Then the director snared Pattinson, one of the hottest actors on the planet. But “Cosmopolis,” which opens locally Friday, is not a multiplex-ready entertainment or even a horror film. Based on a novel by Don DeLillo (“White Noise”), it's a day in the life of a paranoid billionaire who runs his empire, beds his lover and checks his prostate in the back seat of a limo that's circling Manhattan.
To get the movie made, Cronenberg, 69, had to enter the sanctum of the same kind of kingpin who is satirized in the movie.
“One of our investors in this film is known as the French Warren Buffet,” Cronenberg told me when I passed the distributor's background check and was able to chat with him on the phone recently. “One of the reasons he wanted to get involved is because he says he deals with people like Robert's character all the time. They live in a kind of bubble of unreality. They handle billions of dollars every day but they never really touch money. He felt that this story was strangely accurate.
“These days, any director of an independent movie also functions as a producer. You end up talking with various distributors and investors from around the world to assemble this financial Frankenstein from private and government and corporate sources. It's very tricky.”
The ace up Cronenberg's sleeve was Pattinson, who attracted investors and then delivered a performance that leveraged his vampire persona from the “Twilight” movies. “I don't mind the metaphor of a blood-sucking businessman,” Cronenberg said, “but by the end of the movie, as he's thinking about his past and visiting his childhood barber, he's a much more vulnerable character.
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