Take Splice, add Inception: the possible recipe for a big-screen Neuromancer

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Take Splice, add Inception: the possible recipe for a big-screen Neuromancer
July 2010
Guardian.co.uk

Every year there are a couple of science-fiction movies that really stand out as original pieces of thinking, while managing to make some sort of headway with audiences. Last year, we had Moon and District 9, and 2010 looks like being the year of Inception, Christopher Nolan's tale of a near-future in which dreams become conduits for corporate espionage.

Splice
Production year: 2009
Countries: Canada, France, Rest of the world, USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 110 mins
Directors: Vincenzo Natali
Cast: Adrien Brody, Delphine Chaneac, Sarah Polley
More on this film
In cinemas tomorrow is Splice, the new film from Vincenzo Natali, who has been watching the success of Nolan's film with some interest. As reported on this blog not so long ago, Natali is the man who looks likeliest to finally bring William Gibson's 1984 cyberpunk classic Neuromancer to the big screen. More of that later; first, to Splice. What's so surprising about the film, in an era in which scientists will soon be able to create life from thin air, and have already cloned various farmyard animals, is that this type of subject matter has not been dealt with extensively on celluloid.

For the past century, film-makers have been obsessed with the prospect of Earth's invasion by superior beings from outer space. But what if the creatures who eventually come to take our place on this planet are genetically modified updates of ourselves, rather than extra-terrestrials? Is Adam 2.0 being created, perhaps by accident, in a laboratory right now somewhere in the world?

It's a thrilling, terrifying prospect, with echoes of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Cronenberg's 1986 take on The Fly. Splice centres on two reckless young scientists (Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody) who create a human/animal embryo in their lab. At first, they intend to destroy it before it comes to full term, but matters take their own course and the pair find themselves acting as surrogate mother and father to the creature, which they name Dren (nerd backwards).

"Splice has been with me a long time," says Natali during a short chat on the phone from Los Angeles. "It was inspired by a thing called the Vacanti Mouse, which was an MIT experiment that looked like a mouse with a human ear growing out of its back. It wasn't a genetic experiment, but it looked like one and it was such a shocking image, I knew that there was a movie to be found in that mouse. That was 15 years ago."

The film pushes the ramifications of creating a human/animal hybrid to the extreme. Without wishing to give too much away, there is sex in the movie, and there is death. The end result crosses the boundaries between science fiction and horror in a way that is hugely entertaining for the genre fan, but which might risk giving the film a slightly trashy overtone. Was he not tempted to tone it down at all?

"I'm not sure trashy is the word I would use," Natali laughs. "Creepy, or even sleazy perhaps, but trashy seems to categorize Splice as camp. And that is not the intention at all. I think the emotions on display are far too complex to be reduced to something like that. In essence, this is a film about a family dynamic between creature and creators that morphs into a bizarre love triangle, with all the worst kind of Freudian implications of that relationship fully intact. So it is weird, it is disturbing and transgressive, but not trashy, in my opinion.

"I think it's important for horror to push beyond the boundaries of the acceptable," he adds. "It's the one genre that at its core needs to be subversive and disturbing, because its raison d'etre is to help us confront our darkest fears. It's very primal that way. And I felt that with Splice I had to confront these issues head-on. Anything less would have been an unacceptable compromise."

Does he agree with The Fly comparisons? Like Cronenberg's film, Splice is a movie that begins in the safe, sterile territory of the scientist's lab, and ends up pushing the boundaries of taste.

"I think there's some Cronenberg DNA spliced into this movie," Natali says. "No question about it. And The Fly is a good comparison, because like Splice it is very much a chamber piece, really just a few characters, and with a great deal of emphasis on the emotional component of the story. However, Splice also incorporates much of my personal experience and my own personal anxieties about parenthood. So there is a lot of me in there too."

Aside from Splice, Natali is probably best known for Cube, the 1997 brainteaser about a group of strangers who find themselves being tested by an unknown entity in an apparently infinite, Kafkaesque maze of deadly traps. His next film could well be something rather more expansive, as he's picked up the rights to Gibson's Neuromancer, and reportedly has the novelist himself onside. I wondered how he would get around the book's incredibly dense language and slang without dumbing it down and losing its essence. Natali is clear.

"I won't dumb down Neuromancer," he says. "There would be no point in making that version. We've seen things like that before. What is exciting about William Gibson's vision in 2010 is how prescient it was. He really anticipated the post-human world. And I think we are entering that world very quickly. So, what draws me to the book – and what I think the film will offer that we haven't seen before in the cinema – is an in-depth exploration of our growing relationships to the cybernetic universe. If Splice is about the evolution of our bodies, then Neuromancer will be about the evolution of our minds."

Is Gibson involved in the creative process? And will the film be a blockbuster, or more of a purist science-fiction thing?

"Gibson is involved, and yes, he has been immensely supportive and I'm actively developing the script with his consultation," says Natali. He tells me he is hoping that the success of Nolan's film will help convince studios to greenlight a big-budget Neuromancer, but one which maintains the book's cerebral impact. "The movie would not work without that kind of cash, and I wouldn't want to do it," he says. "I think with the advent of Inception there is now an example out there of how that would be possible."

I hope that Splice is not overshadowed by the release of Inception. Nolam's thriller is the kind of movie that science-fiction fans are going to want to see two or three times at the cinema, and it does seem a mistake to have scheduled Natali's film for just a week later. But if you do get the chance to see both movies over the next few weeks, take a moment to imagine how a Natali-shot version of Neuromancer on the scale and budget of Inception may manifest itself. This is a film-maker with a rare understanding of how to paint complex ideas in a way that neither alienates mainstream audiences, nor patronises them. If we are to see a brave new world of sci-fi in the wake of Nolan's achievement, Natali could well be one of those riding the virtual wave.