June 24th, 2014 
Sam Cohen 
One of the cinematic gods still working today, David Cronenberg, sat down with UTG this past weekend for an interview at the gorgeous Lands End Inn in Provincetown, Massachusetts, overlooking Cape Cod Bay, as part of The 16th Annual Provincetown International Film Festival.
Cronenberg’s directorial portfolio includes such seminal classics as The Fly, Videodrome, Eastern Promises and Crash along with other cult favorites including The Dead Zone, Scanners and Dead Ringers.
An extreme wealth of knowledge when it comes to cinema, Cronenberg shed light on many a thing regarding the changing medium that is filmmaking in our modern age. We even got to talking about where his interests currently lie within certain genres. Check below to read through our conversation with a vastly talented director that many of us here at UTG admire beyond words.
eXistenZ (1999) is my favorite of all of your directorial efforts and felt it was really ahead of its time. With that film it seemed like you were trying to send a message about having another life within video games. Was that your point?
Cronenberg: Well I was playing with anticipating a few things (this being the business of video games). I was playing with some obvious pathways of evolution for the video gaming and the desire that people have to live in another reality. It’s a constant thing. It’s one of the reasons that we have religion–we want to kind of transcend who we are or transform ourselves. We are constantly doing both anyway but I wanted to explore that in a very visceral and literal way like they do with video games. I wasn’t a very big video game player; I had only played a little bit. I felt that I understood the attraction of it and the paralytic nature of it. There are some downsides to video gaming. My take on technology has always been that it is really a reflection of ‘us.’ The good part of us and the bad part, too. Technology kind of comes back and sort of modifies us as well.
One of the biggest debates facing filmmaking today is the film vs. digital divide. The ways people are making films now is ever-changing. What are your thoughts on utilizing film or digital equipment for your projects?
Cronenberg: This is the Kodak party we are at right now so I don’t know if I should be saying film is dead? For me, film has been dead for a while and it has sort of been the walking dead for quite some time. Sound has been digital for 20 years and it was only a matter of time before the visual part of filmmaking caught up to that. I don’t really have nostalgia for film. I think digital is great; it’s very transformable. All of the things that people say film does that digital doesn’t do, I don’t buy it honestly. I don’t like shooting on film; it has a lot of drawbacks that the normal filmgoer doesn’t know about. Film is analog, which means that it degenerates from generation to generation (from the master print to the release prints). That’s a huge problem. I will never forget when I did my first movie; I came up with something called an answer print, which was right off of the film negative. It looked great, exactly how I wanted the movie to look. Then I saw my first release print which was several generations away and it looked horrible. That’s what everyone saw, the horrible version. So, that, plus we could get into many other details negating the fact that film is something still useful. The pressure on top of the digital transfer makes it kind of inevitable that film will be gone. Just as in still shooting too, the only people that still shoot on film are retro people who make a big deal about shooting on film. It’s hard to get film processed and you can’t even get cinema film processed anymore.
It seems like a lot of big filmmakers like Christopher Nolan are shooting on film, what about that?
Cronenberg: Yeah, they have the budget for that. For an indie person, it’s ridiculous. It’s more expensive by far to shoot on film when you can actually shoot a movie with your cellphone. The freedom that you have is kind of ridiculous. For me, the clinging to film is more about nostalgia and affection for the past history of cinema that I certainly have. Shooting on film as a medium in which you can play with, forget about it.
I interviewed Steven Knight (writer of Eastern Promises) a couple of months ago and he said that he wrote a sequel for Eastern Promises. Do you have any interest in returning to direct that universe?
Cronenberg: I did for a while but Viggo Mortensen (star of Eastern Promises) doesn’t want to do it. What Steve wrote was a terrific script but it wasn’t necessarily about the same Nikolai (Mortensen’s character) that we saw in the first film. I think that was Viggo’s problem, it didn’t seem like the same character to him. Maybe that sequel will get made as more of a standalone film more than anything. There was that suggestion that Steve could direct it because he has directed some stuff but it would be a big production. Steve feels a lot more comfortable in doing small and much more contained things like Locke. It would be a big step up for him to do that film, but who knows?
With The Fly, Videodrome, and eXistenZ you have been dubbed the ‘body horror’ king in a sense with how you can make the human body look grotesque and malignant. Do you have any interest in returning to those kinds of films?
Cronenberg: That phrase, ‘body horror,’ was not mine; it was some critic’s. I don’t really see it as a genre. For instance, some people have read the novel I have just written, my first novel (Consumed which hits shelves on September 30). They said that it reminds them of my early films more than my later films. I’ve never turned my back on the horror or sci-fi genres. It’s just that I don’t want to repeat myself. If there were this fantastic horror concept that came along, I wouldn’t hesitate because it is a ‘horror film.’ If it were sort of more of the same, then of course I wouldn’t do it.
Interview written and conducted by: Sam Cohen — (Follow him on Twitter)
Check out the trailer for Cronenberg’s next film, Maps to the Stars, below!
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