Somewhere a version of “Flashdance” directed by David Cronenberg. Speaking at the Marrakech International Film Festival, where he is also the guest of honor and the subject of a retrospective, the Canadian auteur looked back at his almost sixty-year career, musing on some of his greatest works as well as those that could have been.
“The producer of [‘Flashdance’] was totally convinced I was the one to direct it and I told him I would destroy the movie if I did,” Cronenberg told the audience during an in-conversation event. The director also mentioned how he almost helmed “Total Recall” because of his fondness for the work of Philip K. Dick and got close to directing 1991’s “Black Robe,” which he left due to disagreements with how to tackle the adaptation of Brian Moore’s “controversial” novel.
“’Black Robe’ was a novel that I was very interested in and it would have been very controversial. You would have to recreate the life and social structure of Indigenous people and, in the book, it was not politically correct. It didn’t show anybody in a good light,” he said of the project, which would eventually be directed by Bruce Beresford. “Ultimately, I realized the producers wanted to make it a lot less upsetting. The movie that got made was interesting but I think it could have been much more interesting.”
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Speaking about his latest film, the Cannes-competition entry “The Shrouds,” Cronenberg addressed how the media has largely focused on the project’s autobiographical nature. Starring Vincent Cassel, the film follows a businessman whose grief over the premature death of his wife leads to the invention of a revolutionary technology that allows people to monitor a loved one’s corpse from within the grave as it decays. The Canadian filmmaker lost his wife of over four decades, film editor Carolyn Cronenberg, in 2017.
“There is too much emphasis on what [in the film] is about my life,” said the director. “You shouldn’t need to know the biography of the director for the film to be good. The fact that [the film] is based on things about my life doesn’t make it a good movie or even a passionate movie. It is of minor interest that my wife of 43 years died in 2017 and six years later I made the movie partly in response to my own grief.”
Cronenberg went on to add that “The Shrouds” is also “a funny movie” and that he found it “interesting” how the audiences at Cannes largely missed the film’s comedic tones. “The audience was intimidated by the glamour of the festival,” he said, adding that the response in his home festival of Toronto was much more in line with what he expected and that, if someone were to walk into the screening room at TIFF, they would have thought it was a classic comedy playing on the screen.
Of casting Cassel as tech mogul Karsh, Cronenberg mentioned he is aware of the resemblance between the French actor — who wears spiky grey hair in the film — and himself, but that he “did not cast him because of his hair.”
“[Cassel] did know that this film was very personal and he did model himself after me. Usually Vincent plays tough guys, guys who talk very quickly, and he was more gentle in his speaking, more relaxed. It was a legitimate thing for an actor to do. You don’t want to be yourself when you’re an actor, you want to be somebody else. I was a very convenient model because I was always on set,” he emphasized.
Earlier in the talk when discussing “Videodrome,” the director spoke about the prescience of his films, and said that “‘The Shrouds’ is another version of what I was doing with ‘Videodrome’” when it comes to its grasp on technology. “I dont really think the purpose of art is to be prophecy,” said Cronenberg. “I don’t think of this film as prophetic but it was sensing where things were going with technology so I just amplified that. I’ve done the same thing with ‘The Shrouds.’ The technology to do that is absolutely there, I just don’t think that anybody wants to do it.”
Elsewhere during the 90-minute talk, Cronenberg spoke about key behind-the-scenes moments in some of his major films, including how the technical intricacies of having Jeremy Irons play a dual role in “Dead Ringers” led to Panavision developing a new monitor technology that enabled directors to see two halves of a frame and how the telepods in “The Fly” were fashioned after his beloved Ducati motorcycle.
Of his four-film collaboration with Viggo Mortensen, the director said he greatly values the freedom to tell the actor when a role isn’t quite right for him. “I wouldn’t be doing him or me a favor if I miscast him. We agreed to be able to say no to each other. It can get emotional and tricky, your relationship with actors,” he added.
Despite being widely known for his genre work and having labelled himself the Barron of Blood early in his career (“At least I didn’t say I was the King of Blood. I was very modest,” he quipped during the talk), Cronenberg emphasized that the connective thread in his work is not his penchant for scientific motifs or his fascination with the nooks and crannies of the human body but love.
“I’m a total romantic,” he said. “If I said all my films are love stories you would laugh at first but they are all about love in one way or another. I’d hate to be sentimental but it is one of the most basic dramatic aspects of human life, the phenomenon of love. Despite the genre elements of my films, they are all romances.”
