Splice is the little sci-fi movie that’s making good. After a 12-year gestation period, Canadian director Vincenzo Natali’s low-budget movie, which he co-wrote with Doug Taylor and Antoinette Terry Bryant, is finally hitting theatres. The film—which follows gene-splicing scientists (and lovers) Elsa and Clive (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) as they splice human and animal DNA together and grow a creature named Dren that transforms from female to male—was a word-of-mouth sensation at Sundance; it was then picked up by a big-time producer (Joel Silver) and is now getting a hotly anticipated released by a major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros.). The soft-spoken Natali happily discussed his provocative horror movie (with a review at www.knightatthemovies.com), and was especially eager to delve into the gender issues at work in the film with Windy City Times.
(Note: This interview contains spoilers from the movie.)
Windy City Times: I loved the nod to James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein with the naming of your lead characters as Clive and Elsa (for actors Colin Clive and Elsa Lanchester). Can you talk about why that film and perhaps Whale’s style was so inspirational?
Vincenzo Natali: It’s part of my DNA now. I grew up with it. I remember my mom used to take me every Tuesday night to a little rep theatre in Toronto that would play Universal horror films and that’s where I first saw Bride of Frankenstein. I have great affection for those movies and I think they’re extremely well made. Once I started entering into a story about engineering a human there was no way of avoiding the Frankenstein paradigm so I decided to embrace it.
WCT: And like Bride of Frankenstein in particular, Splice combines horror and horrific humor—something very tough to do. Can you talk about that rather tricky approach?
VINCENZO NATALI: I have to say that it comes rather organically from the material which is, let’s face it, the movie is a kind of family drama. There’s just something inherently absurd about the whole situation and therefore, quite humorous. It was a very natural thing to do and I think that horror and comedy are good bedfellows. The key was never to become campy. I never wanted this to become Re-Animator. I wanted to take it very seriously and it helps that I really like all the characters in the film—I really like Clive and Elsa and Dren.
WCT: The early scenes of Dren obviously remind one of Alien and Species, both creatures created by H.R. Giger, but you subvert expectations by adding human qualities.
VINCENZO NATALI: Oh, absolutely. In some ways, Dren was always going to be in some ways more human than the humans.
WCT: “More human than human—that’s our motto here at the Tyrell Corporation.”
VINCENZO NATALI: [Laughs hard] To quote Blade Runner, which makes me think that a lot of these things just come by osmosis. I don’t think about it; I’m just so inundated with this stuff it just seeps out of my pores. But, yes, Dren was always intended to display as much, if not more, humanity than the scientists in the film. I felt this was a movie where we would discover the monster within our humans. There’s a bit of a role reversal going on.
WCT: You really see that in the bond between Elsa and Dren which emulates rotten mother-daughter characters as in Mommie Dearest and Carrie. At first, “mother” is so loving and solicitous but when “daughter” begins to misbehave… I’m assuming this was intentional.
VINCENZO NATALI: Oh, unquestionably. This is a mother-daughter story and is echoed in Elsa’s relationship with her own mother who we don’t meet or know too much about but we know there is a disturbing, abusive past there which manifests itself in Elsa when she moves Dren to the barn. That’s the most disturbing part of the film to me.
WCT: There’s a running undertow in the movie that deals with the blurring of gender identity, which is such a huge topic in the queer community. I’m thinking of Chaz Bono morphing from female to male, for example. Did you and your co-writers ever discuss this?
VINCENZO NATALI: That’s part of the reason I was really looking forward to this interview with you. I sort of intuitively sense that our future is polymorphous—that we’re headed toward some kind of androgynous state which denotes to me a slightly higher step in the evolutionary process. I feel that Dren is more evolved than us and the fact that she can change sex is obviously an ability that humans don’t have—at least not without the assistance of medical science. So, yeah, she’s one crazy, queer creature! [Laughs]
WCT: That’s interesting you talk about that because this idea of fluid gender identification is relatively new in social culture. It seems that my young compatriots in the queer community are saying, “I can be anything I want to be. I can morph back and forth.”
VINCENZO NATALI: Right. Absolutely. That’s in the film.
WCT: Tell me why queer fans should skip Sex and the City 2 and see Splice instead.
VINCENZO NATALI: [Laughs] I’m sure that’s a hard choice. I’ll admit that we don’t have the wardrobe that Sex and the City 2 has but we’ve got some pretty gnarly sex and—I’m willing to bet—considerably more interesting sex than you’ll ever see in Sex and the City.