I felt so deeply immersed in this world that, for a long time, I didn’t even know what city we were in.
Our crew, which was mostly English, loved where we were shooting because they’d been on many shoots, and they were bored because everybody’s shooting in Mayfair or Notting Hill, doing cute stuff. And we were shooting where they feel the real London is, where they live and where working class people live and where immigrants of all kinds live and where subcultures are rubbing up against one another, collaborating in an uneasy alliance, and in this case criminal. It’s sort of globalization at its finest.
One very Cronenbergian element is the tattoos, which here don’t necessarily mean what they seem to mean.
The movie is about identity and language, and the language of tattoos is another language. And with any language, you can be deceptive or honest. And literally some of the tattoos Viggo [Mortensen] had are words that mean things. Like one of them meant “north,” but it doesn’t just mean “north,” it means “white supremacy.”
Because it’s saying “north” and not “south.” Not Europeans, but Russians. Real Russians. The northern Russians. It’s actually a white-supremacist symbol, which you wouldn’t understand to be that unless you knew. Everybody in prison would know that that was then part of your personal philosophy.
The bathroom fight sequence was just phenomenal. You’ve got Viggo naked, being slammed around in a hard, white-tiled bathroom by two guys in black leather and boots. I imagine it was difficult to choreograph.
Any fight scene has to be choreographed. The unique thing about this is that Viggo is naked in the scene. It’s an important part of the scene. But in terms of how we choreographed it and how we shot it, it was as if he had clothes on. We didn’t worry about it. It took a lot of work, but no more than any fight scene. The camera has to see it, it has to be lit, the actors have to land where the camera is or there’s no point in doing it. However free-flowing it might seem—and that’s what you want—it all has to be pretty well-controlled, or you’re going to see lights that you shouldn’t see. Also, you don’t want to hurt anyone. Except I like to hurt him a bit.