Nothing cartoonish about it

WHEN it came time for David Cronenberg to choose how much violence to depict in his bloody art-house thriller “A History of Violence,” the director settled upon what he terms a “practical approach”: Less is more.

“It could not be balletic or slow-motion beautiful, and it could not feel choreographed,” Cronenberg reasoned. “It would be nasty, brutish and short -- which is what the philosopher Hobbes said about life in general.”

In the film, which opens in Los Angeles Sept. 30, small-town diner owner Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) kills two wanted murderers in self-defense. He becomes a local hero but gets embroiled in a high-stakes case of mistaken identity when big-city gangsters played by Ed Harris and William Hurt come looking for him. After Stall’s family is threatened, the bodies start to pile up.

“For the characters, the violence is functional, necessary, justified,” Cronenberg said.

To mitigate any perception of violence for violence’s sake, the Canadian director, whose films often showcase sci-fi gore but seldom feature physical combat, chose to bookend each of “Violence’s” fight sequences with lingering close-ups of their grisly human toll -- special emphasis given to smashed-in faces, bullet-riven torsos and coagulating blood.

“Most action pictures want you to be exhilarated; they don’t want you to be disturbed,” the director said. “They don’t want to show you the consequences of action in terms of real death.”

The aftermath imagery serves as a kind of aesthetic counterpoint to the gratuitous shootouts and punch-ups employed by the “Die Hard” school of action moviemaking.

Cronenberg added, “From what I’ve seen in test screenings so far, the audience will applaud and cheer -- and then it’s all shut off like a tap when you cut to those shots showing what the results of violence are.”

Although “Violence’s” script was adapted from a graphic novel of the same name by screenwriter Josh Olson, Cronenberg points out that his version significantly departs from the source material. He also took pains to distance the project from another graphic novel’s cartoonishly violent big-screen translation.

“It couldn’t be more different from ‘Sin City,’ ” the director said. “This is not an action movie.”