David Cro­nen­berg: ​‘You don’t want to bore peo­ple with how sad you are’

With 55 years in the busi­ness and 23 films to his name, David Cro­nen­berg has made an indeli­ble mark on the face of cin­e­ma. Not only is it impos­si­ble to imag­ine hor­ror as a genre with­out him, his far-rang­ing inter­ests, tenac­i­ty as an inde­pen­dent film­mak­er and unmis­tak­able sense of humour have solid­i­fied him not only a favourite among crit­ics, but audi­ences and fel­low film­mak­ers as well. His lat­est film, The Shrouds, is his most per­son­al to date, inspired by Cro­nen­berg’s own process of mourn­ing after the death of his wife. To cel­e­brate the film final­ly reach­ing UK audi­ences via Ver­ti­go Releas­ing, we hopped on a call with one of Canada’s most beloved exports for a chat.

LWLies: I was in Cannes last year when [The Shrouds] pre­miered, and it was a real delight to be there. I feel like see­ing a Cro­nen­berg at Cannes is kind of the peak for me, as a Cro­nen­berg fan.

Cro­nen­berg: Hey, it is for me too.

I always love the names that you give your char­ac­ters. There have been some real clas­sics over the years. We had Saul Tenser in Crimes of the Future, we had Bian­ca O’Bliv­ion in Video­drome, and now Karsh Rel­ic. I would love to know where you find inspi­ra­tion for your names, and do you keep a list every time you hear a name that you find interesting?

I do. I often do. I’m struck by a name, and I will make a note of it. I have a lit­tle file for names, and then I put a lit­tle note, if it’s a real per­son whose name it is, or whether it’s a com­pound name. Maybe I like Karsh for the first name, and Rel­ic for the sec­ond name, and they come from two dif­fer­ent notes that I made. It’s real­ly just a mat­ter of tex­ture. It’s not sig­nif­i­cant, sym­bol­i­cal­ly, let’s say. I mean, Karsh Rel­ic obvi­ous­ly is not a West­ern, Anglo-Sax­on type name, and that’s meant to indi­cate that his geneal­o­gy comes from some­place else, which he men­tions in the movie at the begin­ning. It just adds some­thing. If the char­ac­ter does­n’t have the right name, it feels to me like it won’t work.

It’s fun­ny, because with Stephen King, once I had read ​‘The Dead Zone’, and the lead char­ac­ter’s name is John­ny Smith — that’s a very extreme­ly com­mon sort of cliched name — and I said to a jour­nal­ist, ​“I would nev­er do a movie where there was a char­ac­ter named John­ny Smith.” Then, of course, I end­ed up adapt­ing ​‘The Dead Zone’, and I did­n’t want to change the name because it was Stephen King’s name for his char­ac­ter. So yes, I have made a movie with a char­ac­ter named John­ny Smith.

It par­tic­u­lar­ly strikes me in Crash, there’s some great names as well, so it feels like you and Bal­lard were on a kind of same wave­length with great names for characters.

Yeah, it took me a while to real­ize that Bal­lard and I were on the same wave­length, because I did­n’t have a very good reac­tion to ​‘Crash’ when I first read it. But then, a year lat­er, I real­ized that I did get it, and I did like it, and want­ed to make the movie. One of the things was, it was Bal­lard’s dia­logue that first real­ly attract­ed me. It was quite unique and tough and sim­ple and dis­turb­ing. And then, of course, his imagery. So I real­ized even­tu­al­ly that there were a lot of things that he and I had in com­mon, even though we came from very dif­fer­ent places. And so it came togeth­er in the kind of fus­ing of our blood in the movie, which he did like a lot and sup­port­ed it when we were being crit­i­cized by every­body in the world.

I was going to men­tion this lat­er, but I think the fact that some­thing like Crash was so reviled when it came out – and peo­ple were real­ly quite vehe­ment – and now the kind of things that get passed are so far beyond what is in Crash. I’m 32, and there’s a lot of peo­ple younger than me that are mas­sive fans of your work. I’m curi­ous to know if you found that younger audi­ences through the years have been more recep­tive to the ideas that are in your films.

Well, I think Crash is a good exam­ple, because when we showed it at Venice many years lat­er, it was just a cou­ple of years ago, because there was a new 4K ver­sion of it, and we screened it at Venice, and the audi­ence there was very young. And they were total­ly not shocked and not out­raged and not mad at me. And they all stayed for Q&A, and they were very wel­com­ing and total­ly seemed to get the movie per­fect­ly. Times do change, and reac­tions to art tra­di­tion­al­ly. I mean, Shake­speare was not well thought of in the Vic­to­ri­an era, and now he is a god. So if you live long enough, you will see some rever­sals in terms of the way your work is received.

And it can go the oth­er way; it could be con­sid­ered great and pow­er­ful, and then lat­er con­sid­ered incon­se­quen­tial. That has hap­pened to many artists also, so you nev­er know. That’s why when I hear that Quentin Taran­ti­no is mulling three or four options for what he says is his final film, the film that will estab­lish his lega­cy — and I think you don’t have con­trol over your lega­cy. In fact, you might not even have a lega­cy. The oth­er aspect of that is it might be sig­nif­i­cant to you because you’ve decid­ed it’s your last film, but your fans lat­er, I’m sure they won’t know which film came when. If they love your films, they’re not going to wor­ry about which was the last one, and which was the mid­dle one, you know. So it’s, to me, not worth wor­ry­ing about that sort of thing, because you real­ly don’t have con­trol over it.

This is so inter­est­ing. A few weeks ago I was inter­view­ing anoth­er film­mak­er, and he said that he thinks about lega­cy a lot, and par­tic­u­lar­ly since he had a daugh­ter, he thinks about it, because she will one day be respon­si­ble for every­thing that her father has cre­at­ed. And he said that he does think of his films as a sort of com­plete vision, a com­plete body of work that’s in con­ver­sa­tion with each oth­er. But I’m curi­ous for you, you’ve been doing this a con­sid­er­able amount of time now, and you’ve made so many films. Do you think of them as an entire organ with many limbs? Or do you think of them as sep­a­rate kind of things that occa­sion­al­ly will inter­con­nect with one another?

I actu­al­ly don’t think of them. [laughs] I real­ly don’t. They’re way­ward chil­dren who, once they grow up and they’re out in the world and have their own life, maybe they’ll send me a text every once in a while, but that’s it. I know they’re linked, of course, because of my sen­si­bil­i­ty. Each time I make a movie, I real­ly think of it as the first movie I’ve ever made, hon­est­ly. And I focus only on it and mak­ing it work. I know that there are direc­tors who are self-ref­er­en­tial and delib­er­ate­ly make ref­er­ences to their oth­er work very con­scious­ly. If I have ref­er­ences that work that way, they’re def­i­nite­ly unconscious.

I’m not think­ing about them. Obvi­ous­ly things that I’m inter­est­ed in, that fas­ci­nate me — I hes­i­tate to use the word ​“obsessed” because I think of an obses­sion as a very spe­cif­ic, pow­er­ful thing, and I think the word is used in places where it real­ly does­n’t belong because they’re talk­ing about more super­fi­cial con­nec­tion. When peo­ple say I’m obsessed with the body, well, I mean, every­body’s real­ly obsessed with their bod­ies, you know? Because that’s what we are. So you bet­ter be, you bet­ter pay some atten­tion to your body, because oth­er peo­ple will, includ­ing microbes and virus­es. So you’ve got to think about it.

But yeah, I real­ly don’t think about my oth­er movies. I’m forced to. I don’t watch them. I don’t think about them. Like I say, if they’re alive and they have a life, then they have a life of their own, which is the way chil­dren should be. And inter­est­ing­ly, talk­ing about know­ing that your kid is going to be tak­ing care of your lega­cy, well, your kid might not; your kid might say, ​“What­ev­er hap­pens to my father’s work is not my job.” It’s not their job to nur­ture your lega­cy in the world to come. To me, that’s actu­al­ly quite a strange attitude.

That’s a good way to talk about The Shrouds, because obvi­ous­ly Vin­cent Cas­sel and you have worked togeth­er before. I am always real­ly curi­ous to know when a direc­tor choos­es to work with some­one that they’ve worked with before, if that is some­thing that comes out of hap­pen­stance, or if they have been work­ing on this project with the per­son in mind. So, was Karsh writ­ten with Vin­cent in mind, or did it just kind of hap­pen that way? And is that some­thing you tend to do or tend to try and avoid?

No, I delib­er­ate­ly avoid think­ing of an actor when I’m writ­ing, because at that point I think I would uncon­scious­ly start to shape it for the strengths of that actor, and that might not be the best thing for the char­ac­ter. So I delib­er­ate­ly shut that part of my mind off when I’m writ­ing; I don’t think about what actor would be best for it. Only once the char­ac­ter has real­ly come to life on the page, then I try to match that char­ac­ter with an actor who will bring more things to it. You know, Vin­cent was­n’t the only one I con­sid­ered, because there are many aspects to cast­ing that most peo­ple don’t know, and they don’t need to know.

For exam­ple, what is the actor’s pass­port? That’s a cru­cial thing. This movie was a Cana­da-EU copro­duc­tion — basi­cal­ly a Cana­da-France copro­duc­tion. So, nat­u­ral­ly, I start­ed to think about some French actors. If I had want­ed some­one from the US, it would have been a big prob­lem because they’re delib­er­ate­ly shut out of that. And unfor­tu­nate­ly, Brex­it has made the UK be also coun­try non gra­ta for the kind of copro­duc­tions I do. It’s real­ly too bad. I had to work, shape every­thing in a par­tic­u­lar way to get Guy Pearce in the movie because he’s Aus­tralian. When I work with Vig­go, it’s not a prob­lem because he has a Dan­ish pass­port as well as an Amer­i­can one, so he works on his Dan­ish passport.

These are things, as I say, that are cru­cial to mak­ing a movie. I often tell film stu­dents, I point out to them that cast­ing is a cru­cial part of direct­ing. It’s not very well pub­li­cised, it’s not very glam­orous, but you have to con­sid­er all of these things, financ­ing and nation­al­i­ty and pass­ports and copro­duc­tions, before you even can start to think of the actor as an actor. Half your bat­tle as a direc­tor is over if you cast the right per­son. And if you cast the wrong per­son, you are in big trou­ble, just cre­ative­ly, if not oth­er­wise, emo­tion­al­ly and psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly. So I pay a lot of atten­tion to the cast­ing. It’s nev­er friv­o­lous, but there’s a lot that’s very sub­jec­tive also. Some­one else who would have thought of direct­ing the script of The Shrouds would have come up prob­a­bly with very dif­fer­ent actors, you nev­er know.

Oh, yeah, absolute­ly. And I think that those con­sid­er­a­tions you’re talk­ing about, about visas, about sched­ul­ing, about all the oth­er things, they’re unglam­orous, but they’re so inter­est­ing to hear about, par­tic­u­lar­ly as a film­mak­er who has had to nav­i­gate your way through the indus­try in a very par­tic­u­lar way, because you don’t have access to kind of a Spiel­berg bud­get or a Christo­pher Nolan bud­get. You’re work­ing with­in inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing con­straints, which is a tricky thing to do. And I think for film stu­dents, maybe there’s some­times this notion that when you get to make a film with a stu­dio, that’s kind of the end of the prob­lem. But it’s like, well, then all these oth­er con­sid­er­a­tions that come in and ways that you have to try and save mon­ey and ways that you have to work around con­straints, or work with constraints.

Yeah, no, absolute­ly. A lot of it starts with, ​“Gee, I would love to be a direc­tor. I’ll be on the red car­pet in a tuxe­do, and it’ll be real­ly fun, be very glam­orous.” But there’s a lot that goes before that. And of course, I start­ed off as a com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent film­mak­er, and I’ve always been. I mean, my inter­ac­tions with the stu­dios have been very — there’s always been a dis­tance, there’s always been a pro­duc­er, a strong pro­duc­er, between me and the stu­dio, like De Lau­ren­ti­is on The Dead Zone, and Jere­my Thomas on Crash, and so on. I’ve nev­er real­ly made a pure stu­dio movie. I think maybe A His­to­ry of Vio­lence might come clos­est to it with New Line. But even then, New Line was­n’t sort of the same as Uni­ver­sal or Para­mount – it was a minor stu­dio, let’s put it that way.

Yeah, talk­ing about bud­gets, a very sore point these days, it’s even hard­er now. The bud­get of The Shrouds was half the bud­get of Crimes of the Future. There were more spe­cial effects involved in Crimes of the Future, but still, it’s very dif­fi­cult to main­tain the bud­get lev­els right now that we had some time ago, even for inde­pen­dent films. It has to do with the pan­dem­ic, with stream­ing, and Net­flix, and all kinds of oth­er things that are in the glob­al econ­o­my in gen­er­al. Cin­e­mas are clos­ing, dis­trib­u­tors are going crazy. That’s very dif­fi­cult. So even the fact that I’m talk­ing to you now after the movie has already opened in most of Europe and North Amer­i­ca has to do with find­ing the right dis­trib­u­tor or even a dis­trib­u­tor for the UK.

We were so elat­ed when we found out the film was com­ing out because, for cinephiles, there’s always that thing if you see a film at a fes­ti­val, and then you think, ​“Am I ever going to see this film again, because will it get to have a life beyond the fes­ti­val?” Obvi­ous­ly, I’m in a very priv­i­leged posi­tion of get­ting to go to fes­ti­vals and see films, but then I have to go home and just talk about them and not be able to share them with people.

But I want­ed to ask about the recep­tion to the film, know­ing it had already come out in France and in Amer­i­ca and in Cana­da. I’m curi­ous to know if you found in talk­ing to the press and talk­ing to the pub­lic that peo­ple are very keen to share their own sto­ries of grief with you. I know when you make a film about some­thing as uni­ver­sal as grief, it can be that sud­den­ly you become sort of like a priest fig­ure for peo­ple to share their feel­ings with. Have you found that?

Well, I often feel very priest­ly and you can see I have that – [ges­tures at his black hood­ed sweatshirt]

You’ve got the outfit!

If I use the hood, I become very monk-like, don’t you think? [pulls up the hood to demonstrate]

Very monk!

Yeah, in fact, quite a few jour­nal­ists who were inter­view­ing me began with telling me their own grief sto­ries and telling me how they relat­ed to the film, or how they did­n’t relate to exact­ly the film, and some of those real­ly inter­est­ing peo­ple want to talk about it, even though, social­ly, usu­al­ly there’s a kind of an inhi­bi­tion to talk about grief. You don’t want to be bor­ing and bore peo­ple with how sad you are, and stuff like that, if they haven’t expe­ri­enced it before.

Yeah, very much.

But then when you find some­body who’s real­ly will­ing to talk about it, it can be very cathar­tic and real­ly very help­ful to com­pare notes, even on such a del­i­cate, inti­mate sub­ject. So the reviews have been… I’ve got­ten some ter­rif­ic, real­ly sen­si­tive, intel­li­gent reviews, which is not always the case, and you always look for­ward to those because you know you’re going to get some bad reviews.

If you don’t get any bad reviews, then you haven’t prob­a­bly made an inter­est­ing film, but you want the major­i­ty of them to be pos­i­tive. Even on Rot­ten Toma­toes we were 75% or some­thing like that. So that’s good; that’s about where it should be, I think. Yeah, the reac­tions, of course, I’m used to this.

The Cannes audi­ences was the first one, as has been the case with a lot of my films, and it’s an unusu­al audi­ence because it’s made it up of a lot of peo­ple from the film busi­ness, but also from locals and also from dis­trib­u­tors who are just look­ing for anoth­er film to buy: a very mixed, inter­est­ing, strange audi­ence. So your reac­tion at Cannes, they like to talk about how many min­utes of applause you get, and so on. But basi­cal­ly, it’s not an incred­i­ble indi­ca­tor of a nor­mal audi­ence’s response. I found that the film has a dark­ness, but it’s also very fun­ny. And the audi­ence in Cannes was very mut­ed in terms of the humour. And part of that is lan­guage, of course, because most of them per­haps speak French and you’ve got dou­ble sub­ti­tles under­neath the film that can be con­fus­ing. But I found that, of course, it’s, ​“How can we laugh at this film about the death of Cro­nen­berg’s wife as he’s sit­ting there in a tuxe­do? Can we real­ly laugh at this movie?” And the answer is yes, you real­ly should. 

But then we showed it through Toron­to Film Fes­ti­val and, of course, it’s a very Toron­to film, and the audi­ence total­ly got it. There was laugh­ter real­ly from begin­ning to end in the appro­pri­ate places. Same with the New York Film Fes­ti­val; the New York­ers total­ly got it. So I think it takes a cou­ple of fes­ti­vals for you to begin to under­stand what your audi­ence could enjoy with your film. It’s not simple.

That’s a very prag­mat­ic way to look at it as well, know­ing that the first recep­tion will not be the final recep­tion. I think as well, actu­al­ly, since I have to go in a moment, it reminds me of grief itself: it takes you a long time to laugh about those feel­ings and to kind of under­stand. My grand­ma, when she passed away, it was very, very hard for our fam­i­ly, but one of the things we kept going back to was she was obsessed with Jel­lo while she was dying. All she want­ed to do was eat Jel­lo. And she was ill for a very long time. Just the amount of Jel­lo she got through became this kind of run­ning gag in our fam­i­ly. So, it is very much like a fes­ti­val film, in that you do take some time to kind of work out how to react to this appropriately.

Yeah, your own reac­tion. In my case, it cer­tain­ly took me by sur­prise, many aspects of what I was feel­ing were sur­pris­ing to me and some of them are men­tioned in the film. I could have made anoth­er two films, and each one would have revealed more reac­tions which took me by sur­prise, you know, at the death of my wife of 43 years, we were togeth­er. So, you can antic­i­pate it, you say, ​“Okay, she’s sick; it’s appar­ent now that she will not sur­vive.” And you think you’ve got it cov­ered and then you real­ize when it happens.

No, no, no, it’s so sud­den, you can’t antic­i­pate how it gets you – over years as well. You don’t ever stop. Grief is some­thing that is eter­nal. And that’s com­fort­ing, but also it is a lot to process for any human being. I could eas­i­ly sit here and ask you 100 oth­er ques­tions about the film. Con­grat­u­la­tions again on the film. I hope your next one is eas­i­er to make. I hope they give you more money.

Thank you. Well, you sound like you might be a good pro­duc­er. I like your attitude.

Hey, you know, get my num­ber, we’ll talk!