Grave Expectations: FFC Interviews David Cronenberg

by Walter Chaw I first interviewed David Cronenberg after the premiere of Spider at the Telluride International Film Festival in 2002. A couple of months later, I hosted a screening of the same at Denver’s Landmark Mayan Theatre and was granted another hour with him to go through his filmography feature by feature. I was 29 in 2002–another lifetime–and I can feel the weight of my life’s experiences strapped to my back like lead weights: one for every tragedy, one of equal size and shape for every success. Cronenberg’s work has always spoken to me about the human body as frail and imperfect. He’s 82 now. He was still in his fifties when we met. And though he remains sharp and in good humour, I see how the long years have leaned into him. His latest film, The Shrouds, may very well be his last; on its press tour, he’s hinted that it will be. I have daily reminders I’m in the final third of my life, yet being confronted with the end of David Cronenberg’s career has shaken me more than I could have predicted. Who will teach me about love now? Who will teach me about grief?

The desperate longing that infuses his films, the longing for communion, is at the centre of The Shrouds, a culmination in many ways of his career interests. Vincent Cassel’s Karsh, an unmistakably Cronenberg-styled protagonist, may be his most personal avatar to date. Karsh has three pursuits: to eat (he’s a restauranteur); to die (he’s a secular sexton); and to fuck (he’s an actively sexual and sexually jealous creature). He is all of Cronenberg’s overlapping obsessions, and scary in those obsessions. Hilarious, too. I started our most recent conversation by asking Cronenberg about the role of stories for a species evolved from the ability to tell and learn from them.

DAVID CRONENBERG: Well, I think that’s completely true. And I think we’ve evolved to shape our understanding of the human condition through storytelling. And also, to allow us the possibility of correcting reality in a way that conforms more to our understanding of what is possible, as opposed to what’s actually happening. It’s become an incredible force in the development of human civilizations. As a creative person, one has the desire to tamper with reality, to tamper with memory, to engage with it somehow, not just let it float around aimlessly in one’s head.

FILM FREAK CENTRAL: As an atheist, does the telling of stories give your wife’s recent death the meaning you believe it lacked?
Yes… But I need to be clear, it’s not really a therapeutic approach. In other words, if you’re expecting creation to assuage your grief or to somehow resolve your grief… There’s really no way for grief to be resolved. I’ve told this story before, but not too long ago, an Italian psychiatrist came to my house in Toronto. He liked to write about cinema from a psychiatric point of view. And amongst the things he said, he asked, “How are you dealing with your grief?” And I said, “Well, I’m suffering.” That’s how I’m dealing with it. And he said, okay, you don’t need any therapy. (laughs) Suffering is a realistic and all-engaging response to grief, and it’s not going to stop or make the grief go away. And so making the movie, despite the fact that it deals in some realistic ways with my response to my wife’s death, this is not therapy.

What is it?
It’s just somehow engaging it. It gives you some control. Or illusion of it. You’re telling the story, you’re talking to yourself about yourself. That’s really my answer to that question. Creation, storytelling, is an innate, very human, physical, realistic form of transcendence.

You told me once that what separated you from an author like Clive Barker was that he was in pursuit of the sublime, but you were not.
No. As an atheist, I don’t believe in transcendence in the sense of leaving the body and being bodiless in some afterlife. But I do believe in the feeling of transcendence that comes through physical intimacy–not just sexual, but a closeness you can have with your children, with your dog, whatever living creature you could get physically close to. Usually, it’s a mammal and you like the warmth, but not always. I think it’s transcendent, it takes you out of yourself. It lets you realize in a very physical way that your life is not everything, that there is life beyond you, and that it’s important that you engage with that and realize that.

In casting Diane Kruger in three roles, are you suggesting that everyone–that everything, in some way–Vincent Cassel’s Karsh has physical intimacy with in the future will be a surrogate or substitute for his lost wife?
Absolutely. That is, whatever sexual intimacy he has with another woman, there will be the resonance of the sexual life he had with his wife. It will be there, will be felt there, will be present there. The blind date that went wrong at the beginning of the movie, she says, you know, your life with your wife is very intimidating for any woman who might want to get involved with you. And that’s because she understands, instinctively, how the presence of his wife will always be there, no matter how they got along as a new couple. And I think sexual passion has a lot to do with that, for example, the strength of it, the power of that. The last shot in the movie, or second-last shot in the movie, is meant to be that, too–to function as bookends, you know. The beginning of and end of the movie, both are alluding to this aspect of death and intimacy, where there is a kind of immortality that lingers in his desire for her and his projection of her onto every partner he will ever have again.

I thought of the Mantle twins when Karsh beds his sister-in-law–played, like Karsh’s wife, by Kruger. Are you drawing a parallel between sibling relationships and marriage bonds?
I wasn’t, honestly. I wasn’t thinking of these two sisters as twins, but as sisters who look a lot alike, really. And I don’t deal with twinness in the movie, but I know a lot of people assumed that they were twins. But yeah, the idea of twins feeling that they’re two halves of a whole… In my research about twins–and also, I have twins in my family, actually–they do have a special intimacy with each other. But it’s not something so specific as–it’s not really like two halves of a whole. They’re separate people, there’s no question. So I don’t really think of it quite that way. I think of it as even broader than that. Even more than two halves of a whole, it’s the connections that bind a whole universe of life. That’s as close for me as I come to what somebody might think of as spirituality.

I have noted a playfulness about you and your films of late. I know you said once the only film of yours that isn’t funny is The Brood, but there’s a lightness about your recent pictures I’ve found notable. Where does that come from?
Well, honestly, I actually think all of my movies are funny, basically. That they are full of the sense of play, because I’ve never lost sight of the childlike aspects of creativity and filmmaking. I mean, children are innately creative–innocently, innately creative. And it’s always been very… I’ve always been extremely aware of the playful, childlike aspects of filmmaking, and drama in general, and creativity in general. You know, making films as if we’re kids in a sandbox, you know, we’re putting on funny mustaches, we’re wearing hats that we would never wear, we do funny voices, just like kids. However serious filmmaking can become–because of the pressure, because of money, because of time, because of ego–underneath it all, we’re just playing. We’re just playing, we’re making stuff up, and we’re pretending it’s real. That’s totally childlike.

Children can deal with grief through play as well–the concept of fort/da, for instance, in trying to control loss.
Yes. So for me, humour is right there, obviously. Always there. It’s not intentional. I don’t have to think about it. Whenever I’ve written a script, any script, there’s always humour in it. Playfulness is really what drives all the lightness and creativity on a film set. Without it, it would be…yeah, I don’t think making a film would be a very pleasant experience, quite frankly. So it’s always there for me. And I love it when I have collaborators who, despite the pressure on them as actors or special effects people or something, you know, worried about time, worried about money, [don’t] lose sight of the playful aspects of creativity.

Orson Welles called having run of RKO a boy presented with a giant train set.
Yes, he said it was a boy’s greatest of train sets, and he’s not wrong. I completely relate to that. You do get toys, you get all kinds of toys. When people ask me about, now, artificial intelligence, blah, blah, blah, it’s just another part of the set of toys that you have to play with, that you can do things with.

“…As filmmakers, we are observers and judges, and the thing that we photograph most is the human body: the face, the voice, the body. That’s our subject matter because we’re dealing with the human condition. Artists deal with the human body.”

Is all human technology an extension of human biology?
Yeah, sure. I mean, I’m an example of that. I wear glasses. But beyond the glasses (Cronenberg takes off his glasses and peers into the camera), I have plastic lenses in my eyes because I’ve had cataract surgery. I’m listening to you through a new generation of hearing aids that incorporate an artificial intelligence chip. It’s a very interesting technology that’s just about a year old. I am augmented. We’ve always–humans have never accepted their bodies as what they are. They were always messing around with it. The people were doing operations on each other 3,000 years ago, you know, we have evidence of all kinds of surgeries and tattooing and all kinds of things. So technology has always been to us an extension of an understanding of the human body and the possibilities of changing it, and modifying it to cure it. To me, it’s just very natural, this union of body and technology. It’s not, as it was understood in, like, the 1940s and ’50s, something alien, you know, that would be non-human–inhuman–or change us into something non-human or inhuman. It’s completely human. In fact, it comes totally from our humanness.

I was moved–to tears–by Karsh’s desire to bear witness. To see. It’s a kind of pleasure that’s not exactly sexual: a longing. Can we still call that voyeurism?
There’s a whole kind of human understanding of observing and judging. Of course, we always observe and we always judge, not necessarily saying I see you and what I see is bad, but we say, I see you and I’m thinking about you. It’s very physical. We see with our eyes, and we’re seeing a body. I mean, as filmmakers, we are observers and judges, and the thing that we photograph most is the human body: the face, the voice, the body. That’s our subject matter because we’re dealing with the human condition. Artists deal with the human body. So for Karsh, it’s, you know, it’s not exactly voyeuristic, in the sense that it’s his wife that he’s been intimate with for many years. And so it’s really, for him, a continuation of the observing and appreciating. You see your beautiful wife, you appreciate her, her beauty, even as she ages. As you age, you absorb her aging into your aesthetic sense of what is possible for beauty. Suddenly, your wife is now an old woman, but you are an old man. Does that mean that you no longer think she’s beautiful? No, you think she’s just as beautiful, because you altered your aesthetic sense to absorb the reality of her and yourself. So it’s not exactly, as I say, voyeuristic in the sense that you’re not watching somebody that you don’t know. Let’s say that would be more somewhat voyeuristic. This is an extension of his relationship with his wife beyond death.

I told you once, and it’s as true now as it was then, that I learned about love through The Fly. The labour of love and how you vow to love your partner as they change, fall apart, age. That you see them differently than anyone else could. I love the line in there about the grandmothers and how the flesh drives them crazy: their love for their grandchildren makes them want to eat them up.
Yes. Yeah. No, I think you said a very beautiful and true thing. You know, in a sense, it has to do with that transcendence that I was talking about. It’s like you want to fuse with the other person. That’s sort of the ultimate sexual metaphor. It’s a kind of fusion. And yes, you’re inside each other’s bodies, one way or another. And that’s beyond normal intimacy. It’s a very special intimacy. It’s the sense of fusing together and losing yourself. And that’s the transcendent part: how you’re no longer just yourself. You’re a kind of combined creature. But what you said as you, you can put quotes around your words and say that I said it, and that would be very good.

What is your relationship with your wife now?
Well, it’s now become memories, you know, but it feels much more. “Memory” sounds like something past, but it’s very present. I mean, I don’t think it’s unique. Certainly, it’s not unique to me, but you always hear this person. You hear things that this person has said to you. It’s as if they’re right there at your arm still. And it’s not that they’re saying necessarily immensely significant things–they can be very minor things, they can be very painful, because it just accentuates for you that sense of loss. It’s always there. It’s always there.

So aside from therapy or catharsis, which you’ve been clear The Shrouds is not, has telling your loss in this way been meaningful for the process of your grief?
I mean, Diane Kruger’s characters are new creatures, you know? Once you start writing, everything becomes fiction, so now, however they started, you’re creating fictional characters. However much they were based on–originally–on my experiences of my wife, they are not her in the movie. So, no, it doesn’t give me that thing that people wonder if it might. Release? Catharsis? It doesn’t do that. These are fictional characters who immediately have their own little life in the movie. That’s it.

Are our death rituals a part of creating a story around loss?
I mean, I could go on for a long time, but yeah, I mean, I think it’s very well-known what ritual does in terms of bringing a community together, a culture together, a family together. When someone dies, rather than just standing around with a glass of wine in your hand, ritual allows you to acknowledge the reality of the death, and the reality of the life that affected many others, you know. So I don’t have a problem–even as an atheist–I don’t have a problem with the ritual, because participating in it, whether or not you believe in an afterlife or not, there is a sort of sense of community, and a communal understanding and acceptance of death, and the desire to shape it for yourself and for everybody else. But basically, that’s it. When I was thinking about what would happen when Karsh finally started to establish his cemeteries in other countries and other cultures, I realized, of course, that he would run up against other rituals, other religions that would perhaps find his hi-tech cemeteries repulsive and repellent to their religious instincts and so on.

Making movies, telling stories, watching movies as an audience…
It doesn’t matter what the ritual is, you know, you could make it up. In fact, I think there are families who develop their own rituals that have to do with the personalities of the deceased. The deceased loved his car, so they’re going to do something with him and his car. It really almost doesn’t matter how bizarre it is or how strange or how, you know… As long as it means something to the person who’s engaging in it with other people. Then it has its purpose, and who would I be to say that’s ridiculous or absurd if it’s needed. If it helps, so be it.