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David Cronenberg is the H.G. Wells of horror films: over thirty years and a dozen movies, he's taken us to the fringes of the future to ask important questions about the present. Unlike Wells — no genre hack himself — some of Cronenberg's visions look a lot like reality. His first film, 1975's Shivers, depicted a parasite that invaded an upscale singles complex, making its residents sexually voracious and spreading via sexual contact. (HIV? Crystal meth? Both?) Since then, he's addressed the human power struggle with technology (Videodrome, ExistenZ), male sexual competition (Dead Ringers), scientific hubris (The Fly), and the search for sexual community in jaded times (Crash). Although intricately styled and infamously gory, his films are about humanity at its most basic: the body, our instincts and our attempts to subvert them.
The first level of intent is to tell a good story. The movie has to work as a narrative suspense twist whatever. But I like a movie to have depth, to have a lot of levels to it, so the deeper you go the more things you find. You're not required to go that deep if you don't have a mind to. It all started at Cannes, the discussions of, "Is it a critique of America and its relationship with violence?" Me being the contrarian that I am — because I knew the answers they wanted — I said, look, there's no country in the world that was not founded on violence or territorial wars or suppression of the indigenous peoples, so you can't lay all that on the U.S. But at the same time, I wanted it to have resonance. That whole iconic Americana element that involves American Westerns, gangster movies, and a family movie at the center of it. Politically, I can feel it, though. Did being Canadian give you an advantage in telling the story? As I pointed out to the French, it's been the American critics who have been most eager to interpret the movie as a critique of America. I think that makes sense, because they're the most sensitized to what is happening in America right now. There are a lot of people who are critical, so they find this movie is a stick to beat America with. I'm the last one to say don't do that. But as a Canadian, I think I do have a subtle perspective shift on America. The saying is, is the fish a better creature to tell you what water is, or is the fisherman? It amazes me how liberal Canada is. So close, so far. I had a discussion with Michael Moore about Bowling for Columbine, in which he portrayed Canada as this mystically different country. He was saying Canada has as many guns per capita as the US, but somehow we don't kill as many people as they do here. And I said, "That's really misleading, Michael, because we have gun control in Canada, and those guns that you're mentioning are shotguns in the homes of farmers, they're not Glocks in the night tables of urban dwellers." In Canada, you can't get a permit for a gun for self-defense. It's not considered a reason to have a gun. So people don't have guns in their houses, and that makes a big difference, because then the kids don't take them to school and shoot each other. He wanted it to be a strange, cultural thing between us and I said, no, it's quantifiable. We didn't have slavery, we didn't have a Civil War, we didn't have a revolution, our disconnect from England was civil and sort of parliamentary. We never had the idea that taking the law into your own hands is the way to deal with an extreme situation and that you had the tool, i.e. a gun, to do it. In A History of Violence, you have a man with a gun protecting his family and importantly, his property, from other men with guns and literally taking the law into his own hands. In Canada, when you're threatened, you phone the police. You don't pull out your gun. It's a completely different attitude, which has historical antecedents. There's a lot of blood — and deconstructed faces and brain spillage — in this film. Why is the violence so graphic? Well, it's not. It's not a lot of screen time compared to any garden-variety action movie. But it has an impact because it comes only at moments. It's not because I have this theory of cinema and violence that I've imposed on the movie. It comes from the movie. It comes from certain characters. Where did they learn to be violent, and what does the violence mean to them? In this case, they learned it on the streets, and what it means to them is business — if you have to kill someone, you do it and you move on to the next thing. It's not martial arts, and it's not even sadistic pleasure, it's just business, and that gave me the key to the tone of the violence of the movie. And even though the violence seems to be justified, the human body doesn't know whether the violence visited on it was justified. The results are the same. And to me, that's what violence is really about — the human body. That's the violence we worry about the very most. There's cars crashing and buildings falling down, but really, if there's no damage to the human body it's still not what we worry about. So that was my other approach. It's all very body oriented, very intimate. In almost all your films, there is this fascination with human flesh and tissue — the placenta in Existenz, the videotape-swallowing vagina in Videodrome, the fuckable wound in Crash. Explain your fascination. For me, the first fact of human existence is always the human body. I'm an atheist; I don't believe in an afterlife. I think of myself as an existentialist humanist. As an existentialist humanist, you don't refer things to an afterlife or a superior being. You're saying, "Look, we're really all we've got, we've got to make things work here and now, not in some afterlife where all wrongs will be righted." To me, that's a positive philosophy. It does mean that I therefore look at the body in a very serious way. I think it's a universe unto itself and deserves further study. With History of Violence, did you want to address sexuality in a different way than you had in the past? No, not really. Sexuality is of interest to me for all the obvious reasons — plus the body-specific reasons — but I have to forget about my other movies when I'm making a movie. The sexuality comes out of the characters and out of the plot. There are two sex scenes, which are interesting because they take place between a married couple that have children. You don't see that anymore. It's either adolescent sex or forget it, whereas anybody who's married knows that sex gets more interesting and more complex and deeper as you get older. So I was interested in that. In the original script, there were no sex scenes. I added them. I felt in some ways you could call this movie Scenes From a Marriage. I have to know about the sexuality involved in that marriage if I'm really going to understand it. Of course, it's a perfect before and after — there's a pivotal moment in the film which changes the sexuality, and in looking at that, it's very revealing of what's going on under the surface with these characters. I think the sex scenes are really remarkable — they are intricate, they are real, they advance the plot. I thought the sex in Crash was excellently done in a different way. You're really good with these scenes. How do you direct them? Whether I was doing dialogue or violence or sex, my approach was always the same. It was never, "Okay, now we have to get tense because this is a sex scene, or this is a special moment because we're doing this violent scene." It's, "How do we choreograph it?" The actors are involved immediately, they're not manipulated like pawns, and that immediately takes the edge off. In a sex scene, as an actor, you're incredibly vulnerable — your own sexuality, your experience of sex is revealed in certain ways. But I don't do it that way. I encourage them to look at the monitors, so they know exactly what they look like — this goes for dialogue scenes as well — and what I'm seeing, and we use that to shape the scene. Some might assume, after watching Shivers, Dead Ringers or Videodrome, that you're afraid of sex. I'm very comfortable with it, I'm not embarrassed, I'm not uptight, I'm not voyeuristic. When I shoot sex scenes, it's business as usual, in a way. That attitude relaxes everybody on the set. That's pretty much it, you know. I mean other than that it's just trying to figure out what would these characters do it and how would they do it and why would they do it, and the resonances are quite nice too. Maria and Viggo really wanted to know everything that's going on, for example, in the scene where she dresses up as a cheerleader to seduce him. These are role-playing scenes, and the whole movie's about role-playing, and they understood that. Many of your movies involve technology and how it's used to override sexual reproduction or some natural function. This film is very primal. Have you lost faith in our ability to transcend our nature? Well, I don't know that we ever really do. This movie is not very much about technology, but my understanding of technology as expressed in other films is that technology is very human. And because technology is only human, it's an expression of ourselves, just as an artist expresses himself in a painting. It expressses all aspects of us, including the worst, the most destructive, the most sadistic, the most perverse. But it's still human. I think of technology as worth examining from that point of view because of the things it says about us. It's like a magnifying mirror, and we shouldn't be afraid to look into it that way. I guess there's always a desire for transcendence, but I wonder if it's an illusion. Once again, if you're a humanist, you're not really looking for transcendence of humanness, you're looking to come to terms with what is human. Because even the desire for transcendence is totally human. I don't think there are any other creatures that could conceive of such a thing. Shivers and Rabid were made in the late '70s, and they're considered prescient in terms of the AIDS epidemic. How does that sit with you today? Videodrome was considered to be prescient vis-a-vis the internet and interactive media. Even The Fly was considered, well, not to be prescient about AIDS, but actually about AIDS. There's a branch of science fiction which prides itself on predicting the future, and takes great delight in it when it comes to pass. Arthur C. Clarke wants to say, "I predicted satellites thirty years before there were satellites," and so on. I don't see myself that way. I don't think prophecy is my game. On the other hand, if you are doing what an artist should do — that is, lowering all your defenses and having antennae to pick up all those slight signals in the air that are there for everyone to pick up, you'll inevitably anticipate something. In Rabid, I invented a whole stem-cell research thing. The premise is based on tissue that's been neutralized to the point that it doesn't know what it should be, and that's what stem cells are. I actually did research that was available then, and I could see that the human body does produce these neutral cells that have the potential to be anything. I thought that was pretty fantastic. It's taken this long before it's actually manifested itself in medicine as a tool to be used, but I could anticipate this thing. I once thought that I could be a scientist, but I realized that I'd rather just invent the stuff then spend the thirty years really making it happen. What invention would you like to see become reality? Well, I like teleportation. I've already done that in The Fly, which of course was a remake of the original. You know, I read somewhere that some people are now thinking that maybe it is possible. Perhaps not in the foreseeable future with a creation as complex as a human being or a living creature, but with some more simple substances. It would have huge, huge repercussions. I wouldn't mind seeing that happen. Do you watch television? Not really. I used to watch it a lot as a kid,and that's where the idea for Videodrome came from. We had this rotating antenna, and when all the networks went off the air, you could rotate your antenna and pick up some strange things, like from Buffalo, Queens, Toronto, the Great Lakes. They'd be these fascinating, kind of shadowy and mysterious programs, and you weren't sure whether half of what you were seeing was your imagination or reality. Today, I watch sports. I don't really watch series TV anymore. I use my TV set basically as a DVD player. What's your next project? Nothing certain. There's a couple of possibilities, one that's been in the news a bit is London Fields. It's a challenge to try to get it on the screen, but there's a good script that was co-written by Martin Amis. Another possibility is an original script that Bruce Wagner wrote. He's a brilliant novelist and a good friend, and I've been trying for years to think of something we could do together. [Note: forty-eight hours after our interview, it was announced that HBO had commissioned Dead Ringers as a series. Holdout!] Do you think snark is an issue in reviewing? Does it seem that we've become a culture of criticism at the expense of creation? Yeah. Some of the reviews, you have to think — and I'm not talking about this movie — but you have to think, you can't hate my movie that much. It's pathological. There has to be something else going on there. And with blog culture, that's magnified. A celebrity walks down the street and instantly — musings about what they were wearing and how awful it was and how much they're hated. The obsession with celebrity is another thing. I remember Pauline Kael was the first film critic to review an actor's persona, not their performance, and I always thought that was curious. We recently interviewed Don Roos, who defended the Hollywood closet. He said, I don't want to know anything about an actor's off-camera life, because it inhibits their believability as a character. Yes, and it affects me as a director, when it comes to casting. Back when I was going to do Basic Instinct 2, I wanted to cast Rupert Everett as the male lead. Sharon [Stone] was fine with it, but the studio wouldn't allow it. They said no one would buy him as a heterosexual man. I said, "That's ridiculous — he's an actor." They said, "Well, he's militantly gay. He's made a point of being open about it." Can you imagine what will happen if people are cast entirely based upon their persona? You know, I had forgotten about Basic Instinct 2. Well ... let's not get into that. n° 
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