‘Possessor’: Brandon Cronenberg on His Crazy Body-Swap Horror Film Premiering at Sundance [Interview]

This Saturday, January 25th, young filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg (Antiviral) makes his return to the festival scene with his sci-fi indie, Possessor, which will hold its World Premiere at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.

Brandon, son of legendary Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg, is forging his own path in the horror world. With Possessor, he turns in a dark and creepy indie film, while honoring his roots with insane body horror and extreme ultra-violence.

In the film, Mandy and The Grudge star Andrea Riseborough plays Tasya Vos, a corporate agent who uses brain-implant technology to inhabit other people’s bodies, driving them to commit assassinations for the benefit of the company. When something goes wrong on a routine job, she finds herself trapped inside a man (Christopher Abbott) whose identity threatens to obliterate her own.

In the works for the past several years, Cronenberg tells Bloody Disgusting that the genesis of Possessor comes from the concept of self-reflection and wondering if you could be your own imposter.

“I think initially I wanted to make a film about a character who may or may not be an imposter in their own life,” he explained to Bloody a few days prior to his World Premiere. “I wanted to look at the ways we need to build and maintain identities to function, either consciously or unconsciously, how acting and creation of character and narrative are fundamental to how we operate.

“So the genesis of the film was really in the domestic scenes rather than the thriller elements – someone wakes up in their apartment, and maybe they are someone else, and what does that ultimately mean? My first draft had too much going on in it, because I had been accumulating ideas as I was developing Antiviral, so I split it into two scripts and one of those became Possessor.”

While many will immediately want to compare Possessor with films like Inception, Cronenberg tells us that his film is actually more in tune with body-swap comedies.

“I think Possessor is at most loosely related to Inception. It’s true they both touch on the idea that aspects of a person’s will and desires can originate outside them, but structurally my film probably has more in common with body-swap comedies,” he explained. “Possessor is also more focused on what it is to play a human character, on the conflict between internal and external identity, and how both those things are in some ways imposed on us.”

Speaking to the body-swapping aspects of the film, Possessor is actually pretty complicated as it follows star Andrea Riseborough playing an agent who is also pretending to be the character of another actor. In the same sense, actor Christopher Abbott is performing as his character and Riseborough’s at the same time.

“Andrea Riseborough and Christopher Abbott are the leads in Possessor, and for much of the film, they essentially play the same character, who is sometimes also pretending to be another character,” Cronenberg explains more eloquently than I ever could. “I was extremely lucky to be able to work with them, as they are of course both fantastic actors, and they made this part of my job easy. I really can’t overstate how good it was to have them on the film. I understand that they checked in with each other throughout shooting and collaborated on certain details together, but from my perspective on set, it was a fairly organic process. There were some ideas I had going into production about how the different versions of the character would tie together, and we discussed those beforehand. Then Chris and Andrea brought their own ideas to that structure, and we built it out together as we went.”

The weird is only one of the great aspects of the film; Possessor is off-the-walls bloody, dabbling in body horror. Being the son of David Cronenberg, I wondered where the excess in violence radiates from.

“I tend to find it less disturbing when violence in film is explicit,” says Cronenberg, “because it plays as horrible in the way that real violence is horrible. It’s much more unsettling to watch a PG-13 action film where the hero guns down two hundred nameless characters who don’t bleed. In Possessor specifically, the violence is also very narrative. Without giving too much away, the various approaches to the way it is depicted relate directly to character psychology, while also playing with where the audience is situated in terms of how subjective or objective a particular moment is.

“Most effects scenes in Possessor were either entirely practical (all the hallucination scenes were made with in-camera effects), or mostly practical with some clean-up (some of the violence involved blood-line removal, touch-ups, blade extension, etc., but only to polish what we had done on set),” he adds in regards to capturing the blood in-camera versus using CGI. “This was possible in part because we had Dan Martin doing effects for us, who as you may know from his previous work is a truly incredible artist. You can film Dan’s fake heads from about an inch away and they completely pass! And I was fortunate enough to work with Karim Hussain [pictured below, right] as my cinematographer again, who is intensely talented and innovative, and who was one of my core collaborators from the start of development. We spent literally years leading up to the shoot working out various camera effects and tricks for those scenes. We also had Derek Liscoumb and his physical effects team make a couple of unusual items (an acoustic levitator to allow us to float particles practically, and a trick fountain that used sound waves to “freeze” water in-camera).

“I should say that we did work with an extremely good VFX company in the UK called Milk,” he adds. “Aside from the work mentioned above, they also did set enhancement in a few cases and built a VR sequence for us.”

While he couldn’t pinpoint many direct inspirations, Cronenberg did tell us that they “did pick through some Argento films while we were developing Possessor, particularly Opera.”

Next up?

“I am currently developing a space horror film called Dragon that I will hopefully have more news about soon.”

Watch for Meagan’s review of Possessor out of the Sundance Film Festival this coming weekend. Well Go USA will release the film later this year.

Brandon Cronenberg with Karim Hussain on the set of Possessor