Interview with director Cronenberg

Interview by David Gilmour from Toro Magazine:

How do you follow up car-crash sex, slashers in snowsuits, and disturbing twin gynecologists? If you're David Cronenberg, you prepare for your next film, A History of Violence, by learning how to kill a man with your bare hands.

Cronenberg makes sexy films. In fact, it's his audience's sexual response that often drives the horror to such a deep level. His latest film, A History of Violence, is Cronenberg's twenty-first film. After movies such as The Fly (human disintegration), Crash, (auto wrecks-as-aphrodisiac), and Rabid (pretty girl gets rabies), the title of the new film makes one suspect God knows what. Cronenberg inclines toward the gross-out the way Hemingway inclined towards death.

Yet there are legions of David Cronenberg devotees, including pre-eminent film critic David Thomson who describes him as "one of the best directors working today." His detractors would like to see him spanked and sent to bed with no supper. They both have a point, depending on the film. So be warned, but don't be put off.

Cronenberg, as we are often told in film reviews, has never moved away from Canada, and for our interview I met him in a restaurant near his Forest Hill home in Toronto. In person, he has the presence of a novelist. Books come up often and are spoken of with the casualness of somebody who is at home in the world of literary considerations, somebody who spends a lot of time alone and enjoys it.

There's a lovely bit of dialogue at the beginning of your new film, A History of Violence. A man comes out of a motel and says, "I had a little trouble with the maid." A few minutes later you see what he's talking about and it's not what you think. It's the film's first major brush stroke and it's a black one.
[laughing] Yes, the movie definitely changes the second time you see it.

It reminded me of The Dead Zone, which is such a compelling piece of storytelling that once it starts up, even on television, you can't turn it off.
I can. If I'm flipping channels and I come across one of my movies, I turn it off immediately.

Are you afraid you're going to see something you don't like?
No. It's strange, I haven't figured it out because I have no desire to go back and correct things. As far as I'm concerned those old movies are artifacts. Besides, I can't watch them like movies because they're really documentaries of how I was feeling that day. If I ever get Alzheimer's it might be one of the upsides that I get to watch my movies again.

Does the sense of the importance or unimportance of your work change when you get older?
I've always had a sense of mortality. I had an old head even as a kid.

By which you understood that the stakes in anything were never that high?
I understood that they were high, but high in a cosmic way. I remember writing a story when I was in grade six, death was one of the characters, and when I finished reading it to the class, Sheila Spergel, a fellow student said, "That sounds like it was written by a ninety-year-old man." I took that as a compliment.
A novelist can fail and all he needs to start again is a new pad of paper and a pen. But when you fail in your profession, people won't give you the means to make another picture.
Do you remember that business with Robert Fulford? He reviewed my first film, Stereo [1969], said it was like an elegant dream, blah, blah, blah - really a good review. So I thought, 'This guy understands me, I'll show him my first commercial movie,' which was Shivers [1975]. Next thing I know, in Saturday Night , is the headline "You should know how bad this film is. After all, you paid for it." Fulford creamed the film, said it was pornographic, and then added that if this is the kind of film we have to make in order to have a feature-film industry in this country, we shouldn't have a film industry at all. I was shocked.
I remember talking to the head of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC), who had funded the film, and he said, "It's going to be hard for us to invest in your next movie, David." I told him that only a hundred people read Saturday Night. "That's right," he said, "but it's the wrong hundred people." Then the issue was raised in the House of Commons: They were talking about me and my little $185,000 film as if they had nothing better to talk about.

How old were you?
I wasn't Steven Spielberg [who directed his first short at thirteen]. It took me a long time to decide I wanted to make movies, so I was about twenty-nine. But Fulford really fucked me up. It took a couple of years to get the CFDC to invest in me again.

Ever see Fulford again?
I haven't seen him or spoken to him since. That was thirty years ago. But here's something very annoying: Fulford's been quoted as saying that after Shivers , he never saw another of my movies. But only recently he agreed with a criticism that someone made of all my films. How is that possible since he hasn't seen any of them?*

Do your hands still shake when you open up The New York Times to read a review of your movie?
[pauses] I wouldn't say they shake because I've done this a lot. And I've certainly taken some hammerings with movies like Crash . But reviews are important because critics are the first people to be articulate about your movie. They're an audience, a weird audience, but still an audience, and if they're going to attack it, you always hope at least they're going to get it.

But your body never forgets the pain it's suffered, regardless of what's happened in the interim.
That's absolutely correct. It's like child abuse. And I could, believe me, work myself into a lather of rage. I could go right back there, as if I were reading them for the first time and feel that sense of betrayal. There are many species of torture and one of them is when someone loves your movie and gets it and writes beautifully about it, but then in the next movie feels as if you have betrayed him and your talent and nails you to the cross.

Who did that?
David Denby (The New Yorker), Kenneth Turan (Los Angeles Times). I just spoke to Turan recently in Cannes. I seem to recall The Fly turned him against me.

Have you ever punched a critic?
I've wanted to. I'm not actually a violent person but I had to learn to kill with my bare hands to make this movie [ A History of Violence ]. So I could now kill a critic, any critic, in seconds. It'd be so fast people wouldn't know why he dropped to the ground. And I'm tempted to sometimes.
A few years ago I interviewed a director who said that the performance movie stars give is pretty much the same regardless of who directs them.
That's not true.

Is that a reflection of her limitations as a director?
Absolutely. I'll tell you the things I gave William Hurt for [ A History of Violence ]. He'd never played a gangster before, so I gave him the Philadelphia mob stuff, the goatee, the mansion where his character lives, his pretensions, his aspirations to be a kind of Irish manor lord. When you give an actor all that, that's direction. It's the stuff you've done in preparation.

Do you give a lot of directions on the set?
I don't do a lot of takes, but never just one. Sometimes the actor is almost there. You say, "I love this, but a little less of that." It's like cooking. You say, "Just a soupcon of that, a little ginger maybe." With William it was balancing things. The character's funny but he's got to be dangerous too. Not too broad but not too not-broad either. You don't have to say much. When we were doing Spider , Ralph Fiennes said he'd never been directed so much with so little. At first he thought he wasn't being directed at all.

Do you ever fire actors?
I've never fired an actor. Casting is a huge black art. People assume that some studio forces you to use certain people, but it's not like that at all. It's like you're in your garden and you're doing an experiment in genetics. Once I've got Viggo Mortensen [the main character in A History of Violence], I've got to find him a mate [Maria Bello]. They've got to be hot, but they also have to have been married for twenty years. Then I have to find them their kids. I'm doing this whole husbandry thing with my actors.

Can you get any actor you want?
No, but at least I'm at the point where they'll probably lie and not say, "I don't want to work with this guy."

Is it because they're too expensive or because they're scared to be in one of your movies?
It's been a long time since anyone's been scared. Dead Ringers was the one that frightened actors. And it wasn't because of me. It was because of the role. I went through thirty of the best North American actors, who all turned it down. Even people I'd worked with before: Jeff Goldblum turned it down, Chris Walken turned it down, James Woods - they all had different reasons and they all said later that they made a mistake. You know who the first guy I went to was? Michael Moriarty. William Hurt turned it down, too. Al Pacino, Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro. It was only when I went to someone who was not North American that it worked. I went to Jeremy Irons and he was interested and I was so fucking grateful. Talk about a battering. A director gets rejected too - it's not just actors - and it hurts. But you can't be vengeful and say, "That guy, he turned me down, I'm never going to work with him again."

What was the problem?
I think a lot of the Italian-American actors had trouble with gynecology. They'll play a murderer or serial killer or a rapist but not a gynecologist. The other thing that made it scary was they had to play twins; real twins though, not the good twin and the evil twin.
A few years later, when Jeremy Irons won an Academy Award for Reversal of Fortune, he stood onstage and thanked you more effusively than the director who'd actually directed the film he won for. That seemed like something of a breach in protocol.
I was watching it with my wife and I almost fell out of bed. It was this: Jeremy knew he should have won the Oscar for Dead Ringers; he knew that his stature as a superb actor was really brought to the fore - for an American audience - by that film.

What happens when you get an actor who says no to a piece of direction?
I've never had that.

There was a problem, wasn't there, with Elias Koteas doing a gay scene in Crash?
Yeah. But he did it.

What happened there?
I don't yell and scream. It's just not my style. It's always a seduction, always Machiavellian. The one thing I never do is yell. Except once. That was at James Woods [in Videodrome (1983)]. I said, "Will you just stop fucking around and just get out there and say the fucking lines!" You have to understand, though, that Woods is a very smart man, but he got to the point where he was exasperating, and he knew what I was saying when I said it. But with Elias it was odd. It wasn't homophobia so much as a comment [James] Spader made triggered some cultural aversion to being perceived in a certain way. I think he was testing me to see if he could get out of it. I made him understand that the whole movie was blown if he didn't do that scene.

Let's get back to A History of Violence . It's about a man who has gone from a life of murder and practised violence - like you, he can kill a man with his bare hands - to running a restaurant in a small town; he's got a wife, a teenage son. All that dark stuff is behind him. Now, some critics would say that people don't change, that a bully in grade four turns into an adult bully, that an asshole in high school is still an asshole at fifty.
I know what you're talking about, but look at my children, for example. They surprised me. They have not turned out the way I thought they would at all. They changed while they were growing up. And if you thought you ever knew anybody, you thought you knew your kids, much more so than even your wife. But I also have the existentialist approach, which is that identity is a created thing. It's a willed and created thing, not just a given.

Really?
I can feel the assembly of my personality as I wake up each day.

But your mother tongue is still going to be English tomorrow morning. Your tastes in food and music and sex are going to be the same. How is that an assembled thing?
I'm choosing to assemble myself the same way. I could choose to assemble myself a different way. I think there are instances when people do that. Don't you ever find yourself saying occasionally, "God, he's really changed"?

I don't want to pry into your personal life but let me ask you this: Have you changed in any substantial way since you were in your twenties?
No. But that's because I like me.

You mentioned your children a moment ago.
I've got three children, two daughters and a son. In fact, I'm a grandfather now. I have a two-year-old granddaughter. It's fantastic because it's like having a little kid again but you don't have to take care of her. My theory is it takes five people to raise a child. Doesn't matter who those five people are. It's like working on a film set. My nephew, Aaron, just directed his first feature film, Rhinoceros Eyes . A week into the shoot he phoned me and said, "How do you survive this? I've never been so tired in my life. I'm exhausted. It's swarming me." I said, "Take naps, wear good shoes on the set, and calm down."

Some people feel that parenthood is a long and protracted farewell. A farewell to snowsuits, then to high school, then to living at home - a sweet goodbye, but a goodbye nevertheless.
[smiling] But are they ever really gone? Occasionally you might wish that they are a little more gone.

Have you ever spotted your child out in the world when he didn't know you were there?
Isn't that amazing? He's a human being without you. I feel the same way about movies.
It may be a cliche about them being like your children, but it's spooky. They go out into the world and have relationships with people that you don't know about. They have those relationships without any reference to you. You don't know about them till later or you never know about them. Movies do the same.

When you meet people, do they think that because they've seen your movies they have a very private relationship with you?
I understand that. A few years ago I read Martin Amis's London Fields [slotted as Cronenberg's next feature film]. I loved it and phoned him. I wanted to fly over to meet him, right then and there. He said, "Well, I don't think you have to do that," and I realized that just because I'd read his book and thought I knew everything about him, and wanted to hug him, he didn't necessarily have the same relationship with me.

You're very generous with people. I saw you at Convocation Hall in Toronto years ago. After the question-and-answer session, you talked to every single person who wanted to talk to you for as long as they wanted to talk.
I don't do that kind of thing very often. I live more like a writer, hermetically, sealed away, reclusive. I don't party. I've never been a party guy. The only reason to go to a party is to get girls, and once you've got your girl you don't have to go to any more parties. What I like is a writer's ideal: You wake up whenever you want and you have no responsibilities other than writing when you feel like it. If you need to read a paper, then you read it; if you need to watch TV, you watch TV. But you don't have to speak to anyone or go meet anyone. You don't have to shave; that's my ideal day.

But that's not what happens when you're making a movie.
No, it isn't.

And while we're on the subject, I have to tell you that this last film, A History of Violence, struck me as just about perfect.
So perfect that I should never make another one?

No. But you could take a few years off. Maybe write a novel.
I wanted to be a novelist before I became a filmmaker.

Maybe now's the time.
[long pause]: Those are such dangerous words. ?

*While Robert Fulford concedes that he has not seen a Cronenberg film in its entirety since Shivers in 1975, Fulford doesn't recall writing about Cronenberg's work since then. Toro was unable to locate the Fulford commentary Cronenberg is referring to.
Five must-see Cronenberg movies"
1. Shivers (1975)
A gory and strangely erotic film about a parasitic worm that transforms the residents of a bland Montreal high-rise into priapic zombies. Lovely final shot as the building itself excretes larvae-like cars to go forth and spread havoc.

2. The Brood (1979)
Imagine giving birth to creatures who act out your rage on the people who have provoked it - a wonderfully nasty film with killers in little snowsuits. Watch for a chilling scene where one of them clasps a banister with bloody fingers and scuttles away. Reviled by critics who should have known better.

3. The Dead Zone (1983)
Cronenberg is one of the few directors to understand that Christopher Walken has more to offer than bizarre diction and weirdness. Here, in an adaptation from Stephen King's book of the same title, Walken plays a life-defeated man with such sadness, such tenderness that you cheer for him even when he's hiding in a church balcony with a loaded rifle.

4. Dead Ringers (1988)
An extraordinarily creepy story about twin gynecologists, one a smirking womanizer, the other a sensitive weakling (both played by Jeremy Irons). What can one say except that when a gynecologist slides into drug addiction and then madness, imagine, for a second, being one of his patients. Note the colour of the gowns in the operating theatre. That's Inquisition red.

5. Crash (1996)
Based on the book by J.G. Ballard, about people who are sexually excited by car accidents and the injuries that result from them. Crash appalled many people but won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Chicago critic Roger Ebert got it right when he suggested viewers should substitute their own sexual preferences for those in the movie. Not a film, however, for the faint of heart.