David Cronenberg on the set of Eastern Promises Peter Mountain/Courtesy of Focus Features

Eastern Promises feels like a companion piece to A History of Violence. Did you feel that making it?
I can certainly see, after the fact, connections, and also, when I first approached Viggo… you know, we're very close, but he's difficult to pin down; you can't get him easily. And we did discuss whether the role was too similar. But it didn't take long for us to realise that it was very different from an actor's perspective, playing a Russian with a Russian accent and having to change the body language and everything else to be convincing. It's a very different story, too, in that there are no American characters in it, there are no guns in it. So in terms of actual filmmaking, it was very different from History.

Why did Eastern Promises appeal to you as a director?
I've often said you make the movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie. It's all intuitive, I don't have a list of things. People sometimes think I have a list of things — you know, body transformation, identity — but I don't think that way at all. I really am, when I read the script, just watching the movie in my head, and I'm getting excited about it, or I'm already bored. You make the movie to know what drew you to the material. It's not just intellectual because it can be emotional or something else. And I can say now — but I'm only guessing really — that London, for example, prides itself on being a multi-cultural city, and that's very different from the melting pot idea of America where you come and you give up the values of where you came from to become an American. But London has all these different cultures, and I loved the different languages, the different textures, the different way of living, and also the different look at London.

It's a darker side of London you're showing, a side very few tourists would ever get to — or even want to — see…
Once again, when you're a director, finding the location to shoot or building the set is hugely important because, for me, making a movie is not cerebral, it's very sculptural and very physical. So the idea of shooting in London, an unknown London, was very appealing. The crew on Eastern Promises was very excited about where we were shooting because they said, "Nobody ever shoots here. They want to shoot in Notting Hill and Mayfair and make cute comedies and see Big Ben, and where we're shooting is to us the real London. That's where we live, that's where the immigrants live." It's gritty; it's Hackney and north Harlesden.

The fight scene in the bathhouse between Viggo and his attempted assassins is pretty extraordinary. How did you pull it off?
It only took two days to shoot, three days if you include the scene that precedes it, which is a long, single Steadicam shot. It is a long process, though I don't use storyboards. This is a kind of scene that perhaps some directors would do storyboards for, but I never use them because I like the collaboration of my actors. If you're storyboarding, you're fixing everything before you even have your actors, and you are therefore cutting out their collaboration. On the other hand, it takes a lot of preparation to do a scene like that. The first thing is for me the arena, the playground: Where is this all happening? Carole Spier, my production designer, and I found a great bathhouse in London that looked like what you saw. But two days after we left they started to renovate it, and when we went back they had destroyed everything we loved about it. They were putting in very bland tiles, and they'd taken down all the old ceramics and lit it and cleaned everything. So we looked at each other and said, "Okay, we have to build this." And when you build it, of course, it gives you a chance to shape it differently. So that was basically, "What's my playground? What's the arena?" I loved the fact that it had small rooms linked by hallways and that opened up into bigger rooms; quite strange.