"The appeal of horror is beyond politics...it deals with things much more primordial - those old standbys, death and separation."
"I would never censor myself." - David Cronenberg
This interview with David Cronenberg was conducted on Thursday, February 20, 2003, at the Hotel Monaco in Denver, Colorado, and was made possible by Landmark Theaters and Moviehabit.com. All quotes outside the interview that are attributed to Cronenberg are taken from Chris Rodley's 1992 edition of CRONENBERG ON CRONENBERG.
When he was in his 20's, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg staked out his claim with a variety of student films and made-for-tv efforts. His early work showed unique thematic relations that he would explore in ways often described as cerebral, primordial, methodical, and even inscrutable. Starting with TRANSFER (1966), FROM THE DRAIN (1967), STEREO (1969), and CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (1970), the doctors, surgeries, institutions, viruses, and psychic (not to mention physiological) turmoil were all in their embryonic stage and just beginning to blossom. When he was in his 30's, Cronenberg really let loose with shockers that were uniquely visceral or bizarre, but also bold and ingenius, such as SHIVERS (1975), RABID (1977), THE BROOD (1979), SCANNERS (1981), VIDEODROME and THE DEAD ZONE (both 1983). These films alone gave Cronenberg a well-earned place in the pantheon of great horror film directors. Then, in his 40's, Cronenberg had a huge hit with his remake of THE FLY (1986) and from there launched himself into the arthouse crowd with DEAD RINGERS (1988), NAKED LUNCH (1991), and M BUTTERFLY (1993). In his 50's, he caused a scandal in Cannes with CRASH (1996) and later put his unique spin on the dangers (to use a catch-all word, here meant to encompass perception, politics, and more) behind virtual reality-video games in EXISTENZ (1999). Now, just a few weeks shy of his 60th birthday, Cronenberg returns to the screen with his latest film, SPIDER, based on the gothic (Cronenberg would say "neo-Gothic") novel by Patrick McGrath (pronounced McGraw) and starring Ralph (pronounced Rafe) Fiennes as the eponymous and schizophrenic character who is trying to make sense of all the intermingling webs of his memory. Although still in its initial stage of exhibition, SPIDER has already begun to net Cronenberg some of the best critical reviews he has received since THE FLY. While it's tempting to chart the relationship between these two films in title alone, and tragedy and deterioration can be found at the core of both, they are also worlds apart in important ways that go beyond aesthetics and approach - and a testimony to Cronenberg's wide range and diverse palette.
LITERATURE & FILM
"There are books you read because they're a diversion, and there are books you read when you're in spiritual trouble. They are soul food; they really do balm the soul. I want my movies to do that, get to the soul." (Cronenberg)
(Interviewer) Pablo Kjolseth: To use the preceding quote as a launching pad to discuss your latest film, does SPIDER fall into this category, and if so why?
Cronenberg: I'm really looking for a very personal connection between me and the audience. My relationship with the audience is very collaborative. It's not like Hitchcock, who liked to think of himself as a puppet master and his audience as marionettes who he could pull their strings to make them laugh and twitch and cry. Whether he was assessing himself accurately is another question. I don't even aspire to that. I'm asking my audience to have a similar experience to what I've had, but from their perspective. Any audience is going to bring their own culture, education, awareness of movies and everything else to a movie, so I don't try to predict their reactions or manipulate those reactions. I'm really telling myself a story and inviting them to listen in. SPIDER has sadness, tragedy, and even humor. So, yes, I think it does completely fit that bill from that long-ago interview.
I take the art of cinema seriously and I think it should do what art can do, and I would separate it from pure entertainment alone. It's meant to do more than that. Cinema has incredible and vast potential. What Hollywood normally does is it runs in a very narrow groove. It's very powerful, and we have great affection for Hollywood films, but they don't remotely tap the great potential of what cinema as an art form can do. It's left to independent filmmakers to explore that vast potential.
Kjolseth: How did the book by Patrick McGrath find its way into your hands, and how did his involvement with the screenplay come about?
Cronenberg: I was sent the script by someone in Toronto. At that point I didn't know anything about Patrick McGrath. I hadn't read his novels. The first thing of his that I read was his script for SPIDER, and I thought it was terrific. I got very excited about the possibility of me doing it, especially since it came with Ralph Fiennes attached - he'd been involved with the project for about four years before I got the script and he was very interested in playing that role. After I read the script I started to read Patrick's other novels, starting with SPIDER, and I found a whole, rich, and very interesting world considered by some to be gothic, or neo-gothic, as I think Patrick is revitalizing the classic gothic genre. SPIDER, in a strange way is perhaps his least gothic novel. Gothic would mean, huge, lonely mansions perched on the edge of cliffs with thunderstorms and people in capes sweeping around with a lot of great emotion and tragic density. SPIDER is a more modern novel than that.
Kjolseth: In the book, Spider's inner voice, his narration, is very eloquent and active, and at complete odds with how he expresses himself to the outside world. Tell me about the decision to strip away the first-person narrative used in the book.
Cronenberg: I think in the book you don't really know how he connects with the outside world. Certainly when he's speaking to himself in the form of the journal, and the book SPIDER is his journal, he's a beautiful writer. He writes very fluently and beautifully with wonderful metaphors and great structure because Patrick McGrath is a wonderful writer. That works as a literary conceit; that this man who is basically suffering from schizophrenia, and his personality is disintegrating, and he is having great trouble distinguishing interior from exterior voices, and is hallucinating quite mightily - that he could at the same time write such a clear, self-aware account of himself, as a literary conceit, it works...and you want it to work. But as soon as you apply that to the Spider who was created for the screen, also by Patrick, you can see that they are two different people. The Spider in the movie is very inarticulate, not very self-aware, and he can barely speak. When you had a voice-over supposedly representing his inner thoughts that were very beautifully literary and rounded and balanced, you don't believe it. You simply don't believe that this man could speak that way or have those thoughts. Immediately, I said to Patrick: I think this is you not being able to let go of the novel - but you've gone so far in creating a new, cinematic Spider that we have to go with that one and forget the novel version of Spider. So I took away the voice-over, and I still have him writing in a journal but I asked Ralph Fiennes to develop a kind of hieroglyphics, or cuneiform, or runic script, that Spider can read but we can't read because he's very paranoid. He doesn't want other people to read what he's writing because, in a sense, he feels that he's taking evidence from a crime that has been committed, and he's very possessive of that and very worried that someone else will read it and so that's why he writes in this strange script in the movie.
Kjolseth: Before you tackled them, many people would have described NAKED LUNCH and CRASH as impossible literary works to translate to the screen and yet you did it. Have you ever read a book that even you thought was un-filmable?
Cronenberg: I actually don't even think about that when I read. I don't read books for their movie potential at all. And I do read a lot. And I absolutely don't read books thinking about moviemaking. It's just not in my nature to do that. Basically, my party line is that all books are unfilmable. They are totally unfilmable unless you shoot the pages. The two media are so completely different that you are only giving the illusion of filming a novel but, really, you can't. So a complete re-invention is required. You sort of make up a version of it and then call it by the same name and that's your movie.
Kjolseth: Your father was a bibliophile. You grew up in a house with corridors that you cite as literally composed of books. Do you think such love affairs with literature are waning with each generation, and if so, what kind of impact do you think this will have on how future generations think?
Cronenberg: Literature is a very different animal from, let's say, the movies because it is based on the structure of language. Without language you don't have self-awareness, you don't have, self-consciousness. So much of what we are, as humans, that differentiates us from any other animal that we know, and probably from anything else in the universe, is the self-awareness, the higher consciousness, that we can have, which is so hugely language based. Movies, of course, use language, but there's a level of abstraction in a book, a novel, that is much more extreme than in film. You cannot photograph an abstract concept. If you want to generate abstract concepts from your film, that is to say thoughts and connections, you have to do it by photographing actual physical objects and, of course you can invent them with computer imagery, but it amounts to the same thing. So it's a very different process that happens in your nervous system and your brain when you watch a movie, even one that has a lot of dialogue, than what happens when you read a book. They're very, very different. I don't think that we will ever let go of literature. I don't think it's possible, because (literature) does something that's very unique and is not supplanted at all by the cinema. The two things are very different.
The popularity of reading novels might wax and wane, and certainly there are a lot of very depressed novelists right now who feel that their art form has already hit its peak, and now hit its nadir within their lifetime. Most of them are still writing, but they feel that their audience has gotten smaller and smaller. On the other hand, reading has not decreased at all. In fact, the computer has really enhanced a strange form of letter-writing through instant-messaging and email, and I'm not saying that the art of letter-writing has been revived because the kind of writing that people do in email is not like the kind of writing that they did when writing a beautiful letter was considered a mark of culture. When, if you couldn't write an elegant and beautiful letter, you were not considered a cultured person. Well, we don't have that now. But reading is still as important as it ever was and has been enhanced in a very strange way by the computer. The fortunes of the novel might well wax and wane - but reading is essential to thought.
