SOME PLACE REALLY DEEP

DAVID CRONENBERG

David Cronenberg was at a creative peak in 2014, when Barend de Voogd had this Skype interview with him. The director of such classics as VIDEODROME, SCANNERS and THE FLY had recently not only delivered his biting satire MAPS TO THE STARS, he had also just written his first novel Consumed. On top of that The Toronto International Film Festival had put together an exhibition on the Canadian filmmaker that was coming to Amsterdam.

Too bad you couldn’t come to Amsterdam to open the exhibit yourself.

Yes, it’s too bad. But you can still go see it.

I know, but I would have loved to meet you in person.

It is unfortunate. I’ve never been in Amsterdam, so I would have loved the opportunity, but I had some prior commitments.

The exhibition was initiated by two people from the Toronto International Film Festival. Did you help conceptualize it?

Not really. I helped with a couple of things. It took them about five years to put it together. They did a fantastic job of finding things the fans will enjoy. Artifacts from the movies. All the creatures. I don’t keep any of that, I don’t have an archive. I keep maybe two things from my movies that I like as sculptures, but other than that, I didn’t know where all that stuff was. But they tracked it all down.

The Toronto Film Festival were perfect to do this, because they know me personally and they have a real understanding of the development of my films. The festival and my career have sort of grown up together and nourished each other through the years.

I saw the teleporter from THE FLY and the game pod from EXISTENZ, but I don’t think there’s much material from your more recent films.

I think that is natural. Because the more obvious things to exhibit are things that were created specifically for the films and would not have existed otherwise. When you get to movies like EASTERN PROMISES, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE or even COSMOPOLIS, they are more naturalistic, more contemporary and they don’t generate these artifacts.

I think of it almost as archeology. When you’re making something for a movie, the creatures from NAKED LUNCH for example, you really only create them to film them. They’re not made to last for a hundred years. They’re made out of rubber and other materials that don’t last. A lot of these things tend to disintegrate. But it’s a great collection of things that sci-fi fans will enjoy.

A lot of people, when they write about your work, seem to make a distinction between the horror movies you did earlier in your career and the movies you do today. Is that something you’re comfortable with?

It’s been a very natural evolution for me, so I don’t feel there’s this separation. Even when I made genre pictures I also did DEAD RINGERS, which was based on a true story. So I don’t see it as a segmented career. I understand that my earlier films were more obviously genre pictures, but you can draw a line from a film like SPIDER directly to those earlier films. For fans who love strange creatures and monsters and things, I haven’t been doing that lately. That’s true. But if you’re a critic, writing about the thematic connections amongst the films, I think you can see a perfect connection amongst all of them. It depends on what your approach to film is, as a critic or a fan. For me, creatively, it feels exactly the same.

But the attitude of critics towards your work has also changed. If you read what Roger Ebert wrote about THE BROOD when it came out…

Yes, the attitude of critics has changed. It was easy to focus on the horrific and nasty aspects of THE BROOD without really understanding it. I think Ebert for example did come to understand my filmmaking better. I think he needed to learn something, because he was seeing something that was different from what he had seen before. I don’t think I’m egotistical in saying that. It was very easy for him to mistake the superficial elements of that film for something it really wasn’t. Later he could see the film in light of my other work. Yes, it was inventing some new biology, but it was also emotionally very true and interesting in terms of its dialogue and so on. So yes, it has taken a while for some people to come to terms with what I’ve been doing. Maybe that’s normal if you start to do something that’s new to people. It takes a while for them to comprehend. There are many examples of this, like Kafka, who were not understood immediately and later were.

You did some work earlier on in your career that has not widely been seen, like the short TRANSFER and the stuff you did for Canadian television. Is there anything among that early work that you are still particularly proud of?

Pride is not really anything I feel. It’s more a matter of: these were things I was able to do at that time in my life, under the circumstances that were there, in terms of financing and my own creative ability. It was very difficult for me to make a career then. Sometimes you weren’t shooting under the best circumstances. I created these things, for better or worse. I wouldn’t change them. George Lucas likes to redo all his early movies with the new technology, which is an interesting approach. But for me, I would rather everything I did be exactly as it was. Because then it says: this is the way it was. It gives you an interesting feeling for the period of the time it was made, the environment in which it was made, where my mind was and what my capabilities were. Because, as I’ve mentioned many times, I never went to film school. You are seeing me learning to understand the medium of film and gradually coming to grips with it and developing my own voice and style. So I would say, for people who are interested in that, my early work could be very interesting. But it’s not a matter of pride.

As a self-taught filmmaker, what were your influences when you started to learn the medium?

I always thought I would be a writer. It was almost accidental that I became a filmmaker, out of curiosity. I was interested in technology, so I started making films. My influences were mostly literary, but coming into film I learned from seeing films, and I saw everything. Particularly the art films from the fifties en sixties, when suddenly you had Fellini and Kurosawa and Godard and Truffaut. Those were really hot at the time. People went to see them. I don’t think people would go to see them now. They had an influence.

But my entry into filmmaking really was the New York underground film, people like Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Ed Emshwiller, the Kuchar brothers. They were saying: you don’t have to go to film school, you don’t have to work for a studio, you can just grab a camera and learn how to do it. Do your own thing. This was the very wonderful liberating part of the sixties, which always gets lost in the movies about the sixties. I have never seen the movie about the sixties that felt to me like the sixties felt to me. It was very liberating creatively, there were no barriers to your potential. It was the New York underground  movement that gave me the keys to unlock the door to cinema.

It’s striking that none of the influences you mentioned has anything to do with the kind of genre pictures you started out making.

No, because as a kid I read everything. I read fantasy and sci-fi magazines. I read Galaxy Magazine and Astounding Magazine. I read comic books, but also William Burroughs and Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. I never had any idea what would come up after I sat down in front of the typewriter. And when I started writing, out came SHIVERS. I could have easily seen myself writing a more naturalistic story about life in the city or my own personal life. It could have been anything, but this seemed the most natural to me. And it was as much a surprise to me as you can image. I really don’t know where that came from, but it was some place really deep.

You know, these days it’s common to say that making a low-budget horror movie is a very good way for someone to start a career in film, because you have a built-in audience, you have all these precedents. But when I did it, it wasn’t a good idea at all. In Toronto you had the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and the National Film Board which both only made naturalistic film dramas. Stories about how difficult life was for farmers, how difficult life was for fishermen. It would have been much easier for me to get that kind of film made than a horror film. There was no tradition at all of fantastic film making in Canada. None at all.

Am I right to say that your early films came from a more personal, more obsessed place than your later films? A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE deals with its subject in a more abstract, theoretical way.

I don’t think I’ve ever been obsessed. I don’t think of myself that way at all. In fact, you can’t really make a film like A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE without investing a lot of your personal passion in it. Think of the sex scenes in that movie, or the scenes with violence, the way I constructed those scenes is very personal, as much as anything else I’ve made. So, I don’t think you can make that separation. How you react to them as a viewer is one thing, but for me creatively they all feel the same. They all require the same amount of emotion, passion and obsession. That is to say: work obsession. Attention to detail, professionalism. Not obsession in the psycho-analytical sense where it’s something you can’t let go of. Actually, that kind of obsession is not very creative. It’s anti-creative. Usually people that are truly obsessed go to a psycho-analyst to get over the obsession. It’s a nice word to use, but actually you mean determination. Not letting go of a project, even though it seems to fall apart. Keep going for it. I don’t think of that as obsession.

In the seventies and early eighties there were a few important names in horror, like Romero, Carpenter and Craven. You were on that list as well. Did you feel part of anything like that at the time?

No, I didn’t. I really thought my approach was quite different. It came from a different place. And also because the rest were Americans. There’s a big difference culturally. I don’t know how easy it is to see if you’re in Europe, but it is there. I remember going on a talk show. Mick Garris was the host and it had me, and John Landis and John Carpenter. And after the show those three guys came to me and said: ‘We’ve never heard that before!’ And I said: ‘What haven’t you heard before?’ And they said: ‘Well, you’re talking about yourself as though you’re an artist. You talk about your vision and your art. We would never talk about that, never admit that.’ Their attitude was that they were humble workers in the field of cinema. I always thought I was creating art. The Americans had to hide their artistic ambitions. I really connected myself with the artists I admired even though I was making a low-budget horror movie. The genre was not going to stop me from doing something really interesting and profound and significant.

If you look at other Canadian directors, like Ted Kotcheff, Vincenzo Natali or even Atom Egoyan, is there something that you all share?

Oh, definitely. I feel really close to those guys. Of course Kotcheff is from an earlier generation. He was of that generation that had to leave Canada to make films, like Norman Jewison. Kotcheff went to England, Jewison to California. That was a time where you couldn’t sustain a career as a movie director in Canada. You could do television, but for the movies you had to go somewhere else. I was there just at the moment when it became possible to stay in Canada and do movies.

But yes, I feel a great kinship to Atom and Vincenzo. And even Xavier Dolan who is a Quebecois. When I made my first movies I was shooting in Montreal and there was a very vibrant Quebec film industry then. For English speaking film makers there wasn’t one, but there were a lot of Quebec filmmakers who I really admired. Jean-Pierre Lefebvre and Gilles Carle for instance. A lot of guys there were interesting to me. Although the Quebec culture and Toronto culture are very different, there was still a unique Canadianness to it that covered us all. So I also very much felt a kinship with them.

Although we share a language with America and some aspects of our culture, our approach is very different. There are so many aspects that are different between America and Canada that they can’t help but affect you as an artist. 

I always feel Canadian filmmakers look at American culture with a little more distance, a little more analytical.

There is a way in which we always define ourselves against America. Even the Confederation of Canada and the railway that was built that goes from East to West, they were all built against the thirteen colonies. So we wouldn’t become a fourteenth colony. But at the same time we were very influenced by both France and England, in a way America was not. America cut themselves off from England. You know, the queen of England is still on our money. There’s more of the European sensibility still, in Canadian culture, than in American culture.

Marshall McLuhan, who appears as a character in VIDEODROME, under the name of Professor Brian O’Blivion, he felt that one of the reasons he could make such a contribution to understanding media and communications, was that we as Canadians are outside the river of America. A fish doesn’t know what water is. When we are commenting on American culture, which of course has influenced the entire world, we have a unique standpoint. We are close to it, but we’re not in it. So we can see some things that an American cannot see. It gives our work a unique tone, and it does also result in that sort or analytical, more clinical approach to film making. We sort of create a false America in Canada that somehow reveals truths about America that Americans couldn’t reveal. It’s a strange paradox.

You have many films that are set in America, but MAP TO THE STARS was the first that was actually shot in the States.

That’s right. I never shot a foot of film in the States before MAP TO THE STARS. That wasn’t because I didn’t want to or anything, that had only to do with production things. The low Canadian dollar made it more attractive. The Americans didn’t want to shoot in America, they wanted to shoot in Canada, because it was cheaper. And then later the coproduction treaties between Canada and Europe made it difficult to shoot in America, for contractual reasons.

You already mentioned VIDEODROME, which is one of your most famous films. Not in the least because it’s so prophetic about the role of the media. EXISTENZ plays with the same themes. But because the media landscape is constant evolving, I was wondering how a 2014 version of VIDEODROME would play out.

It would be about us using Skype for a conversation [chuckles]. No, but seriously: I don’t think my job is to be a prophet. But because of the sensibility you have as an artist for what is going on around you, inevitably you will anticipate things almost by accident that will seem prophetic after the fact. There have been attempts to remake about eight of my early movies, including VIDEODROME, and I’m saying: yeah, what would a 2014 version of VIDEODROME look like? I have no idea! Because in a way, a lot of that has happened. It’s all here. Not that I invented the internet, but I did invent interactive television, which in a way is a metaphor for the internet and what we are doing now via Skype.

Also the idea of a virus spreading through the internet is very Cronenbergian.

Yeah, we talk about viruses all the time. About going viral and so on. That sounds very much like VIDEODROME language. No question about.

A lot of your more recent films have been book adaptations or other people’s scripts. Is there any particular reason for that?

Well, one thing is that you can get bored with yourself. [Laughs] You’re doing the same thing you’ve already done. And then you get inspired by someone else’s work. When I started out I always thought that if you wanted to become a real filmmaker you had to write your own scripts. And the first four or five of my movies were original scripts, but then with THE DEAD ZONE I realized it could be very exciting to fuse your own sensibilities with someone else’s. You would make a hybrid. Just like the way two people would come together to make a unique child, you would fuse your DNA with someone else’s, and you make something neither one of you could make alone. And I thought that was very exciting. It also feels very organic and natural. And it never felt like a diminishing of the creative act, which I might have thought it would be. It felt really invigorating. And genetically speaking it’s good if your work is not inbred, but that you breed with others.

Not that I was thinking I would never write another original screenplay, in fact, as you probably know I’ve recently written a novel. But I stopped worrying about whose script I would make into a film next, if it would be my own or someone else’s. As long as the creative act of making the film felt full to me, as a part of what I am, then I would not worry about it. In fact, often when you are working with someone rewriting a script or adapting a novel it often feels like an original screenplay. It’s a strange thing to say. Take for example NAKED LUNCH. It’s based on Burroughs, but it has a lot of myself in the script. So to me it became a non-issue.

But I haven’t excluded anything. I might do an original script again. I might even do a genre movie. I haven’t turned my back on them. Obviously, A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE and EASTERN PROMISES are genre pictures. Different genres, sure. But still… If there was suddenly a horror or sci-fi concept that I felt excited about, that felt fresh to me, I wouldn’t say: Oh, but I’ve left that behind.

How do you exactly collaborate with others? Because you often work with the same people: composer Howard Shore, production designer Carol Spier, director of photography Peter Suschitzky and so on.

When you’re making a movie it’s not exactly like going to war, because it’s not so hostile, but it can be difficult and the more comrades-in-arms you have, the more people you understand and whose artistry you trust, the more protected I feel. They give me strength and comfort. And in that comfort and protection I feel more daring in the art itself.

That’s a very European approach, as oppose to America where you grab whoever is hot at the moment. Whenever a cameraman wins an Oscar you suddenly want to work with him. That’s never been my style. I’ve always sought out collaborators, colleagues who I work very well with. Why not continue working with them as long as it’s working? If for some reason it doesn’t work anymore, there will have to be changes. And there have been changes over the years.

In the exposition the work of Carol Spier features rather prominently.

Yes, she’s been one of my greatest collaborators.

Can you tell us something about CONSUMED? Is it just going to be a book or are you planning to make it into a movie?

Well, IMDb says it’s going to be a movie. I don’t know where they got that information from. Fifty years ago I thought I would have written my first novel, so I’m rather late. That’s why I really very much want it to exist as a book first. I never thought of it as an idea for a movie. People who have read it say it very much relates to my movies, but it is a different medium. Where before I had all these collaborators to create my vision, now there are only the words. It will be interesting when I do the interviews for the book, because normally I would be talking about Carol Spier, the actors, and now I won’t have any of those. I don’t wanna say too much about what the book is about, because it won’t be published until September. We sold it to about twenty countries, so it will be published in about fifteen languages.

Are there any other things you are working on?

No, I don’t have any projects, so there is a kind of freedom there. I’m not sure what I’ll do next, whether I will write another novel or another screenplay. And of course I always get sent screenplays by producers. If there’s something wonderful there I would surely consider doing it. But at the moment I am happily free of any future. I have no future! [Laughs]

I read that there was going to be a remake of SHIVERS. Are you in any way involved?

No, I know nothing about that. It has been suggested that there will be remakes of SHIVERS, RABID, THE BROOD, SCANNERS, VIDEODROME and THE FLY. And so far none of them actually happened. But I have nothing to do with those projects. Those early films, I don’t own the rights to them. The various people who do own them have the right to do remakes if they like and they don’t have to involve me. And really, I wouldn’t be very interested to be involved with remaking my own stuff because I already did it. But as I said, none of them actually happened and chances are they will never happen. But you never know.

You have inspired a lot of filmmakers over the years. Are there any young filmmakers in particular that you think of as kindred spirits?

Well, my son Brandon [laughs]. He’s made a film called ANTIVIRAL. But apart from that I don’t see too many movies and very few genre movies, I must confess. It’s not that I avoid them, it’s just that I read more books than I see movies these days. I haven’t seen enough to really make an assessment of the field, but I have no doubt there are some wonderful young filmmakers coming up because there always are.

Were you involved with Brandon’s film ANTIVIRAL in any way?

No, not really. There were a couple of moments where I gave directorial advice. Practical advice. Creatively I was not involved.

It was a beautiful film. I liked it a lot.

Thank you. I will tell him.

What surprises me is that you still experiment and still demand a lot of your audience, as with your last films COSMOPOLIS and MAPS TO THE STARS.

Yes, that has always been my original impetus. Filmmakers I admired early on, like Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman were not conventional, or mainstream. They didn’t make consumer-friendly items. They were serious about being artists and about what cinematic art could be. I’ve always maintained that. It’s still the basis of all my interest in filmmaking, so I’m happy that you see that.

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This interview first appeared in a shorter version in the Dutch fanzine Schokkend Nieuws. Above is the full version of this talk, edited only for clarity.