THE CRONENBERG INTERVIEW

The following is an excerpt from an interview Rushdie did with Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg in the spring of 1995.

Cronenberg: I've had movies censored, and I realize that I could never second- guess a censor. I don't know how they think because they'll want to cut something out of my movie that I would never imagine they would.

Rushdie: I had the strange experience of becoming a subject of a movie-this appalling movie made in Pakistan called International Guerrillas. It's about the freedom fighters of Islam searching for me, trying to kill me. I'm the villain of the movie. There is a character called my name who is the author of The Satanic Verses who wears a series of appalling safari suits. And every time this guy arrives on camera there's a sort of satanic "dahh dahh." And the cameraman always looks to his feet. And there's a slow "pan" up-

C:That's a "tilt." It's a very common mistake and I get very pedantic.

R:No, I appreciate it. I would make the same pedantic correction about writing. And this guy, me, lives in what appears to be an island in the Philippines, protected by what appears to be the Israeli army. And various members of these Islamic radicals were arrested by these Jewish soldiers and are brought to the "me" character who tortures them, has them tied up and cut about with swords. And at the end of the film I actually get killed by the Holy Book itself. The Koran appears in the sky above me and fries me with lightning. This dreadful film is so badly made that it's actually difficult to take it too seriously, but it came to England and was banned. And I found myself in the strangest position. I'm fighting an anti-censorship fight and here's somebody banning a film which is brought about by me. It ended up with me writing to the censors here, guaranteeing that I would not take legal action against them. And telling them that I do not wish to be protected in this way. It's a wonderful parable about how censorship doesn't work. If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town. Everybody would have seen it. Instead, it was unbanned at my request and the producers booked the biggest cinema in Bradford, which is the largest Muslim community, and nobody came. They lost a fortune, and the film just died overnight.

C: Are you good at religion, are you religious?

R: No, I am totally without religion. I was brought up in a family where religion was just not around. And it just faded in me. However, I am very interested in it. Because if you grow up in India and you spend all your life writing about India you actually can't write about India without writing about religion.

C:Why did I read that you had converted to Islam?

R:Five years ago there was a moment when I made a stupid mistake and when I was approached by a number of British Muslims here who sort of seduced me into making some statement of support for the faith, and said that if I were to do this then in return there would be a rapid amelioration of the situation. I said very stupid things for a couple of weeks.

C:Uh huh.

R:It's one of those things that you get seduced into for good reasons, where you think, "OK, I will show these people I am not their enemy, I want to calm things down." And that sucks you towards saying things which you shouldn't say because they happen not to be what you think, you know? Yeah. The moment I made the statement it immediately made me feel physically sick because I felt that in some way I had lost my language. Up to that point the one thing that kept me going was that I could defend everything I said and I could talk about it in my ordinary language and not have to use any kind of special guarded phrases, you know, just talk. And suddenly I found myself in this compromised position. So very rapidly I took steps to say, "Look, this was a mistake and this is not my position, and while I'm not hostile to Muslims at large, I could not really, truthfully, call myself Muslim." C:Sitting here talking to you, I was having trouble thinking of you as a practising, devout Muslim.

R:Basically, I was offered a deal. It became rapidly clear that it was a mistake to have made the statement and that the people I was dealing with were completely unreliable. You see that means you'd not be a very good politician, doesn't it?