When you think of the greatest living directors, it’s hard not to include David Cronenberg on that list. The 75-year-old filmmaker is probably best known for “Scanners,” “The Fly,” “Videodrome,” and “A History of Violence,” but his full filmography is one of the more eclectic out there. While he’s never been the most prolific director out there, fans have grown accustomed to waiting for a new Cronenberg project. And according to the filmmaker, if he does anything in the future, fans probably won’t be able to see it on the big screen.
Speaking to EW, Cronenberg talks about his future and what he thinks might be the type of project he wants to do down the line. Sadly, a feature film doesn’t seem to be in the plans. Instead, the director is taking inspiration from one of his more recent projects, a novel titled “Consumed,” for what he might do in the future.
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He explains:
“I’ve written one novel and I really quite enjoyed that. I think that there are things you can do in the novel that you cannot do on a movie. I just came back from the Venice film festival, and I was on a panel with Spike Lee and some others, talking about the future of cinema. There was a lot of discussion about Netflix, and streaming series, and so on, and I was saying that I thought that was the future of cinema, and that it was really an interesting idea, the idea of doing a TV series, a streaming series. Whether I end up doing something like that is a whole other thing. Obviously, it would be a huge commitment of time and so on. To do eight hours of TV is a lot. [But] once again, the idea of a series as being more novelistic than a movie. When you compare the two, a movie is really more like a short story than a novel, and the complexity that you can get into in a series is really quite interesting.”
We are seeing more and more filmmakers talk about the freedom and creativity that the modern era of Peak TV has to offer. Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and other companies are spending huge amounts of money to sign well-known filmmakers and creators to come over to do whatever projects they want for streaming. And no, Cronenberg doesn’t discuss anything in particular, but it’s fairly easy to envision a scenario where he signs with Netflix for an 8-episode series, with his imagination as the only limitation.
Perhaps 2014’s “Maps to the Stars” will be the Cronenberg big-screen swansong. But for film fans hoping to see anything the director can cook up, there’s still hope for a David Lynch-ian turn to TV for his next project.
Of course, that is if there is a next project. Let’s just hope we haven’t seen the end of David Cronenberg.