David Cronenberg

'I think people would accept just a little bit of surgery to be able to play a game in a way that nobody had ever played it before' It's certainly not the first thing you think about: that this must be about Salman Rushdie," admits David Cronenberg, looking back at the early stages in the making of eXistenZ. "And actually it isn't about Rushdie per se. But there is the taste of it there."

Maybe so. We'll come back to that. But, in the finished picture, essence of Cronenberg is clearly stronger than taste of Rushdie, what with the organic "game pods", throbbing pink telephones and the lethal, undetectable gristle guns - the kind of tactile, squidgy, oozy things that have slithered out of bath taps, reached out from TV screens or turned into typewriters in his earlier films. Here, though, they have been harnessed to the cause of virtual reality. They've become almost friendly, in fact.

Game for a laugh

"eXistenZ is more playful than some of my other films," says the writer/ director. "And it's funny. The middle part of it, with the right audience, plays as comedy."

But the technology and its bizarre by-products are not 100 per cent friendly. This is, after all, Planet Cronenberg. And in this world the creature always escapes the control of its creator.

eXistenZ is the ultimate game. It can be plugged direct into your nervous system via a "bioport" at the base of your spine and an "umbycord" that links you to the game pod. Once this has happened, there is no need for those clumsy touch-pad gloves and crude video helmets that you need in order to get into virtual reality nowadays. You experience the game as reality. It happens to you. It exists.

But there is a catch. "I went a little bit further, thinking: if I want to be the game, the game will also want to be me," chuckles Cronenberg.

And indeed it does. But that, he suggests, is something any artist has to learn to live with. "It's not so much dangerous as it is inevitable," he explains. "I think that we invent reality. There's a communal reality and there's a global one. There's the physical ones and there are very individual ones. But there is no absolute reality. So, whether or not it's dangerous, it is inevitable that we do that. And it's also inevitable that other people build their own version of reality.

"If you're an artist, that compounds the thing. Your desire is to create something that has a life of its own: a Golem, a Frankenstein, whatever. You don't think of it as being ugly; you think of it as being your baby. But it does have a life of its own and suddenly it's no longer connected with you. Sure, that can be dangerous."

In eXistenZ more than any of his previous films (with the possible exception of The Naked Lunch), Cronenberg has personally shaped a world into which he has launched his characters. Chief among them is the game's designer, Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who ends up having to fight for her life against a bunch of fanatical anti-eXistenZialists who have put a $5 million bounty on her head.

Allegra is rescued from them near the start of the film by Ted Pikul (Jude Law), a young security guard. Pausing to equip Ted with his own bioport, she leads him into the heart of the game, and to games within the game, where nothing is as it seems.

Which is where the Rushdie parallel comes in. The anti-eXistenZialists have taken out a kind of fatwa - the word is actually used in the movie - against Allegra. But she responds, not by going into hiding (which would have made for a pretty dull film), but by going on the run.

Alter ego

Yet the fatwa against Rushdie - whom Cronenberg has interviewed for a Canadian magazine - was where it all began. "I suppose that's really what I started to think about. There's Rushdie coming out of the Western liberal tradition of literature, and that's his reality. Then what he writes has a completely different life in this other reality: the reality of right-wing Islamic militants who don't understand or even acknowledge his tradition.

"So it's a clash of realities, each one seemingly as legitimate on its own - certainly for the people who are in it - as the other. And that leads me to the themes I've dealt with."

As for the concept of a game that taps into your nervous system, Cronenberg doesn't see this as such a far-flung idea. "I think that's already happened," he says. "In terms of movie-making or TV or video games, I think we've already incorporated them into our nervous systems. Maybe not in the physical sense, but they have had that effect on our perception of reality.

"It's really unprecedented, the understanding of the movie-making process. Just look at the way that critics write about films. I was reading a review in The New Yorker where the guy said: 'I felt like I was at a particularly bizarre pitch meeting.' It's become common currency of experience with people who have never really experienced it.

"And then if you look at piercing and tattooing and so on, that seems to be very acceptable these days. So I think people would accept just a little bit of surgery to be able to play a game in a way that nobody had ever played it before. I'm not so sure it would be that unattractive to a lot of people."