a nightmare logic" in the affectless, media-saturated landscape of the late '60s. The bleak, somewhat noir narrative follows the descent of a jaded couple, who sustain their marriage by confessing their adulterous escapades to one another, into the polymorphically perverse world of Vaughan and his car-crash fetishists. Along the way, James Ballard and his wife Catherine lose their already tenuous grip on reality, yet gain a new intimacy, made possible by the "deviant technology" of the auto wreck and its resultant injuries. On first inspection, their strange journey seems as unsympathetic as Vaughan's fetish is baffling, yet the seductive tone of Crash beckons even the most squeamish readers to abandon their previous notions of morality and sexuality. Like the new form of intercourse Ballard enjoys with the leg wound of Vaughan's most mutilated female follower, Crash is a perverse act that calls the very concept of perversity into question.

For a reader untutored in Ballard's typically clinical tone, the most disturbing aspect of the novel is its apparent lack of moral posture regarding its characters' self-destructive obsession. Ballard hastens to add that Crash is "a cautionary tale," a deadpan exploration of extreme atrocity in the mode of Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Cronenberg jettisons Ballard's disclaimer like a crash-test dummy, resulting in an even more boldly attractive statement than Ballard himself intended. As the director freely admits, Cronenberg assumes the role of Vaughan for his audience: "'Things you normally look away from actually reveal a kind of beauty - a different aesthetic - and I'm going to convey that to you in as seductive a way as possible.'" Through deep-blue lighting and chrome details, through the repulsively sexy performance of Elias Koteas as Vaughan, and through the inviting wounds decorating Rosanna Arquette's body, he succeeds.

AH: In Crash (1973) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), you list perversions, mutilations, and unfortunate Intersections between flesh and metal. One gets the sense that these could be medical journals written for psychopaths. Did you borrow this clinical tone from your experience as a medical student?

JB: Oh, I think so. The couple of years I spent as a medical student influenced, and goes on influencing, my fiction. I don't think I could have written either of those books without my medical experience. Anatomy and physiology seem to be a wonderful storehouse of images and metaphors of every conceivable kind, and much closer to the sort of truth of what I was trying to reach than anything I could find anywhere else, in literary sources or what have you.

AH: Did that enable you to approach the most extreme forms of bodily damage with a calm perspective? For Instance, I have a friend in medical school, and he said when he first encountered the cadavers in the dissection room, he was about to pass out. But after only a few days, he was tossing organs around and joking.

JB: That's very true. That's the sort of survival mechanism that comes into play. I mean, thanks to my experiences during the war, and my childhood in Shanghai, I'd seen a great number of human corpses. But there's something about the theatrical way that cadavers lie on their glass-top tables under the cool light of the dissection room. It's like a strange cross between a Conceptual art installation and a nightclub. And the cadavers, of course, are naked, and reveal all their personal histories in scars and blotches, in facial lines, in skin color. One's looking at the entire life of a human being, not just at a dead version of the person.

And as you've said, to begin with, one's rather stunned by it all. Then this kind of grave's humor comes in, and one saunters around with a head under one's arm and isn't touched by it. But then, as you begin the process of dissecting the human being - particularly the face, where you uncover all the facial muscles that give expression to the character - you begin an extraordinary exploration of another individual in the most intimate possible way. All that I fed straight into my own fiction, and, to some extent, I still do.

AH: You've called Crash a "cautionary tale." What were you cautioning against?

JB: Well, cautionary tales take many forms. One of the most famous of all, Swift's "Modest Proposal," employs the deadpan approach. It seems to embrace the very subject that is the target of Swift's anger. I'd like to think that Crash lies in the tradition of that type of cautionary tale. I mean, when I was writing Crash, I certainly didn't think I was writing a cautionary tale. What I thought I was doing was following certain trends that I saw inscribed in the sensation-hungry, rather affectless landscape that was emerging in the '60s. I was following these trends that I saw inscribed across the graph paper to the point where they seemed likely to intersect, you know, way off the page. I saw this new logic, a nightmare logic, emerging, and this was what I was exploring. I was, in a sense, carrying out an autopsy before the cadaver was cold.

What Crash does - it's particularly noticeable in the film - is remove the moral framework that reassures the spectator that these horrific scenes are, in fact, constrained within some system of moral value. And I think that unsettles people, because they ask questions - I mean, "Do the filmmaker and the writer really believe that auto wrecks are erotically stimulating?"

AH: What was happening in your life while you were writing Crash? Was there anything out of the ordinary?

JB: No, my private life was very modest. Because I'd been widowed in 1964, I spent the years bringing up my three children. And I lived - and still do - what appeared to be a totally bourgeois life. I was never in the drug scene. People would come here to interview me, in the heyday of Burroughs and all that, and they would expect to find a miasma of child molesting. And they would find this, you know, rather sober figure - I hope sober - bringing up three children, with a golden retriever and a cat. But I think it was a very good background against which to explore the external world.

AH: What were your initial responses when you first read Crash?

DC: I found it very hard going. Brilliant but very cold, and very monotone. Deliberately so, you know, and very humorless, which Ballard himself isn't, and which his other works are not. That sort of unrelenting aspect of it was, in a way, part of its charm. But it also made it very hard to read in one sitting. I stopped reading about halfway through, and didn't pick it up for another six months, and then finished it. At that point, I thought, "Well, it's certainly very powerful, and it certainly does put you in a very strange space - one that you haven't ever been in before - but I can't see making it into a movie." I mean, it just didn't seem like there was a connection. In retrospect, though, everything seems obvious, and a lot of people thought it was an obvious match. The woman who sent it to me was a film journalist, and she said, "You should make this into a movie."

AH: What made you recognize that It might be an obvious fit for you?

DC: It was one of those strange moments of epiphany. I was talking to Jeremy Thomas, one of my producers, a couple years later - we had just finished Naked Lunch (1991), and he said to me, "We should really work together again. Is there something you're passionate about, something that you've always wanted to do?" And I said, "Yeah, I think we should do Crash." And until I actually uttered those words, I had never consciously thought about it. Jeremy went on very excitedly, saying, "I actually optioned that book in 1973 when it came out. It's amazing that you should say this. I couldn't get it off the ground. I know Ballard - I'll introduce you." I was thinking to myself, "Why did I say that?" [Laughs]

But I realized that the book had somehow started a process in me that was important enough to complete by making a movie. Suddenly all the ties to the film were there. Eventually, after procrastinating (in the way that writers do) in writing the script, I started to feel that all the necessary connections - those strange, mysterious tissues that bind you to something - were healthy and working.

AH: You successfully adapted what was considered an ostensibly unfilmable book in Naked Lunch. Crash was also considered unfilmable, and yet you brought it off again. What were some of the particular challenges In adapting Ballard's novel, as opposed to Burroughs'?

DC: I did think, at first, that I might have to do the same thing that I had done with Naked Lunch, which is to do a kind of a construct, rather than a direct attack on the book itself. I had done some wide reading around Ballard, and about Ballard - and, of course, I had met him. But when I started to write the script, it actually distilled quite directly into a screenplay.

AH: It's rather faithful, actually.

DC: The only thing that I did was to add the last scenes to the movie. I originally ended it more or less where the book had ended, which was with Ballard reclaiming Vaughan's car, and anticipating the future, but not really describing it. And we all felt, finally, that there was one more step to take, and so that last scene is the major addition.

AH: You have a special relationship to cars yourself. You're an amateur race car driver. I was wondering how your feelings about the implied eroticism and the danger of automobiles has changed over the years, before and after encountering Crash.

DC: Well, I really had to suppress that part of myself. I mean, in the sense that the movie is not at all a car-enthusiast movie.

Even my appreciation of the James Dean 1955 Porsche and the '63 Lincoln, which is as close as I come to the enthusiast part - really comes from a different place. What's important is the iconic value of those cars. The only overlap was in logistical terms, when I had to talk to the stuntmen about how we would do things. I had a good understanding of cars, car dynamics, and crashes, having experienced them myself. But the meanings of the cars, and the experiences of the characters, were quite different.

AH: You had a major auto accident soon after completing the novel. Did that force you to reassess some of the flights of imagination you had just taken?

JB: No, it didn't. By a miracle I wasn't hurt. At least I hope I wasn't hurt - you never know about long-term brain damage.

AH: But you'd already finished Crash, so I think the screws were already loose.

JB: I'd finished it two weeks earlier, and I know if I'd died in the crash people would have said, "Ah, he got what he deserved." I mean, I never said that I think car crashes are sexually exciting. What I'd said is that the idea of a car crash is sexually exciting. We know they're almost the worst thing that can happen to us on the average day, and yet, at the same time, we find the idea of crashing cars very, very exciting.

Now, this is what I was exploring - the fact that there's something about the car crash that trippers a powerful imaginative response. I mean, I've written endlessly about the peculiar resonance that the deaths of famous people in car crashes - Mansfield, Camus, James Dean, and so on - have, which the deaths of the famous in hotel fires and plane crashes do not have. That Kennedy's assassination took place in the course of a motorcade had a special bearing on the curious, electrifying magic his death had on the public imagination. Had Kennedy been shot as he stepped out of the aircraft in Dallas, I don't think it would have had quite the same resonance. I don't think you have to look very far, because we all know when we drive our own cars that we have our death, literally, at our fingertips. We all know that the experience of driving a car taps various feelings of aggression and competitiveness. Young men, in particular, have to grapple not just with the car as they drive, but with their own hot emotions. The car, the experience of driving, also plays into the hands of all kinds of unconscious fantasies - of transcendence, of death. I think the car plays a special role in the twentieth-century psyche for that reason. But this is something that takes place in the imagination. It's the idea of the car crash that is sexually exciting - not the crash itself.

AH: I understand the film has caused quite a bit of tub-thumping in England.

JB: The film opened here at the London Film Festival a couple of months ago, and created an incredible storm. And I thought, "Poor David." He must have felt how Gulliver felt among the Lilliputians. He was just amazed by the reaction of the British press, those custodians of public morality.

AH: Did he receive the old "Throw this sick bastard out!" tabloid treatment when he arrived?

JB: When Crash received its first screening in Cannes, I noticed that a lot of the press people who were interviewing us, even though they'd seen the film the previous evening, were really talking about an imaginary film that they'd screened inside their heads. And this is a problem with Crash - people think they've seen a violently pornographic film. In fact, the car crashes are played down, there's a low degree of violence, and there's very little sex. It's only, you know, simulated sex. There are far more graphic sexual scenes in countless Hollywood films - Basic Instinct, etc. - and infinitely more lurid violence. But once the dog has got the bone clamped between its jaws, it won't let go. These new moral crusaders don't want to let go of Crash, because it's such a juicy bone. God knows what will happen if it is finally shown here.

AH: In the film, Cronenberg downplayed the fetishistic fascination with celebrity, which runs throughout the book, as well as in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970). Obviously, the Liz Taylor fixation would have dated the film. But I'm interested in your fascination with fragmented celebrity bodies. Particularly in The Atrocity Exhibition, where the discrete body parts of Jackie O. or Liz Taylor become the building blocks for the psychological architecture of their admirers. What does this breaking up of the celebrity body signify for you?

JB: Well, I think it's something that takes place as we watch celebrities interviewed on television, or see them in close-up on cinema screens. I mean, we can explore every detail of their makeup. We can see, you know, the incipient mole that is appearing on Charlotte Rampling's right cheek. It applies equally to politicians and anyone who appears regularly on television, but film stars tend to be particularly attractive and beautiful. That's why they're there. Our imaginations begin to play over these stellar figures. We can't help but dismantle them in our minds. Their bodies are tantalizingly dose, almost closer to us than our own bodies.

As for Elizabeth Taylor, David and I both agreed that we wouldn't keep her in the plot. Because although she's still a remarkable presence, she would never have agreed to take part in the film.

AH: It would have been even more perverse. though. to have Vaughan be fascinated with the current Elizabeth Taylor, with all her plastic surgery.

JB: Yes. We would have been moving into a divine sort of place then. But in my novel, Elizabeth Taylor had an emblematic role. I wasn't that interested in the actual actress, but she stood for the last of the great Hollywood stars.

AH: You've often spoken of the death of affect in our near future. I was wondering if we aren't already there, and whether or not you mourn the loss of emotional depth or response?

JB: When I wrote about the death of affect in The Atrocity Exhibition in the late '60s, I was writing against a background of a sensation-hungry media landscape that seized on all the violent imagery emerging from Vietnam, from the Kennedy assassination, from civil wars in Africa - all that atrocity footage that gave The Atrocity Exhibition its name. I was writing about the way in which sensation had usurped the place previously occupied by some kind of sympathetic engagement with the subject. I mean, one saw blowups of the Kennedy motorcade used as backdrops in fashion magazines. Images that should have elicited pity and concern were drained of any kind of human response, in the way that Warhol demonstrated. His art really was dedicated to just that. I don't think it is quite so blatant nowadays. It is now incorporated into the way we see the world. In the '60s one would see fashion models flouncing around in front of a backdrop of the Kennedy assassination, or a napalm explosion. You'd think, "My God, what are they doing?" Now, of course, thirty years later, you don't even notice it.

I think a large part of the furor created here by Crash has been the desperate response of people who've seen a number of appalling atrocities on British television - like the massacre of sixteen five-year-olds in Scotland last March - and are looking for an explanation. You know, something must be behind this appalling event, and people think maybe there's something wrong with the media world itself.

AH: When you held your exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Lab in the late '60s, you said that the crowd at the opening got drunk and rowdy, even destructive. Over time, people were damaging the cars further, a female model you had hired was attacked, etc. It sounds reminiscent of the tenants in High Rise (1975). What brought on this violent reaction?

JB: Well, it surprised me at the time. I think the thesis that Crash elaborates was instantly recognized. People perceived, without being able to articulate it, what the show was doing - that there was a connection between the sexual imagination and death. I hired a young woman to interview the guests at the opening on closed-circuit TV, which was a real novelty back in 1969. The intention was to deliberately overload the imagination of the guests by having them see themselves interviewed on closed-circuit television by this naked young woman. When she arrived, oddly enough, earlier in the evening, she walked in, took one look at the cars and then told me that she would interview everyone, but only topless. She would be clothed from the waist down. We'd agreed beforehand that she would interview people fully naked, but when she looked at the cars she said, "I won't appear naked, I'll just appear topless." I thought, "That's interesting."

The invitation I sent out to all the critics and media simply described "crashed cars, new sculpture." So people didn't know what they were coming to see. Well, when they arrived, there was no explanatory material of any kind, no slogans on the walls or anything. There were just three crashed cars under the neutral gallery lighting. Of course, everyone got immensely overexcited. The exhibition was planned as a psychological experiment, that was its sole purpose. And it gave me the green light. I thought, "I'm onto something." And I started writing Crash.

AH: Do you think the exhibit would meet with the same kind of response today?

JB: I think the message has got through, in a way. Even though most people, let's face it, haven't read my book, or even heard of it, the ideology has percolated into the media landscape. I was watching the last episode of Robert Hughes' New Theory for American Vision last Sunday, and it showed a wonderful piece of film - the burial of Ed Kienholz. His wife arranged to have a huge hole dug in the ground. Kienholz's corpse was seated in the front seat of a 1940 Packard - a back-seat Packard. He was seated in the passenger side, with a bottle of wine, a deck of cards, the cremated remains of his dog Smash, and a dollar bill as sort of emblematic companions, then his wife drove the car down a ramp about twenty feet below the ground. Once she got out, he was entombed - all the earth, with dollar bills thrown in, was dumped onto him. He was buried like a pharaoh. It was profoundly moving, actually. Partly, of course, because of the car. Without the car there, it would have just been another burial.

AH: Many of Cronenberg's films deal with biological mutation, often mediated by technology. Some of your stories and novels deal with that as well. But there's a difference in the characters' response to these mutations - in Cronenberg there's usually some kind of visceral revulsion, a sense of horror in the face of extreme change. But in some of your works - High Rise, Crash, The Atrocity Exhibition, and Concrete Island (1974) - there's an almost calm, tacit acceptance of the new context, as if it were relatively natural. How are your heroes able to adapt to these disturbing transformations?

JB: Well, most of Cronenberg's heroes are rebelling against whatever mutational process is underway. Only towards the end do they yield. Whereas my characters, right from my early natural-disaster novels, accept the transformation taking place, because it's an externalization of some deep, unconscious - or semiconscious - need of their own. They embrace the catastrophe because they're keen to remythologize themselves, and rediscover the different world that lies beyond the transformation. So I think a rather different psychology is at work in my own fiction. On the other hand, of course, there are an awful lot of similarities. And Cronenberg's Crash is, in many ways, a departure from his previous films, in the sense that it's wholly naturalistic. There are no exploding heads, no organic mutations taking place, no unfolding visceral changes. It's very cool and chromed. The violent change is all played down. The crashes are like those in real life - they're over in a second. And the sex is very stylized. In some ways, I think it's his best film.

AH: You've talked about pornography in the past. Today, it seems, even "deviant" pornography aesthetics have become mainstream - they're used in advertising and fashion layouts, etc. Do you think there is any new form of pornography emerging?

JB: The sort of stylization that you see in, say, Mapplethorpe's photography, in S/M photography, doesn't seem that far removed from the stuff you pick up in the Sunday supplement magazines these days. Human beings have an almost limitless capacity to absorb the psychologically perverse, because it's all so buffered by the electronic media that stand between us and the images. Plus there's a process at work - of which Crash is a part, I think - that I call the "normalizing of the psychopathic." More and more of what used to be regarded as aberrant or perverse activity is now accepted as more or less conventional behavior. We're almost infinitely tolerant of human behavior of any kind, as long as it's consensual.

This normalizing of the psychopathic has defused huge areas of the sexually perverse - of the human imagination, generally. Surprisingly, I'm told people are still shocked by Helmut Newton's photography.

AH: Which is hard to believe. It's hardly appalling.

JB: I think it's genius, actually. I adore Newton. If you print this, the Artforum readership will think Ballard is a complete idiot, but I think, since the death of Francis Bacon, the most consistently imaginative - and, in many ways the greatest - visual artist working today is Helmut Newton. I can't think of anyone better. Certainly not all these installation artists who are pouring out of British art schools. You know, all those sharks in formaldehyde and so on. People are shocked by Newton, but not by the sexually explicit material, that would have shocked them, say, thirty years ago. They're shocked by his voyeuristic, masculinist eye. They're shocked by their sense that this is a man who is degrading women - which is a different matter altogether. You can degrade women just as fiercely when they're fully clothed. I see his photographs as stills in some very elegant movie that might be playing in your local cineplex. In fact, he loved the film of Crash. I met him about a month ago, and he said, "You know, that's the sort of film I like."

AH: But when you first started becoming enthusiastic about cars, what did you see as their erotic potential, if any?

DC: A car has always represented sexual freedom, nowhere more so than in North America. And certainly for me, as well. I mean, it wasn't any of the obvious Freudian things - you know, the thrusting power of a V-8. I don't think anybody cared about that. The point was that you had a mobile little house that you could do things in - that was the power of it.

AH: It's often where teenagers first encounter the opposite sex.

DC: Oh, listen - there's a whole generation of people spawned in the backseat of a '55 Ford.

AH: Since filming Crash, do you find any personal resonance with Ballard's peculiar fetishization of the car wreck and its resultant injuries?

DC: This was one of the things I found so brilliant about the book - it would suggest things to you that, on the surface, were absolutely repugnant and impossible, and, by the end of it, were just business as usual. You realize that you had these things in you all along, and that it was revealing parts of you that were there, but that you had never been able to recognize. Of course, that's one of the primary functions of art, and Crash did that to me.

So, by the time I was making the film, these things were understood. And it hasn't really changed since then. What has changed is people telling me about their responses to the film - how they came out of the theater and suddenly traffic was totally different for them, and how it changed their perception of their vulnerability in cars, their relationship to cars, the violence of cars. And that feeling everybody has had, that very few people will admit, that they would love to have crashed into somebody - either out of anger, out of curiosity, or just out of some other strange impulse. Always, of course, repressing it, or mostly.

AH: Narratively, Crash reminds me a bit of noir films like Double Indemnity (1944), in that no one is innocent, even at the beginning. The ending you wrote into Crash Inserts some positive potential into Ballard's and Catherine's apparent downward spiral, and it seems the film has become more about a jaded married couple rediscovering one another. Did you sense that in the book, or was it your own notion?

DC: I did sense that in the book, and I felt that I was just making it explicit. But I think the theme of the movie is a little more extreme. At the beginning, they're not so much jaded as exhausted and in despair. Because the old forms have not been working for some time, they've just been accepting that and going through the motions. But when Ballard has his epiphany induced by this car crash, they embark on a very exciting and dangerous, and, to me, very positive process, which is the voyage of reinventing everything. And that, of course, is one of the things that's very disturbing to some people about the movie, because there is no moral stance taken by the filmmaker vis-a-vis the people in the film. In almost all Hollywood films that pretend to take a moral stance, everybody knows that the filmmakers aren't righteously indignant about the subject matter. It's part of the narrative structure that the character should be righteously indignant about something. It's part of the story development, part of his character's development. It's not really a moral stance at all - it's sort of a moral posturing, really. And so, in a weird way - but I think, a very direct way - I'm being much more morally honest in my approach to the film. I'm saying, "I want these people to go through this and see where it takes them."

AH: One of the things that seems to come out in the film, that I didn't notice in the book, is a kind of Christ-like dimension to Vaughan. He becomes sort of a charismatic cult leader - who, after introducing a new dimension of experience to these emotionally gutted people - sacrifices himself so that they can carry on, so to speak, and become more human.

DC: Well, one of the things that Bertolucci said to me after he saw the movie at Cannes was that he felt it was a religious masterpiece. Well, of course, I liked the masterpiece part . . . but the religious part was interesting. He basically felt that all of the characters were sacrificing themselves for us, the viewers - that they were going through this so that we wouldn't have to. But I think, in a more formal way, what you're saying about Vaughan is also correct. I mean, without getting too political about it. He is leading them someplace, and then his usefulness to them is over.

AH: You said of Naked Lunch that you didn't want it to be a drug movie, and so you made up fictional drugs that would preserve Burroughs' use of drugs as a metaphor for societal control. It strikes me that many of your films are about addiction - addiction to metaphorical drugs.

DC: Addiction, to me, is a very interesting phenomenon - especially biological addiction. Because there's a sense in which addiction merges with evolution - when you incorporate some other chemical process into your body, and it becomes a natural and necessary part of your body, then you've changed yourself - you've really transformed. I'm interested in transformation, and the extent to which evolution, in any species, involves a strange process whereby something is incorporated into your development as an animal that becomes necessary - which before was perhaps not even part of your metabolism - and now you're a different animal. Speaking of LSD, I often thought, "What if you were born with lysergic acid as part of your metabolism?" You would grow up learning how to function well in that state, and that would be your new reality. And if you didn't learn how to function well, of course, you'd be dead. Run over by a car or something. Whereas if you just take acid once or twice, you don't know how to function - because it's a new world that is sometimes terrifying.

AH: You've often taken the point of view of viruses and venereal diseases, and you've incorporated the perspective of disease in many of your films. I was wondering if Vaughan's sexual attraction to bodies mutilated by machines wasn't a kind of twenty-first-century venereal disease - a surrender to the "new flesh" implied by literal and metaphorical cybernetics?

DC: I don't really see it as technology doing things to us. I mean, it's very clear to me that technology is us. So merging with technology - our bodies merging with metal - is us merging with us, with different aspects of ourselves. There is no technology without the human mind. Technology is the human will made physical - the incarnation of human will and creativity. It doesn't come from outer space and it isn't imposed on us. The way people talk about technology - "Look what it's doing to us" - you've got to take a step back and see that technology is an extension of us, and is us. We are in control of it, to the extent that we create it. If we don't like what's happening with it, we can do something about it.

AH: Ballard has called his novel a "cautionary tale," and I was wondering what you thought he was cautioning against, if anything?

DC: At the London Film Festival, Ballard and I sat onstage and had a conversation. He's just a lovely man, and we like each other very much. But that doesn't mean that we agree about everything, including the meaning of his own book. People have said to me, "I don't see your movie as a cautionary tale - do you?" And I say no. So I asked Ballard what he thought about this. He said, "Well, it must be a cautionary tale. And I said, "When you were writing the book, were you thinking: 'I am writing a cautionary tale?'" And he said no. So I said, "So, basically, this is an analysis that you're doing of your book after the fact." And he said yes. So I said, "OK, that's all I need to know." Because I know, from my own experience, that it's quite possible not to be a very good analyst of your own work, in a critical sense.

I didn't read his book as a cautionary tale, and certainly one could say that, insofar as it anticipates this disaffected, disconnected psychology of the near future which is becoming more and more present, one could say, "God, he's right, and I don't like this." In that sense, it would be a cautionary tale - not in the sense of a moral fable, but in the sense of saying, "I see these tendencies emerging. And if we don't like it, we'll have to do something about it." But when the film is being attacked for being pornographic and perverse, it's too easy to fall back on saying, "No, no, it's a cautionary tale." And I feel that Ballard - tough as he is - bought into that. I'm trying to be experimental, but not cautionary. The experiment is to say, "Wow, look at this! This is what happens when you do that."

AH: However perverse they seem initially, Vaughan and the others seem quite sympathetic by the time you're halfway through the film.

DC: Well, that's what I think - that happens in the book as well. The characters are sort of emblematic in the sense that the film could almost be seen as an allegory. They're not human in the way that characters in some films pretend to be human, but, by the end of it, you will see their humanity, and their universality. However strange their world seems to you at the beginning, by the end it will be almost accessible, or maybe very accessible - depending what kind of person you are. To that extent, you can empathize with them. But I'm not going to distort the whole process just to do that.

AH: One of the immediately cinematic things about Crash the novel is that Vaughan is something of an amateur film director. He's constantly filming accidents and victims, and staging these meticulous re-creations of famous car crashes. As a director, you've done your share of filming repulsive bodies, bodily mutations, and so on. Did you find any resonance with Vaughan, the cameraman - the recorder of these extremely deformed bodies?

DC: Well, someone did say to me, "You are the Vaughan in this movie for the audience." And, I suppose, in a sense I am. I'm doing exactly what Vaughan is doing, which is to say, "These things which you would normally look away from and find repulsive actually reveal a kind of beauty, a different aesthetic, and I'm going to try and convey that to you in as seductive a way as possible."

AH: After Videodrome (1983) and Naked Lunch - films that certainly did not shrink from visually representing extreme hallucinations - I was surprised that you didn't include the protracted acid trip near the end of the novel. You included some material from that scene - the sex scene between Ballard and Vaughan, and Vaughan ramming into him afterwards.

DC: I didn't want to say, "These two guys are having sex, but they're stoned so it's OK." It certainly isn't like that in the book. It's a logical conclusion. At that point, they're almost beyond sexuality, beyond gender - it's something else. Catherine and Ballard have already brought Vaughan into their bed verbally, so he's become the intermediary. Then they go out separately and have sex with him for real. But I felt that if they did it under the influence of acid, it would be seen - because I hate when the politics intrude - as a kind of a cop-out, an excuse.

AH: Right, "they didn't know what they were doing."

DC: In the book they know very well what they're doing, but, cinematically, that's very hard to convey if you have them staggering around and hallucinating. I thought it would be a lot more powerful, and to the point, to just let them do it. Since, in a way, the movie is the acid trip. It's partly the difference between 1973 and now - the perception of all of those things.

AH: What have been some of the more ridiculous reactions you've gotten to the film so far?

DC: Well, the response in the UK was really nuts. It got caught up in the politics of that little island - the fear that exists there. I told them, "This is a real island mentality you're showing me - a siege mentality - you're worried about being contaminated." It's like all the colonial expansionist energy is now being focused inwards, and the fuzzy-wuzzies are on the island - the colonials are there. In their cries for censorship and bans, there's a real condescension and racism involved. Because they all feel that they won't do anything bad when they see these movies, but those other people out there will. And who are those others? My God - you know, who are we talking about? The Indians? Are we talking about the Jamaicans? Who are we talking about?

It's really sick, and I found that the publicity could actually be detrimental to the film, giving the lie to the idea that any publicity is good publicity. Because they were deforming the film in the press. There was this phantom movie that was being presented as my movie - particularly by writers who hadn't even seen the film - as being extraordinarily violent, and all kinds of stuff that it isn't. It got to the point where I felt it would keep people away who really should come. Because what happens is, the people who shouldn't come - or who, at least, are expecting some incredibly violent thrill-kill movie - are going to be really disappointed, bored, and the people who might have liked it will stay away. So I think there's a point of diminishing returns with controversy. I felt like the ex-Princess Di there.

AH: Did you get any of those headlines in the tabloids?

DC: Oh, we got 'em all. A review entitled: MORALITY DIES IN THE TWISTED WRECKAGE. Then the headline on the original one, which was like a Monty Python sketch, really, was something like: A MOVIE BEYOND THE BOUNDS OF DEPRAVITY. So when I spoke to the audience after they saw it at the London Film Festival, I said, "Well, have you enjoyed your trip beyond the bounds of depravity?" And I got huge applause.