Vincenzo Natali

”Splice” is a sci-fi thriller starring Adrien Brody as Clive and Sarah Polley as Elsa, both science leaders in human to animal DNA splicing. While employed by a major pharmaceuticals company to manufacture health and disease medications, the two find themselves pushing the boundaries of science, successfully (and secretly) creating a part human, part animal embryo.

What the scientists didn’t expect was for the embryo to grow uncontrollably, and the scientists find themselves hiding a newborn hybrid human-animal, named Dren. The part human, part animal creature continues to grow exponentially and the scientists find themselves conflicted about not only the morality of the experiment, but their own relationship with the creature as she grows older (played by Dephine Chaneac) and more unpredictable.

The film is incredibly fascinating, troubling and entertaining (and maybe a little disturbing!), so when Moviehole’s Tim Johnson was given the opportunity for an exclusive chat with the director of the film, Vincenzo Natali, he was dying to get to know the brain behind the envelope-pushing picture.

Tim: This film has been a long time coming, hasn’t it?

Vincenzo: It sure has! Yes, it’s been a very long and painful pregnancy. And painful birth, I have to admit. But in the end, very gratifying.

Tim: How did the concept for this film begin, because you wrote the screenplay also.

Vincenzo: Yes, I co-wrote it and it began with a mouse, weirdly enough. It’s called the Vacanti mouse and you might have heard of it. It had by all appearances, a human ear growing out of its back.

Tim: Sure, I remember that.

Vincenzo: And it was a very shocking, real scientific experiment and it was a very shocking image which in my mind could have easily been part of a Salvador Dali paining. And I just felt intuitively that I wanted to make a film in that world. So that’s where it began, it took a very long time to make the film, I think for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is when we started, this kind of science wasn’t really part of the popular consciousness and in interim it’s evolved exponentially to the point where when we started shooting the film they had legalized the creation of animal-human hybrids in the U.K. So, it really was a case of fact catching up to our fiction.

Tim: I heard it was literally a race to beat the science.

Vincenzo: Yeah, in a way. I was afraid it was going to eclipse our movie and we were going to be old news by the time the movie came out. But not quite.

Tim: So you think it’s not long until DNA splicing experiments becomes a reality?

Vincenzo: I think so; I think we’re going to do interesting things. I think that it’s in our nature as human beings to change our environment and now that the technology exists, I have no doubt we will start to change ourselves. And I’m not necessarily opposed to that. I just think it has to be done in the best possible, responsible way.

Tim: How did you get Adrien Brody on board?

Vincenzo: Adrien was just the top of my list and it didn’t take too much to convince him. I mean, I think both he and Sarah were attracted to the dangerous elements in the script, which I think is unique because a lot of actors would not do these things. I mean, their characters do some pretty transgressive stuff in this film. But they were great, they were wonderful and I think they gave wonderful performances and they were great to work with on this film, because we had a very limited budget and they made life much easier for me than it might have been.

Tim: There’s the relationship between, especially as Dren grows up, the scientists and Dren, the relationship between the two scientists and then the actual science itself; how did you make sure you could bring that all together in a seamless storyline?

Vincenzo: I think that’s why it took ten years to make! I half jokingly say, it took them less time to map the human genome than it did for us to write this script, so it just took a long time. What’s challenging about the subject matter is it’s so loaded. You know, there’s so many different themes that you could pursue. You could take it so many different directions, so a lot of the writing process was about honing in to one thing. And I think at the end of the day, on some level, this is a movie about family. It’s really about familial relationships; albeit goes to very strange, Freudian places; but I think that once we really kind of latched on to that as being our metaphor, our theme then the script came together.

Tim: Did you write Elsa’s relationship with Dren in stages; first as a pet, then a child and then an experiment?

Vincenzo: Absolutely, yeah. The spine of the movie is worked around Clive and Elsa, the scientist’s emotional connection to Dren and how that evolves and changes. And for each character; it starts off with Elsa being the one who’s connected to Dren and Clive being very standoffish. And then as the mother-daughter relationship goes to a bad place, or a more difficult place, Elsa becomes estranged from her creation and Clive on the other hand begins to become closer to it. So yeah, it’s really this transition of power and emotional connection that forms the basis for the movie. I hope that’s what makes the film exciting and new. It’s the emotional, human element.

Tim: Do you think that is one of the most dangerous parts of Dren, and it’s alluded to in the film, that it’s not so much the animal instincts in the creation, but the human emotion?

Vincenzo: Absolutely, this film is about the human discovering their inner monster. And in some respect, us discovering the humanity within the real monster and I think Dren is kind of a catalyst for bringing out, or opening and unlocking these sort of dark secrets or desires that Clive and Elsa have within them.

Tim: Guillermo del Toro who was executive producer on the film said the movie is “morally ambiguous;” subjectively, in your own personal opinion, where do you sit with DNA splicing?

Vincenzo: In the real world?

Tim: Yeah.

Vincenzo: I think it’s like any technology, I think it’s about what you do with it. So, while this film very much owes a debt to Mary Shelley (author, Frankenstein) and Frankenstein which was subtitled ‘The Modern Prometheus’ it’s really not the Promethean myth, it’s not a cautionary tale about stealing fire from the Gods. I already accept that we’ve stolen the fire. It’s the question: ‘What do we do with it?’ and I think with Clive and Elsa who I find to be very courageous, likable characters who are well intentioned when they do this work, they’re just simply not prepared for what they do and that’s where problems arise. They have complete and utter control over the chemical foundations of life, but they don’t really understand the essence of life. They’re a little bit immature and that gets them in to a lot of trouble.

Tim: Do you find it strange that the corporation in this movie is kind of portrayed as the, well not the good-guy, but they almost have the moral conscience, at least in the beginning of the film?

Vincenzo: Right. Well, they appear to have moral conscience, but really all that is, is just fear of law suits! So, they’re morally ambiguous, in fact in my mind that’s true evil. That’s the perfect example of the banality of evil, they don’t have moral standpoint, their moral guidelines are completely driven by the market. But I know what you’re saying, it’s interesting that usually we imagine an experiment like this as being driven by some kind of evil corporation with an agenda, whereas in this case, the corporation is saying to the scientists, “No, no, no, no, we just want to toe the party line and make money off creating pharmaceuticals from animals,” and it’s the young, idealistic people who go into the terrible place. But, you think about communism or any number of event in the last century that were guided by the best of intentions, they really led to terrible, terrible places.

Tim: There’s a confronting love scene in the film, and I’m no prude, but it’s pretty disturbing! Was that an easy or tough choice to push the uncomfortable level of the audience?

Vincenzo: It was easy for me, it was fun! I couldn’t wait to see that scene with an audience because as an audience member, I had been waiting for someone to do something like that. I think we’ve read books that deal with this sort of thing, but we haven’t seen it a lot in films and if that scene had been cut from the film, I frankly would not have been interested in making the movie. Because I think that’s where we depart from Mary Shelley, I think that’s where the film really finds its own voice and becomes something original.

Tim: Did you worry about any backlash?

Vincenzo: Well, I think I’m just very naive. I think I’m a bit naive and stupid, so if I really thought about those things too much I would have been terrified, but I always assumed there was a danger that people would find it ridiculous, and laugh. And I think some people watching the film do find it ridiculous and laugh, but I suspect it’s more nervous laughter and the reason I think the scene does absolutely work is because of the actors.

Tim: It’s incredibly tender. It’s a true love scene, but it just happens to be uncomfortable.

Vincenzo: Yeah, exactly.

Tim: What kind of coaching did you go through with the actors for that?

Vincenzo: I didn’t do much. All I did was make sure, I asked them: ‘Are you OK with this?’ And they were and they were true to their word. It’s all them, they made it easy and that scene between Adrien and Delphine who plays the creature; we shot it in a day, we had to do it very quickly because we had not a lot of time and they were great. They were just OK with it and it went really, really well. It was very easy.

Tim: How about having an actor play Dren, why did you chose to have Delphine do that over CGI?

Vincenzo: Well of course, one factor is even if I wanted to, I never could have afforded to do Dren as a full digital character. But, frankly, even if I had an unlimited amount of money, I wouldn’t have done it that way simply because I think the subtlety of performance that’s required for this kind of story, which is so intimate, because it’s really only a few characters, could never be done by a digital character. Even post-Avatar I don’t think we’re there yet. And it just didn’t seem necessary, and I also felt that in playing those scenes, we needed our human actors, Clive and Elsa, Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley to be with another human being. And not a human being in a blue leotard with ping pong balls glued to it. So, I’m sure that was the right way to go. In fact as much as possible, in all of Dren’s stages, even where she could never be played by a human, I tried to keep something physical on the set; whether it was a puppet, or a replica. I always think the best special effects begin with something real.

Tim: Dren looked fantastic and completely real, so congratulations.

Vincenzo: Thank you. Well, we had a great team.

Tim: Did you workshop a lot with Delphine, because I heard she took a lot of the characteristics of Dren on herself?

Vincenzo: She really did, it’s all Delphine. I mean, I was there to kind of guide her a little bit but she invented everything and we just spent a bit of time experimenting with different things. We shot tests with her; but everything flowed from Delphine. Once we had her cast, we kind of reverse engineered a lot of the Dren design work too, to meet her behavior and her physiology. It really comes from her. Dren is her creation.

Tim: Who came up with the vision for Dren’s physical characteristics; the legs, the eyes, the tail?

Vincenzo: You know, Dren is the child of many parents. And I worked with a whole bunch of great artists … And then a whole host of technicians in the actual manifestation of Dren as an on-screen character. So, it was a lot of different components, like there’s a lot in her DNA and it took a long time. I mean, I really started designing Dren over ten years ago.

Tim: Wow!

Vincenzo: And I’d been drawing her, too. So, it’s just been a gradual evolution.

Tim: And what projects do you have in the works following this one?

Vincenzo: I’ve got a few things I’m pursuing. None of them easy!

Tim: Nothing like a challenge!

Vincenzo: Yeah, but the good ones I guess rarely are. I have a J. G. Ballard novel that I have been working on for a number of years called ‘Highrise,’ that I really want to make that’s just extraordinary. They’re all actually adaptations. The series of children’s novels books called ‘Tunnels’ that I’m working on which is really great and is a much larger canvas than I’ve ever had to work with before. And then just recently it looks like I’ve got the rights to ‘Neuromancer’, the William Gibson novel which I’m very excited about, I can’t believe it! But none of those films are financed and it’s always a slog.

Tim: Maybe not ten years!

Vincenzo: Hopefully not.

Tim: Well good luck with Splice, and thanks so much!

Vincenzo: Thanks, such a pleasure.

‘Splice’ is in cinemas June 4 in the US and October 14 in Australia.