At a roundtable interview for "Eastern Promises" at Toronto, Empire notes the following exchange about the film’s extraordinary and already infamous centerpiece, the nude bathhouse fight scene:

“I was paid a great deal of money”, said Mortensen, laughing.

“When we started to explore that, to my surprise, I found that Viggo does not have any genitals, so we had to actually CG in genitals to make it look realistic”, Cronenberg said, laughing.

“I had to give up some of my salary”, noted Mortensen.

“The CG was very expensive”, nodded Cronenberg.

Heh. Amy Taubin talks to Cronenberg in the latest Film Comment, and, hilariously, gets drawn into the genitalia discussion as well:

I found a piece that someone had posted on Ain’t It Cool News about having seen a preview of the film.
Was it the guy who was obsessed with Viggo’s balls?

I don’t know if I performed an act of repression, but I don’t remember seeing his balls.
You do see them. It’s just that they go by rather quickly.

Right. I meant I didn’t notice them in particular.
It wasn’t like there was a close-up of them. But this guy was obsessed. He even wrote “big hairy
balls.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. They’re definitely
there, as you would imagine, but it’s only if you’re looking for them
that that’s what you see. Because mostly he’s shot in full figure. So
when people decide to run the DVD frame by frame, they are going to see
everything at one point or another. Of course, a lot of the time it’s
going to be slightly blurred because he’s in motion.

Walter Addiego at the San Francisco Chronicle draws parallels between the scene and the stairway sex in "A History of Violence" in his interview with Cronenberg and Mortensen, with Cronenberg noting that "If you played those scenes side by side, it would be pretty interesting. You’d start to see there’s a weirdly erotic element in the fight scene and there’s a weirdly mortal attack in the scene on the stairs (with Maria Bello) as well." And Nathan Lee at the Village Voice asks the director about an iffier choice, "Eastern Promises"’ sporadic, purplish voice-over: "Normally I hate voice-over, because it’s on the outside looking in… It means something’s not working right, like you need a novel to explain the movie. But in this case, the novel is inside the movie."

Meanwhile, the film’s two stars are bobbing around some interesting projects: At Entertainment Weekly, Missy Schwartz writes that Mortensen is in early talks to star in John Hillcoat‘s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer-winning, Oprah-adored apocalypse tale "The Road." And Naomi Watts confirms to ShockTillYouDrop.com (hush now!) that she is indeed in talks to star in a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s "The Birds."

+ David Cronenberg: Drifting Toward the Mainstream (Empire)
+ FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Film Comment)
+ Whose Reality? (Village Voice)
+ BLOOD BROTHERS (SF Chronicle)
+ Viggo Mortensen May Hit ‘The Road’ (Entertainment Weekly)
+ Naomi Watts on Funny Games and The Birds (ShockTillYouDrop)