Kevin Durand has become a familiar face in the likes of REAL STEEL and X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE; he’ll soon be seen in RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION. And the actor is also on view in COSMOPOLIS, the new David Cronenberg film that begins its limited theatrical release this Friday, August 13 from Entertainment One. On the set of the creature feature DARK WAS THE NIGHT, Fango got a few words from Durand about the COSMOPOLIS experience.

“The movie’s based around Robert Pattinson’s character, who’s a billionaire, and it’s basically his journey across New York City,” Durand tells us. “He wants to get a haircut on the other side of town, and it just so happens that there’s been an assassination attempt on the President, who’s visting the city, there’s a funeral procession for a hip-hop icon; there’s like four major conflicts happening while we’re trying to get him across town. I’m Torval, his chief of security, trying to get him there alive. It’s kind of an odyssey story, with all these wonderful scenes and cameos.

“It was amazing,” Durand continues, “but we had to imagine ourselves on the streets of New York.” That’s because COSMOPOLIS eschewed the complexities of Manhattan location work to film largely in a studio, with the urban landscapes outside Pattinson’s limo added in postproduction. “It would have been so insanely expensive to shut down the streets of New York so we could shoot,” the actor notes. “That all came in with the greenscreen, and I don’t feel like it in any way held back our performances. If anything, it gave us more room to move, because we weren’t at the mercy of the world [laughs]. We were in our own studio that we paid for, where we could do whatever we wanted, so it was an advantage for us. You just have more freedom when you’re shooting in a studio, and this movie wouldn’t have been made otherwise. It would’ve stayed a book! And that would’ve been a crime, because David did such a great job adapting it. It reads exactly like the book did. [Author] Don DeLillo had a lot to do with the adaptation.”

And of course, it helped to have a filmmaker of Cronenberg’s vision and experience at the helm. “He’s the most intelligent person I’ve ever met,” Durand says. “He’s so calm, and knows exactly what he wants. He’s never done a day of reshoots in his career. I think they said he has raised his voice once or twice in 25 years, so he sets the tone on set and everyone follows. Everyone’s calm and happy and focused.” Check out our review of COSMOPOLIS here, and look for our DARK WAS THE NIGHT coverage to begin soon.

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