The passion of David Cronenberg

ONCE, WHEN I was an impressionable lass in an all-girl band and easily scarred by horror films like The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome, I wrote a song about David Cronenberg and his monstrous cinematic progeny. Thankfully the results were never put down on tape – otherwise I'd be obliged to e-mail the MP3 to the Toronto director. We chatted last week about his new film (and his best in years), A History of Violence, which marks a powerful return to form, amplifying ideas about the construction of identity and family last explored in Spider (2002). He's as cool and collected as his latest film, and, at 62, as eager to discuss the mechanics of making movies as he is the designing of video games, which he's currently exploring with his son: "It's a fascinating offshoot of the dramatic arts."

Bay Guardian: At first you didn't know the History of Violence script was based on a graphic novel. What most interested you about the story?

David Cronenberg: I was interested in the iconic Americana element. The western movie overtones, and also the gangster movie, of course, but all of it sort of subverted. It's kind of about America's mythology of itself in a way, rather than, let's say, the reality of what it would be like to live in a small town today. So there's a bit of unreality about it, and yet the characters were very real and what they go through is very real – so I like that strange kind of combination of tones there.

BG: Did you feel that the script reflected a certain current reality, though?

DC: Well, yeah, obviously the movie's not overtly political. But when Viggo Mortensen and I met to talk about the movie and his possible involvement in it, we did talk politics a lot, and I think it's in that sense that some people believe in that mythology of America and have acted on it. So if you want to look at it that way, you could say to yourself, "Well, does the Bush administration's foreign policy base itself on old western TV series, Wanted: Dead or Alive?" I mean, is it black-and-white, black hats, white hats, you're with us or against us? Good versus evil?

BG: There's also a theme of Christian spirituality or Catholicism running through the movie – the last lines are "Jesus, Joey, Jesus." How did you feel about foregrounding that aspect, particularly after recent films that seem to combine, strangely, Christian and horror elements, like The Passion of the Christ and The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

DC: Well I'm an atheist, existentialist, liberal, whatever – all those things that neo-cons don't like. But I listen to the movie. I listen to the characters. It really has to come from the characters, and it's always a mistake to impose your own ideology on characters that will not have that ideology. We discussed it at an early stage – Maria [Bello] and Viggo and I. These characters would wear crosses, because they're churchgoing people. They're not necessarily fundamentalists, but they're the normal kind of God-fearing Christians you'd find in a small town. Christianity and vengeance also seem to go rather well together, so that all fits together, and it's a critique of that if you find it to be unpleasantly disturbing.

BG: What do you think of horror films today in general, considering how popular they've been in the past few years?

DC: I think it's a genre that carries with it a lot of power because it deals with primordial stuff, particularly the fear of death and the nature of mortality. I think that if you can harness that power in a great way, you can make a great film within the genre, but you can also do terrible, boring, schlocky, repetitive stuff too. But I certainly don't turn my back on the genre. If there were a project that legitimately could be called a horror film that I thought was fantastically good, I wouldn't hesitate.

BG: You've made so many movies from material that most people would assume was unfilmable, like J.G. Ballard's Crash and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch – how do you manage it?

DC: It depends, of course – Dead Ringers was made in '88, and that took me 10 years to get made. There are many ways to get financing for a movie, but when it's an independently financed film, like a lot of mine have been, it's quite difficult – it can be quite agonizing because you're piecing together many disparate sources of financing, and if one of those pieces falls out of the puzzle, the whole thing has a possibility of collapsing, and you end up with a lot of complex contracts with a lot of very different distributors and financing entities from all over the world, and so on. It can be very difficult, but it can be done. You just have to really persevere – that's the art part of it. You have to have the passion to do it, to endure it.

BG: The passion of a Christ?

DC: Well, maybe not a Christ-like passion. But you do suffer. You know that you're going to suffer when you're going to do that, so you better enjoy it. Because it's gonna happen.

Kimberly Chun