Cronenberg Makes Plans for an 'Eastern Promises' Sequel

One of those sequels I never thought we'd see

By: Brad Brevet
Published: Monday, March 30th 2009 at 4:01 PM

I remember doing an early, early morning telephone interview with David Cronenberg for Eastern Promises. I had been up all night because he was calling me from Germany or something like that and the time difference was such that I had to be awake at 3 AM. As always with these things, they never start on time and by the time it got started I was dead tired and as soon as I was put on the phone I learned he was a little under the weather. Suffice to say, the interview went so poorly I don't think I ever published a single word of it.

However, I do remember asking him about the potential for a sequel since this was a film that really left a lot of cards up in the air. He had obviously been asked the question several times in the past and he had a canned answer for me talking about how it depended on the success of the first film and so forth, but it really didn't seem like he was too keen on the idea. Then again, he may have not been too keen on talking to me any longer… who knows?

However, here we are about a year-and-a-half later and MTV brings word Cronenberg isn't just interested in a sequel to the Russian mobster movie, "We are moving forward with it," the director tells the music website.

"We all are excited about the idea of doing a sequel," he adds. "We are going to have a meeting very soon between me, Steve Knight and Paul Webster to discuss what the script would be. I have some very strong ideas about what I would like to see, but I would like to hear what they have to say as well. And then after that, if all goes well, Steve goes away and writes a great script. If we all like it, we make it."

Also along for the ride will be Viggo Mortensen as Nikolai, and Cronenberg seems like he still has a lot he wants to say. "It's the first time I've ever been in a situation where I actually want to do a sequel to something," he told the site. "I've never had the desire to do that before. But in this case, I thought we had unfinished business with those characters. I didn't feel that we had finished with Nikolai and we had done a lot of research that was more than we could stuff into that one movie."

Should the sequel actually get made it would be the third film Cronenberg and Mortensen have made together following the first Eastern Promises and New Line's A History of Violence. There is, however, no word on whether the characters played by Naomi Watts and Vincent Cassel will be considered for the follow-up, which would mark the first sequel for Cronenberg even though sequels to Cronenberg originals such as The Fly and Scanners have been made without his direct involvement.