Mind over matter

David Cronenberg reflects on a most bizarre body: his own corpus of work. By Joshua Rothkopf

In the realm of cinematic ickiness, David Cronenberg has no twin. He hasn’t so much outgrown his early, low-budget Canadian thrillers—like The Brood (1979) and Scanners (1981)—as refined them over a remarkably intellectual career, bringing his disciplined obsessions to Hollywood, Cannes and the mainstream. Now in his fourth decade of making features, Cronenberg, 65, acquires something that even his most rabid fans couldn’t have expected: grand-old-man status.

“My films have been called other names, yes, so I definitely prefer ‘classics,’ ” the director says wryly, on the phone from his home in Toronto. We’re chatting about IFC Center’s “Cronenberg Classics,” currently in progress and unspooling at midnights on weekends. “ ‘Classics’ doesn’t quite make me feel like the game is over.” Does it make him feel decrepit? Cronenberg laughs. “That comes anyway.”

The seven titles in the series show an impressive growth—and one can’t help but use words like growth when considering Cronenberg’s slippery viscera: a canon of cancerous organs and new orifices. He uses words like that himself. “You’re trying to squeeze the most juice out of the fruit you’ve got,” he says between occasional coughs and sniffles. He’s caught the flu from his granddaughters, and it’s thrilling to suggest to David Cronenberg that he drink lots of fluids. “Oh, I drink them constantly,” he bats back gamely.

Meanwhile, the movies hold up beautifully. Revisiting 1983’s unsettling Videodrome is bound to create an instant sticky cocoon (see?) for adventurous filmgoers, especially in the context of a movie theater at the witching hour. (“It would air at midnight if it were being shown on TV anyway,” Cronenberg offers. “I actually had that in mind when I made it.”) Videodrome is Cronenberg’s urtext, a model for much of what is distinctly “him.” Essentially, it has an adventurous, arrogant hero riding a technological frontier—in this case, James Woods pushing his tawdry cable company in a new direction. That trip’s perverse destination will involve a modification of the body. “Long live the new flesh” is Videodrome’s ominously evangelical final line.

“The first fact of human existence is the body,” Cronenberg says. “But in a moviemaking sense, it goes much deeper. If you’re an actor, the body is your instrument; that’s what you’ve got to work with. For a dramatic artist, even for a director, the whole question of identity and body is crucial because most of what you photograph is human bodies.”

Cronenberg took his primordial premise to Hollywood after Videodrome, birthing a pair of popular successes you can’t imagine being made by anybody else: the Christopher Walken vehicle The Dead Zone, still the best Stephen King adaptation to date, and a superbly romantic (and gross) remake of The Fly.

“I was very lucky on those films,” the director recalls. “I got to make them in the same way as Videodrome, in Toronto with my hometown crew.” Cronenberg also credits some of his success on The Dead Zone to his Barnum-like Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis, something of a kindred spirit in boldness. “Dino was preoccupied with David Lynch’s Dune at the time, so I had fairly free rein.”

After The Fly, Cronenberg waded into treacherous literary waters with unusual panache. He remains persuasive when talking about the process of adaptation (he pens his own scripts) and the “genetic fusing” of artistic sensibilities that resulted in two of his most respected works: the “unfilmable” Naked Lunch and the award-winning Crash.

“It’s very much like DNA,” Cronenberg suggests. “You’re melding with people like William Burroughs or J.G. Ballard to make something that neither of you would’ve produced alone. When we presented Crash at Cannes, a Finnish journalist stood up and said, ‘This is an abomination; you’ve completely destroyed a great novel.’ And Ballard, who was sitting right next to me, said, ‘I actually think the movie is better than the book.’ It was my own Alvy Singer moment.”

His later movies, the sci-fi–ish eXistenZ and British kitchen-sink psychodrama Spider, pushed Cronenberg even further into the independent sphere, with mixed commercial outcomes. Still, his confidence was battle-tested, and he seems stronger for it. Cronenberg is too modest to admit as much. “I actually think it’s me just being cagey and paranoid,” the director says. (Not too cagey: He’s just signed on to do MGM’s The Matarese Circle, an international thriller set to star Denzel Washington and Tom Cruise.) “It’s sort of important for everyone involved to know they’re making a movie with me. I try to be as honest as possible.” Spoken from the heart—or some other internal organ.

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