"One thing just to say: the girls who were at Geary Avenue at three in the morning were very sweet, and they had read the book," says Cronenberg during a recent Toronto press conference alongside his cast. "This is quite extraordinary. They made a T-shirt for us that said 'Nancy Babich' and had a pistol on it," a reference to DeLillo's novel. "And I wore that, and they went crazy.
"But that's interesting because very early on we were on the 'Net [and] we had seen that they were making these Cosmopolis fan websites. Some of them were incredibly beautiful. There were a couple that were better than the official one."
Adds Pattinson: "We were doing interviews in London, and someone asked about what the tagline was for the movie. I can't remember exactly what it was now, but I thought, 'Is that the tagline?' And both of us didn't know what it was. And I just found out the other day that it was from one of the fan-made posters. A whole bunch of journalists thought it was the real one!"
"They were making posters and they were reading the book, and the commenters were commenting on Don DeLillo's book," adds the director. "These were girls who had read Harry Potter and Twilight and now they're reading DeLillo, and they still like it and they still want to see the movie. So I thought, 'Well, there's nothing wrong with that.'"
Indeed. Pattinson's presence in Cosmopolis lends Cronenberg's film a pop cultural weight it might not otherwise have had original star Colin Farrell's Total Recall schedule not kyboshed his casting as Packer. (Inception's Marion Cotillard was to play his wife Elise, a role now played by Toronto actress Sarah Gadon.)
And while the teaming of Cronenberg and Pattinson might on the surface seem unusual, the strength of their relationship is evident not only in their interactions during the press conference but also by the fact that it has been reported that the duo plan to continue their collaboration with the director's next mooted project, Maps to the Stars. (Frequent Cronenberg collaborator Viggo Mortenson (Eastern Promises, A History of Violence, A Dangerous Method) is also rumoured to be eying a role in the film.)
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