It was a great interview, hosted by Chris Rodley IIRC, and the cherry on the cake was being able to get them both to autograph items later (I have an autographed novel and screenplay) although it was rather tempered by admitting to Ballard that I had only ever read one of his short stories and didn't understand a word of it. I was there and, now that you say it, I think you may be right - I'm pretty sure that they at least recorded the audio. I seem to remember seeing cameras there but I haven't seen any film of the event. The day after the London Film Festival screening there was an interview with Ballard and Cronenberg at the NFT. It contains the kernel of what would later be expanded out specifically into Crash, but also shows that the idea of car crashes as an exciting (inciting?) event is just one of many 20th century preoccupations that were swirling around the Ballardian universe! Which mostly come down to humanity in their attempts to connect ironically often only finding ever more coldly technological ways of fulfilling their desires and/or meeting their ends.Ī documentary about the incredible controversy surrounding the release of Crash would be a very welcome extra. So you get the free flowing associations going back and forth between violence in war and in peacetime ("World War III as a conceptual event"), weapons used to drop bombs on Hiroshima or send rockets into space, or the celebrity section taking in Marilyn Monroe's untimely death raising her to icon and the Kennedy assassination being arguably the most famous automobile-based death!
The section on the car crash ( "the car crash as a fertilising event") is just one section among others that take in plastic surgery ("the geometry of her face as a diagram for murder"), death in space ("nightmares of anxiety") and the nature of celebrity figures moving into existing only in imagery ("virtual death").
It is especially important because the film keeps that kind of anthology structure of the original material by splitting its narrative off into separate numbered topics (and resurrecting its characters again to play their parts in a new configuration), but topics that sort of end up blending into, commenting on and enriching each other thematically. Its the best Ballard adaptation to the screen so far and certainly deserves to get better seen, even if I am fully prepared for its free associational, almost avant-garde narrative structure to put a lot of viewers off.
I would argue that The Atrocity Exibition deserves a full separate release all by itself, especially since the Reel23 DVD edition has two great commentaries tracks on it, one just by Weiss and the other with Weiss and Ballard in conversation.
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