That’s Gotta Hurt!

After probing the recesses of the human psyche in Spider, Ralph Fiennes is joining up with David Cronenberg once again, this time to push human physical boundaries to breaking point. An original script, written by Cronenberg, Painkillers explores the world of performance art, but before you begin to form an image of Fiennes in white facepaint negotiating his way around an imaginary wall, this is a rather more extreme performance than simple mime. Self-mutilation is the order of the day and, knowing David Cronenberg as we do, we should have expected no less. The film is apparantly inspired by French artist, Orlan, and her treatise on 'l'art charnal'. Orlan used her own body as a form of artistic expression and underwent no less than nine plastic surgery sessions while exhibiting photos and sculptures of her 'modified' body as art. According to Production Weekly, Painkillers, which originally had Nicolas Cage attached to star, will now star Fiennes as a radical performance artist with a high pain threshold - well, you'd need one, wouldn't you? - who is approached to help capture a subversive group. Fiennes' character must decide whether to disclose his findings and risk seeing the them suppressed, or to protect them. Weird, wonderful and doubtless utterly disturbing, this is all par for the course with Cronenberg and we can likely expect the usual outcry from censors and those of fragile sensibilities when Painkillers goes before cameras next year.