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Body Language: An Interview With David Cronenberg


Wired News freelancer Scott Thill interviewed ultimate creep-out director David Cronenberg for the story, "Cronenberg Drifts From Tech Horror, but Shocks Remain." Here’s the full, unedited transcript of the interview.

Wired News: Where does a crime drama like Eastern Promises fit into your body of work, no pun intended? You started out as a sci-fi and horror pioneer.

David Cronenberg: Well, I think it fits in beautifully. For me, there’s no difference, I have to say. There’s no difference between doing a scene featuring strange body parts crawling around or dialogue. It’s all about trying to make it work, getting the best out of the actors, the dialogue, the lighting, the drama. Creatively, it just doesn’t feel different to me. The challenges are basically the same. For example, if you look at Eastern Promises, we have a lot of tattoos on the main character, so I tried to make sure that they looked correct, that they’re accurate, that the meaning they have works for the movie. In the scenes where Viggo is getting tattooed, I wanted to make sure it looked correct in terms of how it’s done. That’s sort of special effects, but it’s also drama. Stephan Dupuis, who won an Oscar for The Fly, did the tattoos, so I’m working with the same people. But we get excited about different things. The fans have to realize that this is exciting for me. It feels the same. I can’t look at it analytically, you know?

WN: Body and horror are still central to the film. Bodies are getting cut up, slashed, impaled. You have Viggo battling to death in a bath house while totally naked.

Cronenberg: Yeah, and of course body horror was not my term. It was a term someone used to describe what I was doing, so it is not a category in my head that I use to make films. Those analytical things come after the movie is made; they don’t come before it for me. In fact, they don’t come to me at all unless I’m talking to someone like you and we discuss it. But in terms of making the movie, it never comes up. It’s just not a thought.

WN: How does the body play a role in this film in difference or perhaps in similarity to the films you’ve made before?

Cronenberg: Well, you have to realize that almost all of filmmaking is body, for anybody. You can’t photograph an abstract concept. You are photographing the human body, and primarily the face. So I think that any filmmaker, if he’s honest about it, will realize that at the bottom of what he’s doing is body orientation and body consciousness. Even when I’m doing a dialogue scene and lighting Viggo’s face, I’m trying to get his cheekbones and hair right, trying to get that smile and attitude. It’s all body language. It’s just as important and difficult to get right as any of the more extreme things I have done in movies like Existenz, which I suppose is the most recent film of mine that you’d consider sci-fi.

WN: There seems to be a pullback from the tech in Eastern Promises as well. The weapons used are simple knives. I didn’t even see a gun.

Cronenberg: There are no guns in the film. There’s a mention of one, but that’s about it. Of course, on the set, there’s tons of technology all the time. Whether or not it actually gets into the film, you as a filmmaker are dealing constantly with it. In many cases, it’s new technology. New stuff comes out all the time. After all, I’m making a movie every two or three years at my fastest. Every time I come on the set, there’s new stuff. So I get to play with the toys, and I do enjoy it. I made a short for Cannes in my bathroom using a Panasonic HVX-200, a sort of prosumer version of a hi-def camera. It was very exciting to be able to make a short like that with my family, and then watch it projected on a huge screen at Cannes for an audience of 2,500 dressed in tuxedos. And the short itself wasn’t about technology, but the tech had to be there before I could actually make it, you know? So, once again, the experience of making a film always involves playing with and mastering a great deal of technology, whether it’s actually in front of the camera or behind it. It’s still there for me to get my hands dirty.

WN: In a way, the pullback of tech within the film hasn’t really dampened the impact of its violence, what little there is of it, for the viewer.

Cronenberg: I completely agree. In fact, it’s quite the converse. The screenwriter himself didn’t have any guns in the screenplay, and I like that, even though it’s not completely accurate given the London of today. There was a time when the cops in London prided themselves on never having to carry guns, but that’s passé. Everyone there carries guns now, and there is a lot of gunplay there now, as there is everywhere. But a gun is not intimate, you know? Even if you’re standing three feet away from someone, you can abstract that person, who is at a real distance from you. But if you have to stick a knife in someone, you’re going to feel their blood, you’re going to feel their sinews, and you’re going to smell their breath. It’s a very intimate thing, and you have to be the certain kind of person who can and would do that. In a way, it’s actually scarier and has much more impact.

Think of it: We’re in a very bizarre era right now where snuff porn that never really existed before is now available, via Muslim extremists mostly. But if you want to see beheadings or stonings, you can see them any time you want on your computer, which brings it close to home. And it’s low tech too: Not the internet, but a woman being stoned to death. What could be more primitive that that? And you can see it if you want. It’s quite scary and strange, but also very intimate.

WN: I go back to Videodrome, where the televisual "new flesh" was that sort of abstracted reality. But this film seems to reinscribe the hyperreal nature of the real flesh using not much more than knives, which is more terrifying.

Cronenberg: That’s right, because you can get so abstracted that you lose sight of what violence really is. When we talk about violence, we’re talking about destroying the human body in the most physically possible way. And a thing like a gun sort of separates you from that, as does art, religion, statistics and so on. There are all kinds of things that veil that reality. And there are things like, "Well, I killed him but he’s going to heaven, so that’s OK." It gives you an out. But if you don’t believe that, you have to see murder as an act of absolute destruction, which puts it into its proper perspective. 

WN: You called stoning "primitive," but do you find that to be the case? Does it matter how the body is destroyed, if the point is that murder is absolute destruction? The American campaign of shock and awe was basically code for raining technology from the skies until it abstracted the human body almost entirely. People don’t even see them here.

Cronenberg: But they do on the ground, that’s the thing. And it’s usually the bodies of the people they love very much. It’s nice to do shock and awe as politics, but in terms of human reality, it’s an atrocity. There’s no other word for it.

WN: Right, so to call a beheading, stoning or throat-slitting like the one in Eastern Promises primitive seems to be a technical argument.

Cronenberg: I don’t know that I used the word primitive, but maybe I did.

WN: Well, it’s not just you, which is why I’m asking. It’s been going around. I’m just trying to get a sense of where artists like you draw the line, if at all, between barbarism and technological abstraction.

Cronenberg: I’m a completely nonviolent person. I’ve never even punched anyone in the face. I haven’t even slapped anybody. Believe me, I’m not a violent person, but there is violence committed in the world every second, and it has to be absorbed and somehow dealt with. There’s no way we can get away from knowing about it, especially now. What I’m saying is that it is always hideous. I’m not saying that it is never justified, because if you’re attacked by someone who wants to kill you for abstract reasons — some religious or political ideal, let’s say — on a normal, animal level, you have the right to defend yourself. In certain circumstances, I would probably do it too, so I can’t say that it is never justified. But it’s never desirable; that’s my attitude. It’s never desirable. You know, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in an afterlife and I don’t believe in karmic recycling. So murder for me is an act of absolute destruction. You are destroying a unique creature that never existed before and will never exist again, someone whose life experience is unique, and I take that very seriously. It’s quite tragic and, of course, the human condition as well, because we all die. But to have a life cut short is a tragic thing.

WN: There’s a scene in Eastern Promises that drives that point home, where a gangster who had his throat cut is found in a freezer. He may have been a bastard who deserved the violence while alive, but in death he seems like just so much waste.

Cronenberg: And we don’t really know how justified his death was. Was it really over money? Was he squealing to the police? Is that really worth a human life? After all, when you see the guy alive, he’s got a sense of humor, and some kindness. Even he has redeeming aspects to his character. Did he really deserve to die?

WN: Speaking of, the major recurring weapon in the film seems to be a crude, short curved knife. What is it?

Cronenberg: It’s a carpet knife. (Laughs) It’s not an exotic Eastern European knife or anything like that. In the script, it doesn’t mention what kinds of knives they use or anything like that. So my rationale was that these guys are walking around the street with these knives, and if they’re stopped they can just claim to be carpet-layers, that they bought them at the hardware store for a couple of pounds. The knives are cheap and disposable, and they’re hard to identify, therefore they’re good assassination weapons.

WN: Kind of like box-cutters?

Cronenberg: Same idea. I did vaguely have that in the back of my mind, I must say.

WN: Forgive me for getting analytical again, as that is what us writers must do…

Cronenberg: That’s OK, I understand the process and I don’t mind it. I just have to sometimes remind journalists and critics to not confuse their process with mine. That’s all. In other words, what you are doing is valid, but it’s not what I do when I make the movie. And sometimes they don’t realize that. They think that you have this list of themes that you’re looking at when you make a movie, but that’s not how it is with me. But it is certainly valid to do that after the fact.

WN: Fair enough. You’ve made a film about culture clash as well as violence at the hands of throwaway technology, and I’m trying to figure out if there is a message or if this is just a crime film by David Cronenberg. 

Cronenberg: Well, it’s more an exploration than a message. A message assumes you have an answer. But really, every film for me is just an exploration of the human condition. That’s really it. And of course it is in heightened dramatic form, but that sort of illuminates the nature of the human beast. It really is just an examination and exploration of a lot of things, but it’s not as if I have the answer to anything. As you know, it has about four minutes of violence and it’s a 100-minute movie, so most of this movie involves people talking. (Laughs) But I don’t get people asking me, "Why are you obsessed with people talking?" Instead, they ask me why I’m so obsessed with violence, and I tell them I’m not. I spend very little screen time on it. I’m not naive enough to know that it doesn’t have a huge impact.

WN: Yeah, but as you know, you throw in a few minutes of a nude death match with carpet knives in a bath house, and you can kiss My Dinner With Andre goodbye.

Cronenberg: (Laughs) Well put, well put. In fact, My Dinner With Andre would have ended well if they would have had that fight with knives and forks at the dinner table.

WN: So you don’t consider these last few films with a heavy focus on interiority like Spider, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises as a move away from those with the same heavy focus on technology and horror like Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers and so on?

Cronenberg: Well, like I said, in my life I’m still exploring technology, so I don’t really feel that I’m moving away from it. I don’t even think it’s a movement. It’s almost by accident that I did these two movies. People think that at a certain stage in your career you can do any movie you want. I often talk to Marty Scorsese about that. People think you can do anything you want, but you can’t. There’s a lot of money involved. There were a lot of other films that floated by after A History of Violence, and some of them were sci-fi films that kept on floating for various reasons. But if I would have done them, we would have been talking about that move, rather than this one. You’d be asking me why I came back to them.

WN: Nah, I would never ask you that question.

Cronenberg: Right, because it’s not as interesting a question. But I don’t really feel I’ve moved away from anything, and certainly I don’t want to bore myself by doing the same thing I’ve already done. And I know fans have nostalgia for the movies that they grew up with, but for me to redo something like that would be boring. A few weeks ago, I got a script from my agent and told him, "I did this movie 35 years ago. It was called Shivers." When I did it then, it was for the first time. Why would I do it again, at this distance? On the other hand, I wouldn’t ever rule out doing another sci-fi or horror film as a matter of course. Not at all. If something came along that was intriguing and challenging, I wouldn’t hesitate. 

WN: And not to be flippant about it, but your films, from Shivers onward, redefined tech and horror cinema. But today, there are so many movies that have taken those films to such an extreme degree that they no longer have the capacity to shock or disturb.

Cronenberg: Yeah, I think, without trying to sound egomaniacal, that is true. Those movies have been picked apart piece by piece, and recycled quite a bit. But that’s the nature of the film business, or creativity in general: We are all feeding off of each other. There’s no question about that, so I guess it’s not a surprise that I’m moving somewhere away from all of that.

WN: Twenty years from now, they’re going to remaking the crime drama.

Cronenberg: Well, that’s probably true.

WN: Or car film: You made Fast Company early in your career, and adapted J.G. Ballard’s Crash.

Cronenberg: I also wrote a script about eight years ago called Red Cars, which I would still do. It’s a possibility. It’s about the American driver Phill Hlll winning the Formula One championship for Ferrari in 1961. It’s nostalgia tech: The Formula One cars of today are rockets compared to those of 1961. That’s an era I still have a lot of affection for. When I reread my script, I still like it. Fast Company was pretty interesting for me, because I got to play with funny cars and drag racers with 200 horsepower that would go over 140 miles an hour in six seconds. I’m sure they go much faster today. As a gearhead, I had a lot of fun doing that movie.

WN: Did you have similar fun decrypting supposedly unfilmable novels like Crash or Naked Lunch? Any plans along those lines for future films?

Cronenberg: The challenge is never, "Hey, let me make a film out of an unfilmable novel." It’s more along the lines of, "Crash is an amazing novel." And it wasn’t so much about cars, I think. That’s the thing. Car enthusiasts probably didn’t enjoy Crash that much. (Laughs). Some of the cars in that film were actually pretty banal. But yeah, you only work on something that intrigues and challenges you. Through the two-year process of making the film, you want to discover something exciting to you. The challenge is not making a musical; the challenge is making a musical that intrigues you. It’s much more specific. It’s not so abstract and general.

WN: So let’s close on humor. I know Viggo has a wicked sense of humor, and I’ve seen footage of you two cracking wise on the junkets.

Cronenberg: We get kind of crazy. We have a lot of fun, and say really silly things. When I’m touring and promoting a movie, it’s a lot more fun to have someone like Viggo along for the ride.

WN: Right, but the films themselves, although dark, are always hilarious. At least to me. I couldn’t stop laughing through Naked Lunch.

Cronenberg: No, Stephen King said he laughed all the way through it too. When we showed it in New York, where they really understood William S. Burroughs, they laughed from the first line of dialogue, which was, "Exterminator." They just cracked up at that. All of my movies are funny on one level or another.

WN: Yeah, Eastern Promises has dark comedy as well, mostly situated around its violent scenes.

Cronenberg: Well, of course, the guys are violent. It’s a violent group. And it makes sense that their humor would be rather dark and warped. I mean, they’re not about light comedy. The other thing is that they’re Russians, who are pretty fatalistic, heavy, depressed, intense, emotional, morose, all of that stuff. So the humor had to fit the characters. You couldn’t impose it from the outside.