Tim Lewis 

David Cronenberg: ‘My imagination is not a place of horror’

The great Canadian director talks to Tim Lewis and answers questions from Observer readers and cultural figures including Margaret Atwood and Viggo Mortensen
  
  

David Cronenberg portrait
David Cronenberg at 71: 'You have huge power and potency at this age.' Photograph: Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty Images Photograph: Nicolas Guerin/Contour by Getty Images

When the great Canadian film-maker David Cronenberg turned 70 last year he felt, in a word, old. An admirer of Franz Kafka, he said he found himself comparing himself to Gregor Samsa, the protagonist of The Metamorphosis, who wakes up one morning to find – very Cronenbergian – that he’s become a giant beetle.

“You are a new creature,” Cronenberg explains. “Ask anybody who is not advanced in years what they think of 70-year-olds – if they think of them at all – and it’s Alzheimer’s, senile old people and Zimmer frames. Just, ‘Wow, what a burden on the healthcare system.’ Three score and ten, that’s supposed to be it, that’s the biblical age. So there are precedents for considering 70 to be a major moment in your life.”

Once he had come to terms with the shock, though, Cronenberg returned to his work with renewed vigour. He directed a script called Maps to the Stars, a savagely funny takedown of contemporary Hollywood, that he had been tinkering with for a decade with the writer Bruce Wagner. He also finished his debut novel, Consumed, which has been perhaps 50 years in the making. Both are unveiled in the next few weeks.

“You have huge power and potency at this age,” Cronenberg continues. “There’s the mythology of age, the bearded elder, the wise old man. In some cultures advanced age is very much revered, the Chinese culture, Confucius and so on: you are supposed to gain in wisdom and experience and therefore be quite a valuable member of society who should be honoured and listened to. At the moment, in the west, we certainly don’t have that.”

Cronenberg is certainly not ready for his Zimmer frame just yet. He’s 71 now, but maintains a slim, athletic build and often disappears into the hills around his home in Toronto on his bicycle. His soaring hair has a metallic sheen and the density of chinchilla fur. He is ferociously intelligent and quick-witted, but, over a long conversation on Skype, not in the least bit intimidating. His reputation in film circles is for being decent, even moral; qualities not easily retained in that industry.

It’s clear, too, that Cronenberg’s ambition is undimmed. “I can say,” he goes on, “that the novel that I wrote now, I really expected to have written when I was 21 instead of 71, but it couldn’t have been the same novel and I doubt that it would have been as good. I really don’t think it could have been.”

Maps to the Stars, too, will also surely go down as one of the finest films in a career that has been both consistently surprising but also relentlessly Cronenberg: from the chaotic early body-horror flicks (Shivers; Scanners; The Fly; Dead Ringers) to slicker, more psychologically intense recent movies (A History of Violence, his most mainstream film to date; Eastern Promises; A Dangerous Method). Maps stars Julianne Moore as Havana Segrand, an ageing actress desperate not to be tossed on the Hollywood scrapheap. She has a guileless personal assistant, or “chore whore”, called Agatha (Mia Wasikowska) and a wild-eyed therapist, Stafford Weiss (John Cusack). A sprawling, nightmarish tale also swallows Weiss’s Bieber-esque son, Benjie (Evan Bird), and a limo driver, Jerome Fontana (Robert Pattinson), who is, of course, really an actor and screenwriter.

“The movie is obviously a work of fiction, it’s not a documentary on how Hollywood works; it uses compression, exaggeration, all those techniques,” says Cronenberg. “But both Bruce and I would resist calling it a satire. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal is a satire, but this movie is too realistic to be a satire. In fact, Bruce has said that every line of dialogue in the movie he has heard spoken by someone. He could probably tell you who.”

As an outsider Cronenberg is in many respects excellently placed to take a swipe at the eccentricities of Hollywood. He has lived in Toronto – the backdrop for many of his movies – his entire life and Maps to the Stars is the first time he has actually filmed in Los Angeles; he spent five days there mostly, he says wryly, shooting palm trees. But Cronenberg is not a total outsider. Long ago, he was tapped up to see if he might direct Return of the Jedi, and over the years he has had many involved, ultimately doomed discussions with several of the major studios about making films, perhaps most intriguingly a spy caper with MGM starring Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise.

“I’m 2,500 miles away from Hollywood and consider myself literally and figuratively halfway between Hollywood and Europe in terms of my cinema sensibility,” says Cronenberg. “And being a Canadian, being outside the mainstream of America – as Marshall McLuhan used to say – allows you to have perceptions that you could not have otherwise. Like they say: ‘A fish doesn’t know what water is.’ You have to be outside water to know what water is.”

Consumed, meanwhile, is as singular and idiosyncratic as any of Cronenberg’s films. Any synopsis is woefully inadequate, but at the centre of the book is a pair of globetrotting journalists whose reporting embroils them in a horrific murder, organ trafficking and some kinky sex.

Cronenberg is not joking when he says that Consumed was half a century in the making. His father owned a bookstore in Toronto and wrote journalism and true-crime stories. “I used to fall asleep to the sound of his IBM Selectric and before that I would fall asleep to the sound of his Underwood typewriter,” Cronenberg recalls, sitting in his office at home in front of a wall of books, many inherited from his father. At the University of Toronto, he studied science, dreaming of one day being like Isaac Asimov, the scientist and sci-fi author. After a year, Cronenberg switched to English literature and there he made friends who were shooting their own films.

“I remember feeling that my writing was a pastiche of Nabokov and William Burroughs, or a combination of the two,” he says. “Of course, they are very different writers, so that still created a new thing. But one of the things about film-making was that I felt I had no influences. Not being arrogant, I felt I could invent myself as a film-maker from scratch. I had seen Bergman, but I wasn’t feeling I was making a Bergman film. I loved Fellini, but not being an Italian Catholic, I couldn’t possibly make a Fellini film. Nobody in Canada was making genre pictures, so making a Canadian horror film, that was a pretty new thing.”

And what about directing a film of his novel, Consumed? “Once I finished it, I thought that is what I’d really want to do,” says Cronenberg. “I had five producers who read it and said they would love to make it into a movie. But I don’t actually want to make it myself. I’ve already done it. It would be weirdly like doing a remake of my own thing.”

With that, Cronenberg hunkers down and prepares for an inquisition on his seven decades of life from old friends and Observer readers.

YOU ASK THE QUESTIONS

If it were possible to enter any film’s time/location/stylisation etc, which one of yours would you choose to dwell in and why?
Nick Newman, London

I’m really happy not to be in any of my movies. There’s a sense in which you create a film in order to experience something that you are not really living in. So that would be anathema to me, I would not want to live in any of those movies. In fact, for me, part of the reason you make a movie is to experience something that intrigues you, perhaps disturbs you, you need to deal with it, experience it somehow but you need it to be at a distance from you. You need it to be safely encapsulated the way a grain of sand is encapsulated in a pearl by an oyster. It’s an irritation. You hope you have created these movies that are like pearls but you wouldn’t want to be inside them because inside them is that grain of sand or worse.

Why did you cut the lactating moment in Crash?
Rosanna Arquette, actress

Haha! Rosanna was breastfeeding her baby when we shot Crash, and in one of the scenes where she’s having sex in a car with James Spader suddenly this huge spurt of milk shot across the screen. It was pretty sensational, we were all excited that it happened, but the thing is in the movie that character is not pregnant and is not breastfeeding, so dramatically it made no sense. And though Crash is kind of a fevered dream-nightmare, it still it has its own logic.

So I cut it not because of censorship or anything else – really I thought it was a great moment, I loved it, and her breasts were very full in those scenes as a result, which was also rather nice. She certainly didn’t need implants!

How do you survive the horrors of your own imagination? What is/are your favourite a) alcoholic drink b) other drugs?
Matthew Hill, Lyon

My imagination is not full of horrors at all. This is the misunderstanding of what my movies are. First of all, I think all my movies are funny. Not everything in them is funny, but they are full of humour. And second, it’s not really my imagination. Anybody looking at the news on the internet or in a newspaper, there’s horror there every day – compared with that, my imagination is a wonderful playground! So I don’t feel that my imagination is a place of horror at all.

As for the second part, I actually don’t drink. The most I’d do is have a little bit of red wine while I have a meal. Left to my own devices, not going out with people who are ordering wine, I would never even think about ordering an alcoholic drink. It’s not a religious thing, or a question of morality or ethics, simply my body, I discovered early on, does not respond well to alcohol. My mucus membranes don’t like it. I’ve only been drunk like three times in my life literally. At the age of 71, I can count the actual times and I wasn’t crazy about the experience.

That goes for the other drugs too. Yes, in the 1960s I had experience of various drugs as everybody did, but I didn’t really find anything that was congenial. I did one LSD trip, it was very potent but there were disturbing aspects that I didn’t enjoy. As an artist, one of the things I value most is clarity. You are constantly striving for incredible clarity, which maybe you never achieve, but I have found that drugs and alcohol derange that. So I’m boring, what can I say?

Although you are several years younger than I am, we both attended the University of Toronto in the early 1960s and we both have a background in the biological sciences. Was there anything in particular about the University of Toronto that might have suited you for an initial interest in horror films? Was it the pickled eyeballs, preserved foetuses, and venomous snakes in the old, and very gothic, zoology building? They certainly made an impression on me!
Margaret Atwood, author

Yes, I did my dissection of foetal pigs and a few other things, because I started off in organic chemistry. I think I would’ve ended up being a cell biologist. And it was pretty gothic, that’s true, and in fact it was the way the science was being taught that drove me out of the field of science. I felt that the students around me were so different from me and I ended up spending all my time hanging round with all the English language and philosophy students.

So I can’t say the University of Toronto led me to horror, but what it did do was lead me to cinema, though I never studied cinema. There was a student called David Secter who was making a movie called Winter Kept Us Warm, which starred some friends of mine. And it never occurred to me that you could make a movie. It was unlike someone growing up in LA where everybody’s parents were in the business. In Toronto, no one’s parents were in the movie business because there wasn’t a movie business.

So that was more influential in leading me to biological horror. I never thought of the biology part of it as horrific anyway. I thought that was all incredibly exciting, even dissecting the foetal pig, which if you shot that scene in a movie, it might be rather gross for people. To feel that you were really beginning to understand the form of life, how life came to be and exists, that was exciting. That’s not horror to me, that’s pure ecstasy actually.

You’ve a habit of using the same actors for a few films in a row. Who would be in your dream cast?
John Sowerby, Miami, Florida

I honestly have worked with a lot of actors who I really like a lot, but you don’t do an actor a favour by miscasting him. So there is no dream cast without a script and characters you are trying to cast. There’s no abstract in other words. For example, it did occur to me that it would be very interesting to make a movie in which you had Viggo Mortensen and Rob Pattinson. I think they’d be very interesting together, but I don’t have that movie or the characters for them to play.

You go way back, I loved working with Christopher Walken [on The Dead Zone], I thought I’d work with him again, but there was never quite the role. Same with Jimmy Woods [Videodrome], [James] Spader [Crash]. I had a pretty good time with all of my leading men and women really, so I could imagine a movie which they were all in. The way Fellini in had everybody in his life, all his actors in a dance with him.

What do you think of the theory of “inflation”, and do you believe in the idea of the “multiverse”? If you do believe in it, where the hell did the “big bang” come from?
Viggo Mortensen, actor

Well, that’s a big question. To scale it all down, I have no idea where the big bang came from because I really can’t imagine the reality of that. But I do think the Earth is unique in terms of its life forms and how it evolved. We are the only planet that has the life forms that are advanced as we are, that’s my instinct. Even if there were life forms on other planets, I think we’ll never reach them, they will be so far away. So existentially and functionally we are alone even if theoretically we are not. But I think we really are and that’s all the more reason to take better care of the planet.

I’m not sure I answered his question but I did my best. We have some deep discussions, Viggo and I, but we also tell a lot of jokes to even it up.

I very much enjoyed your performance in Don McKellar’s Last Night. Do you like acting, and would you like to do it more (if more good roles were offered to you)?
David Jackson, Washington, DC

I do like acting and I love being praised for my acting, so thank you for that. It doesn’t happen often. Acting is interesting but I don’t know now if I’d be prepared to fly to the Isle of Wight and spend three or four months there or Australia or whatever. But if the role was really interesting enough, substantial enough, maybe I would.

I do enjoy it, and it’s an entirely different universe from directing; you really discover a lot more about what an actor goes through when you try it yourself. You are incredibly vulnerable and you understand why an actor is so obsessed with his body and his voice and his clothes, because that’s your instrument. As a director nobody cares what you look like or what you are wearing or whether you are sick as long as you can say “Action!” and “Cut!”. It’s kind of shocking and the only way you can realise that is if you try yourself.

Your films often contain loops: life and death, body and mind, the conscious and unconscious. What are the challenges in evoking endless returns within a medium that is experientially finite?
Candice Breitz, artist

I’m not sure that I quite understand! But for me, my movie-making is like a diamond, in the sense that it has many facets but when you look in each facet, you are looking into the inner core of the same diamond. That diamond is really my experience of life, that’s all it is, and so it’s inevitable I return to the same themes and tropes and considerations but from slightly different angles.

Could you beat David Lynch in an arm wrestle?
Jack Cody, Kilkenny, Ireland

That’s interesting. I’ve had Bob’s Big Boy burgers with David Lynch when I was doing The Dead Zone and he was doing Dune and we were both working for [the Italian film producer] Dino De Laurentiis. That’s when we got to know each other a little bit. I think I could take him. Especially if he was meditating at the time.

What are five films that you particularly admire and why?
John Landis, director

Not to be difficult, but I don’t have a list. The number of films I’ve seen that have impressed me is endless. But actually, Winter Kept Us Warm is the most influential film of my life in a weird way. It wasn’t a horror film – it was a drama about students coping with life at the University of Toronto – and it wasn’t because of its artistry. It was just the fact it was made. It’s hard to reproduce the shock I felt when I saw my classmates on screen in a real movie, acting. It was like magic: you are watching TV and suddenly you are in the TV, acting in some TV series. It was that kind of shock.

Word has it that Peter Jackson may direct an episode of Doctor Who. Is there a TV show you would consider directing an episode of?
yesfuture, posted online

I’ve been offered episodes to direct, butI have to say it doesn’t attract me at all. All the things that make directing interesting – casting the lead actors, finding the locations, working on the scripts, developing the scripts, finding your crew, working with the crew – you’d have none of those if you were doing a series because they are already established. You’re more like a traffic cop.

Has something been lost with the move away from physical SFX to CGI?
Archaen, posted online

CG, of course, can be overused and it has been overused. You see that in a lot of the superhero movies, it’s just ridiculous stuff that’s going on. It’s amazing technically but it has lost its physical presence. But that doesn’t mean that the answer is more physical effects. To me it’s not really a technological question, it’s a question of art: how good is the director at understanding his audience? I use a lot of CG in my movies, it’s just not obvious. You use it for small things, just heightening little moments, it’s pretty invisible the way I use CG. It becomes another very effective tool, no different from lighting or costume or editing. That’s where it’s most effective.

What is your favourite biscuit?
Misterlks, posted online

Shortbread. If there was a plate of shortbread I’d probably eat it all.

Fast cars bore me to tears. Could you explain why you find them so interesting?
Steven Hughes, Bristol

Which philosophers, would you say, have the most impact on your work
Howard Shore, composer

I consider myself a junior existentialist. When I started to read Sartre and by association Heidegger I thought, “Oh wow, this is what I’ve been thinking.” There’s a great lecture Sartre gave called “Existentialism is a Humanism”. He basically said, “Look, we humans are really all we’ve got, forget about the afterlife, it doesn’t exist. Forget about God, there is no God. We should accept that and if we did and realised that compassion and humanistic empathy were valuable – more than valuable but crucial – then the world would be a better place.” So that’s really my approach to life.

Cars have always represented almost flight, it’s like being able to fly. And freedom, sexual freedom in the old days. So it depends how young this person is because it’s not so much the fast-ness, it’s the car-ness that’s the issue, the essence. At the moment, I’m driving a Tesla, it’s an electric car and I find it terrifically exciting and that has nothing to do with how fast it goes – although it is really fast. Nonetheless if you see a Lamborghini or a Ferrari driven at speed, it’s pretty impressive, it’s like an animal, there’s a beauty to it. I could go on and on about the beauty of the now-outmoded internal combustion car, but there was a prehistoric magnificence to them. If this person cannot respond to that I have no problem with that, but I need to know the experience this person had of so-called fast cars. If you are just watching them from your balcony on a highway then of course it’s boring.

How has your Jewishness influenced your films?
Professor Nathan Abrams, Y Felinheli, Wales

Undoubtedly it has because it’s influenced the formation of my sensibility and my life. My parents weren’t fanatical about it, I never was in a synagogue, I was never bar mitzvahed. My mother did speak some Yiddish to me, but that’s not a religious thing, that’s a cultural thing and I still have an affection for Yiddishness as a result. It would be easy to say that Jews always feel like outsiders in any society because of the diaspora and there are a lot of philosophical and interesting cultural things you could say, but I don’t know that in my case that was particularly true. I always felt very much a Canadian and embedded in Canada, so I would mix the Jewishness with the Canadian-ness. I don’t think you can separate these components of a life.

What’s the most frightening film ever made?
Toby Sculthorp, London

That’s totally subjective because what frightens some people is like a laugher to somebody else. For each person there might be a different answer to that question. Bambi is a terrifying film for a kid because Bambi’s mother is killed. When you’re a child that’s a terrifying thing. So does that qualify? There’s a movie called Blue Lagoon, which was really scary for me as a kid. It’s kids on a boat, the boat sinks, the parents drown, the kids are alone on the island with a drunken sailor. There’s a scene in a cave with a snake and a skeleton and all that stuff, and that was a scary movie for me. Probably for an adult not so scary.

Then, as an adult, for me, Don’t Look Now, Nic Roeg’s film with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland. That really got to me, that was very effective film-making, its anticipation of death was so palpable. On the other hand if the person who asked this question saw it maybe it wouldn’t have any effect. There’s no absolute universal.

Would you consider yourself an optimist?
Tomas René, London

I’m a Canadian, what can I say? Of course! Yes, I’m actually in general a very happy-go-lucky guy and that’s the thing that surprises people because of the movies. You worry about the environment, you worry about the future of the planet, you think as an existentialist, when you die that’s the end, it’s oblivion. People might think, “My God, that’s a horrible way to live.” But no, I’m actually quite optimistic and happy.

Maps to the Stars is out on 26 September; Consumed by David Cronenberg is published by Fourth Estate on 9 October, £18.99. Click here to buy it for £15.19 with free UK p&p

 

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