David Cronenberg, aficionado of the unnerving, won’t let his feelings about a creator get in the way of a creation. “I still love my Tesla,” says the filmmaker, seated in a dimly lit conference room at the Criterion Collection’s Manhattan office. “My relationship with my Tesla has nothing to do with Elon. We have a separate love.” He smiles wanly.
One of Musk’s machines plays a minor role in Cronenberg’s latest picture, The Shrouds (out now), when the story’s antagonist, Guy Pearce, programs coordinates into a Tesla for it to self-drive protagonist Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to a mysterious location. For years, Cronenberg has had to dream up his own unsettling technology for films like Videodrome, The Fly, Dead Ringers, and eXistenZ, but at least for one scene in The Shrouds, Musk made the filmmaker’s life a little easier.
The movie’s main invention is wholly Cronenbergian: The burial shrouds that give the picture its title broadcast corpses’ decomposition to the living, ostensibly to aid in people’s grieving. Karsh, who owns a cemetery that uses the technology, lost his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) to cancer and still feels devoted to her. Becca haunts his dreams, and her twin sister, Terry (also Kruger), haunts his waking life. Terry plays a pivotal role, helping Karsh separate the fact from fiction surrounding her ex-husband, Maury (Pearce’s character), who helped Karsh build the cemetery. When the graveyard gets trashed, paranoia takes over, and Karsh pieces the truth together. Those conspiracies are Cronenberg’s fingerprints.
For Cronenberg, making the film was how he coped with grief after losing his own wife, Carolyn, who died after an illness in 2017. “Making movies is the way that I deal with the world and experience it,” he says. “I make a fictional version of [a scenario], and I see what happens.”
That said, the soft-spoken 82-year-old filmmaker, who’s dressed casually in a blue Patagonia zip-up and jeans on this Thursday afternoon in April, is adamant that The Shrouds is not art therapy. “This movie is just about my musings on the human condition as I live it and see it — that’s about it,” he says. “So death? Life? Love? Sex? Teslas? Yes, it’s all of those things.” But one thing it’s not, he says, is autobiography, even though Cassel sports a white coiffure uncannily similar to the filmmaker’s. “I didn’t cast him because of his hair,” Cronenberg quips.
The director’s oeuvre has always obliquely addressed the human condition, despite his reputation as a “master of body horror” or “godfather of cyberpunk” — titles that make him uncomfortable. The darkness in his films often comes with heavy doses of irony, which is a quality that comes across frequently during our hourlong, wide-ranging interview.
You don’t see moviemaking as therapy, so what did making The Shrouds mean to you?
[With the film] I’m saying, “I’ve had this experience; I’m putting it into a fictional form. It’s my understanding of the human condition right now. And I invite you to come along and experience it with me.” I’m not trying to teach anybody anything. I’m expressing things that I have felt. … [Making the movie] has organized my reactions to death and grief in a cinematic way, but it hasn’t really changed my perceptions.
How did the idea for the movie’s shrouds come to you?
It was an actual reaction I had to my wife being buried. She was taken out of my house in basically a body bag after she died. I was really reluctant to let that body go. It’s not that I wanted to have a corpse in my house, but it wasn’t just a corpse: It was my wife.
It was very strange, and I didn’t really think that I would feel that way, and then I didn’t see her. And then suddenly she’s in a coffin being put into the earth, and I still hadn’t seen her. I really did want to get into the coffin with her [like Karsh does in the movie]. Of course, I was not really going to do that — because I would die, for one thing — but the feeling was always very strong, real, visceral. I thought, “If I can’t do that, what’s the next-best thing that I can do to remain in contact with that body?” For me, it was making a movie. And for Karsh, it was making a cemetery.
For some time after your wife’s death, though, you didn’t want to make movies.
I didn’t have the heart for doing very much. I’d spent basically two years taking care of her. She was dying and we were trying to reverse that, and there were all kinds of new therapies that were possible that didn’t really pan out. It was unrelenting, every day, doctors, radiology. So I was pretty exhausted — very exhausted emotionally. [After she died] I was also having to deal with living alone, being alone, and dealing with the rest of my family, who were also mourning.
Then there was a pandemic, and suddenly, you’re really alone in a different way. Suddenly I was living alone in this house that had been our house and dealing with that. She had been very much a part of my work, as well as business stuff, accountants, and banks — so untangling all of that was also very weirdly emotional. A bank account could be an emotional thing, you know?
What made you want to direct again?
At a certain point, [producer] Robert Lantos encouraged me to make a movie based on my old script, Crimes of the Future, which I had written 20 years before. So I started to get interested in how I would do that film. That was basically it. [Cronenberg’s 2022 film, Crimes of the Future, was his second picture to use that title.]
Filmmaking is tough, and it’s physically very tough, but mourning is pretty tough, too. They’re both very hard on every cell in your body. So I swapped mourning for moviemaking.
The singer Nick Cave, who has experienced tremendous grief in recent years, recently released a song called “Joy” with the message, “We’ve all had too much sorrow, now is the time for joy.” Did you have to make a deliberate decision like that to move forward?
No, but I had not lost my desire to be in love again and hadn’t decided that that was over. Some people decide that that’s it: They’re not going to try to be in love and they’re not looking for another mate. But that wasn’t the case with me.
In the beginning of the movie, Karsh goes on a date, but his grief scares the woman away. As the film progresses, he seems to be able to move on. Why is that?
He realizes that any woman he makes love to will also be making love to his wife, and that there’ll be a fusion of the two of them. That’s what that whole last dream sequence was about, his realization. The sexuality, the sex with his wife and her body and her love will always be involved with any woman he’s with.
Watching several of your movies leading up to this interview — Crash, Rabid, Dead Ringers — I came to realize that your characters are people just looking to feel something.
Yes. It’s easy to feel benumbed, and we have more ways of doing that now with all the screens surrounding us. [With my movies] I’m only reflecting what’s going on. It’s not like a futuristic thing where everybody’s attached to a screen.
Does the idea of people watching your movies on phones bother you?
No. I don’t go to the cinema anymore. Part of it has to do with hearing and wanting subtitles for everything, which you can’t normally get in a theater that’s showing an English movie in America.
I think you can have a very cinematic experience watching things on your phone. It’s not the same, but it’s still cinema. It’s an art form that continues to evolve. I really don’t find it disturbing or obscene.
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So do you see it as evolution?
I’m not one of those people who has nostalgia about film as a media. Film is terrible to edit, terrible to sound mix. Really terrible. Digital is infinitely better. Of course, we have nostalgia for film because there have been a huge number of great films made on film. I would never want to go back to film, splicing tape. It was terrible.
Do you miss going to movie theaters, though?
The last time I went into a theater, it was a terrible, ridiculous experience in which not only were people on their phones all the time but suddenly the projection stopped. And a person came in to talk to the audience and said, “We’re having projection problems, but in 15 minutes we’ll be able to pick up.” And then she came back and said, “We actually don’t know where the film stopped. Can anybody in the audience tell us where to pick this up from?” I thought, “Yeah, great cinematic experience.”
Meanwhile, interest in Blu-rays and DVDs seems to be on the decline with people streaming more movies. But a lot of your movies aren’t on streaming services. Does that bother you?
I have a Blu-ray player. I haven’t used it for years. I don’t know if I’m lazy or what, but I tend to look for things that are streaming from the Criterion Channel rather than go to my bookshelf and take out that Bergman film that I have the Blu-ray of and put it in. It seems clunky and ancient somehow. I have a whole bookshelf of DVDs from all the years of Academy screeners where people send you DVDs, and am I ever going to look at them again? Probably never.
But what if you can’t find the movie you want on a streaming service?
Films have always gotten lost in the shuffle. You see all these restorations of famous films now, and you realize, “Oh, my God. Citizen Kane almost didn’t exist anymore because there was only one print.” The possibility of extinction is there. It’s just the way the world works.
You’ve said that reading literature has influenced your sensibilities more than watching movies. How is that?
My father was a writer. Writing seemed to be a reasonable, obvious thing to do. Filmmaking, though, was not. Filmmaking didn’t come from Toronto [where Cronenberg grew up]. Filmmaking came from Hollywood or Europe. There was never a Spielberg in Toronto, like in L.A. where everybody’s father, mother, cousin, and uncle worked in the film business. It never occurred to me that I could make a movie. So that’s why, weirdly, my creative instinct was always to literature, because of the accessibility. Of course, I was always watching movies, but I was also reading. I was never obsessed with Hitchcock. When I was going to write a screenplay, I wasn’t looking at other movies.
You published your first novel, Consumed, in 2014. Did that writing that feel natural to you then compared to writing a script?
I was surprised by how much like directing it was, because you are doing the costumes, locations, lighting, and dialogue.
You’ve collaborated with many great authors whose books you’ve adapted: Stephen King (The Dead Zone), J.G. Ballard (Crash), Don DeLillo (Cosmopolis), and William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch) among them. Do you feel like working with them gave you a different visual sensibility?
Yeah, definitely. When you’re doing Crash, for example, you know that you’re not really making the book; you are making a new creature that is a fusion [of film and literature]. There is no way really to do a so-called faithful adaptation of the novel. It’s a different art form. It addresses a different part of your brain. I always accepted that, and these writers accepted it, too.
If you look at the difference between Cosmopolis and Naked Lunch, they’re very different. There’s endless dialogue of DeLillo’s in Cosmopolis, and endless Burroughsian dialogue in Naked Lunch. They’re very different but very distinctive. It’s a real fusion of sensibilities between us.
Two recent movies, Queer and White Noise, adapted Burroughs and DeLillo novels, respectively. What did you think of them?
I will only comment on Queer, because I really liked it, and I know Luca Guadagnino. I thought his Queer and [my] Naked Lunch would make a great double bill. And there’s crossover because I use a lot of Queer in Naked Lunch. There’s one monologue that is exactly the same in each movie. It’s totally legitimate because he’s adapting Queer, and it was in that book.
I talked to Burroughs about using parts of Queer. I said, “Really, I don’t think I can make this movie if I can’t address some events in your life, like shooting your wife, and also I want to use some parts of Queer and some of your other books.” And he said, “I don’t separate my life from my work, so do whatever you want.” So that’s why that fusion is there. [Guadagnino’s] Queer is very different. It’s lovely.
Watching Queer, I wasn’t prepared for a sentimental take on William S. Burroughs. I never gleaned any sentimentality from his writing.
Burroughs was very sentimental when I talked to him and met him. The whole tough-guy persona that he projected is very much a defense. In person, he was very sweet. I don’t know if Luca ever met Burroughs, but he caught that element from Queer. I think it’s totally legitimate. You wouldn’t think of Burroughs as being a romantic, but he was — in his own way.
Some reviews of The Shrouds describe you as a legend. How does that sit with you?
It’s hard. It would be strange for one to perceive oneself as a legend. I don’t know how you do that. That’s a calisthenic I’m not capable of. I go to the corner store; I buy milk and bananas. I carry them back to my house. I make some cereal for breakfast. That’s my life. It’s pretty bland.
As an artist, for me, you want to be invisible. You don’t want to be seen. If you’re a performer, that’s a different thing.
How do you feel about the phrase “body horror”?
I still don’t get it. That term is never anything that I used. So I wouldn’t mind if it went away.
Recently, I was invited to the Academy Museum as the “godfather of cyberpunk,” and I thought, “Well, that’s entertaining. I can go for that.” They wanted to show Videodrome and eXistenZ, and had me talk about cyberpunk, which, I mean, what is that even? I don’t know, but I can make it up. You look at Dead Ringers, there’s no cyberpunk happening.
No, but there is a woman separating conjoined twins with her teeth in that movie.
Yes, yes. Well, like the mantra in my new Crimes of the Future goes, “body is reality.” Horror comes through the body, as does love, as does ecstasy. You’re saying the body’s reality, so all of these things are body things, body eroticism, body whatever. But I accept it, and if it helps, if it helps.
What did you think of The Substance, which people call body horror?
That’s an obvious [comparison] these days. I’ve met [The Substance director] Coralie Fargeat, and I’ve met Julia Ducournau who did Titane, and they’ve talked about me as an influence on their filmmaking and called me an inspiration. So, how can you not like that? I do like that. I feel it’s great.
I take it to mean that I’ve created something that has some impact, is revealing some things that maybe weren’t revealed before. And hence “Cronenbergian,” you know, the idea of being an adjective. Before “Fellini-esque” and “Bergman-esque,” I thought, “Yeah, you want to be an adjective, because it means that there’s a recognizable sensibility that you have that is revealing and interesting, and so it stands out.”
Do you see any kind of thematic confluence in your work as a whole? Like, Crash is about people tempting fate to feel alive, while The Shrouds is about the living feeling alive through the dead.
I don’t think about it. I know there are filmmakers who enjoy being self-referential, and it just never occurs to me. I don’t think about how a film fits into the oeuvre, because it’s so random the way films get made.
What do you mean?
People say, “Why did you make Dead Ringers when you made it?” I said, “Because the financing came through. I’d been trying to make it for 10 years. I would’ve made it 10 years earlier if I had had the financing.” It’s only because The Fly was successful enough that people thought that maybe Dead Ringers might not be such a flop after all. The sequence has no meaning.
You initially conceived The Shrouds as a Netflix series, but it didn’t work out. How would it have been different than the movie?
Every episode would take place in a different city, in a different country, as Karsh tried to expand his cemetery empire, and he would run into all kinds of political and religious issues and environmental ones, and it could be very revealing and a lot of fun and all kinds of things. There would be conspiracies; some of them would be fantasy and some would be quite real. It would’ve been longer, and I still would’ve been making it right now.
What are you working on now?
I’m thinking about making a movie out of my novel, Consumed. I’m thinking about what a script would look like. Robert Lantos has been playing with it, trying to get it made as a series or a movie. There’s always the element of, “Can you get this thing financed in today’s economy?”
Can you?
It’s a mystery right now. Things are really rough if you’re an independent filmmaker. It depends on international finances and Wall Street, and, who knows … tariffs? Right now, it seems pretty tough to get something financed that’s not very mainstream. I was hoping Netflix would be an edgier alternative to the studio system, but I think they’ve gone now very mainstream and safe with lower budgets and they’re more cautious. I don’t know that for sure.
Making movies is never easy, because you’re using other people’s money, and you have to convince them to give it to you. The budgets go up and down. The budget for Crimes of the Future was twice what the budget was for The Shrouds, and it’s just because of the way things have gone, because of the pandemic and this and that.
So how do you define success?
I’m not sure that I ever do that, “define success.” It’s interesting right now: You don’t have any idea how much your film has made or not made, whether it’s been successful, whether you get any residuals. Since streaming, all of that has become quite odd.
In the old days, there was the Variety chart. You could see your film was number 23, and it had taken in this much money. With the streaming setup, your film hasn’t really directly made money. It’s a matter of how many subscribers have come in or left, and it gets very confusing. So financially, you take the money and run. What you got paid as a salary for making the film, you should accept that as the money. And if anything else happens that’s positive, then OK.
In terms of critical stuff, it’s up and down. Crash has been reevaluated since it came out. It was [perceived as] a hideous, horrible abortion of a film and now it’s, like, a classic or something. We showed the 4K version in Venice, and it was a very young audience, and they loved it. It was not remotely scandalizing to them; it didn’t shock them at all. So even how you’re accepted at the moment is not how you will be accepted for the same thing 10 years later. Ultimately, I can’t worry about it.
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