The idea for best motion picture Genie nominee eXistenZ, with its superstar game designer on the run and its interweaving themes of reality and delusion, sprang from Salman Rushdie’s continuing persecution. Nothing to do with Keanu Reeves.

David Cronenberg, the film’s director, writer and producer (with Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori) is scathing of reviews and comments likening his picture to other films released about the same time covering roughly similar ground and adamant that his movie did not benefit from the coincidences. ‘I have some faith in the concept of synchronicity,’ says the director. ‘In my version it’s we who connect and try to assign meaning to things.

‘We heard about The Matrix while we were in post-production and thought it would be a problem for us, and it was. Maybe if the movies had been switched it would have been different – then again, Dark City preceded The Matrix and had a very similar look but it didn’t do well.’

Another stumbling block for the film was the fact that the main character was female, which Cronenberg himself admits was ‘asking for trouble’ in the sci-fi genre with its predominantly male audience. It also made finding the right actor for the second lead problematic. ‘It was very difficult to cast the role that Jude [Law] eventually played, because young male Hollywood stars don’t like playing second fiddle to a woman. They don’t want to be kicked around by a girl.’

Snagging Law, a rising star who is a hot property in the u.k. but still affordable for smaller films, appears to have been responsible at least in part for the European success of the film, particularly important in light of disappointing American box-office returns. (The film’s coprodcos are Alliance Atlantis and Serendipity Point in association with Jude Law’s Natural Nylon of the u.k.

Cronenberg met Law while the actor was in Toronto promoting Gattaca and thought him ‘perfect’ for the u.k./Canada coproduction; an actor who could start the film as a clumsy fool but believably turn and become menacing at a later point. ‘And he was a wonderful actor, I could see that.’

Jennifer Jason Leigh appealed to Cronenberg for the lead role because she is ‘primarily an actor, rather than a star.’

‘She’s not afraid to look bad and she’s punished for that because real stars don’t do that.’ eXistenZ is distributed in Canada through Alliance Atlantis.