THERE ARE moments when the rain won’t stop and the economy won’t slow down its freefall, when political ads on TV get more reductive and thuggish, when the news of the worst oil disaster in U.S. history continues … that’s when it all seems as if the future is already here, and it’s gone terribly wrong. And that’s why Splice—the brand-new genetic horror film with weirdly apropos touches of a sex comedy—seems so timely. Humans have blown it. Maybe the next evolutionary step will have better luck. It is appropriate that Splice should open June 4, the same night at the subZERO Festival. Both offers intriguing glimpses into the minds of techno tinkerers.
Diabolical, funny and sexy, Splice may be the best surprise the summer film has in store (see review on page ??), and its release (due to producer Joel Silver picking up what was a very small-scale Canadian movie) gives people something that will be remembered when this week’s hyped-up blockbuster is forgotten.
Success couldn’t happen to a more seemingly nice guy than director Vincenzo Natali, who has been nurturing the film for 12 years. He says, “As an indie filmmaker, I wake up every morning so thankful for what happened. Truly, I thought we were heading straight for a TV premiere on ‘Sci Fi Movie of the Week.’ It’s the worst possible environment to sell a film in these times. I never in my wildest imaginings thought we’d get both a major studio distributor and a summer release.”
METRO: I couldn’t wait to see Splice after seeing it at the WonderCon in San Francisco, as a preview between two fairly ordinary commercial propositions.
NATALI: There were some fairly heavyweight people before me and after me. I felt like the comedian at the strip club: I’m the one person here you don’t know.
There’s a story that Mary Shelley got the idea for Frankenstein in one flash of lightning. Was it like that for you?
Yeah, my flash of lightning was a mouse I saw in 1996. A very famous mouse—by all appearance it had a human ear on its back. It was a shocking image: it looked like it crawled out of a Dali painting. I instantly knew I wanted to make a film in some way related to this, even though the mouse turned out not to be a genetic experiment. What appealed to me about the story in Splice was this: we’re talking about ideas that have been with us thousands of years—the notion of animal human crossbreeds.
We can actually make a Minotaur now, you mean?
It’s almost as if those ideas were planted in us, for the day when we could engineer them in the real world. So that’s where Splice began. And it was a mere 12 years until we made the film.
What took so long?
A variety of things. First of all there’s a sexual component to Splice. It’s a potentially risky commercial venture. When I started the film, the whole ideas of genetic splicing and cloning was at its nascent stage. It was actually a failed technology that started to reinvigorate itself once Dolly the sheep was cloned.
But at that particular time it wasn’t in the public consciousness. One extraordinary thing that happened, during the writing and prepping of the movie, is that the real science caught up with my fiction. By 2006, people were reading about this kind of stuff in the newspaper, and the film tech itself had evolved so you could do this sort of thing cheaper and better than before. That’s what allowed me to make Splice as an independent movie.
It was an incredibly discouraging process, and I thought it would never happen. The lessons I learned in this film: everything has to go wrong before it goes right. Even when we finished Splice, it was ready for the worse marketplace we’ve ever had in independent film. Two companies involved in wanting to distribute the movie in America went out of business, one right after the other. That was typical of the process of making the film, writing it and financing it. This movie has a desire to exist, it wanted to come into being.
If I was trying to get Splice out there, I suppose the first thing I would have done was try to get an endorsement from David Cronenberg.
My first film was this thing called Cube, and Cronenberg very kindly gave me a quote for it. I fully acknowledge his influence, but Splice seemed so close to the things he’s done, so much so that it would be awkward to point to him. It’d be like Tarantino going to Scorsese for a quote for Reservoir Dogs. In many respects, Splice diverges from Cronenberg. It owes a debt to him: we’re from the same city, and Toronto is a small town.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t thinking Splice was a knockoff of Cronenberg when I was watching it. When is Splice set? It looks like about 2015, but Toronto already looks futuristic.
It’s feels like America, but it’s not quite. It’s an ineffable thing. In my mind, the future is already here. So many of the ideas I’ve read about in sci-fi when I was a kid have come to pass. This was a weird quasi-version of that future.
In fact, I didn’t really have to do much to create the technology for this film: it already existed. One even downscales the tech to a realistic level to portray a gene lab. That’s really what they look like; they’re very industrial. The technology isn’t that impressive. It’s not much what you find in your average kitchen—things for cooking and freezing and gelatinizing.
You were saying that you interviewed some genetic scientists when writing the script: Did any of them ever say something like “If we don’t do this, someone else will?”
You’d be surprised what some of them say! I don’t know a lot of geneticists, but their work is devoted to helping other people, and they’re passionate about their science. But I think in every geneticist there has to be a little bit of a mad scientist. It’s such tantalizing work.
One of the experiments I heard about us very common. The eye genes from the fruit fly—they share a lot of genetic material with us, as you’ve heard—can be replicated and replicated, so you can make a fruit fly covered with eyes.
There’s just something horrifying and fascinating about playing with the building blocks of life. I really have tremendous respect for these scientists—in my mind, they are as creative as any artists. I tried to exemplify this with Clive and Elsa—they really believe in what they’re doing and are prepared to risk themselves and their careers. That’s why when we meet them they drive a Gremlin and live in a crappy apartment. That’s how most gene scientists live: they’re not very wealthy.
Local theaters, show times and tickets at MovieTimes.com.
