Why David Cronenberg doesn’t believe creative freedom exists: “There is no such thing”
One wonders what goes on inside the mind of David Cronenberg. The master of body horror has crafted some of the most twisted, outlandish, and most original scary movies of all time. Exploding heads, men turning into bugs, people getting off on car crashes—all of these insane ideas have come from the brain of one man. Even his more ‘normal’ films, such as A History of Violence, Cosmopolis, A Dangerous Method, can be a little out there.
Cronenberg cut his teeth during an age of unparalleled creative freedom for directors. The ‘New Hollywood’ movement, which lasted from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, reduced the influence studios had over creative output and put the power almost entirely in the hands of the people behind the camera. Cronenberg witnessed this extraordinary era first-hand; however, that doesn’t mean he believes in it wholesale.
“There is no such thing as a license to do whatever you want,” the auteur told Chud during an interview promoting his film, 2007’s Eastern Promises. “Talk to Marty Scorsese about it, or even Spielberg.” He framed his argument through the lens of his previous film, A History of Violence. Starring Viggo Mortensen (his favourite actor), Maria Ballo, and William Hurt, it depicts the aftermath of a foiled robbery and what happens when the ‘hero’ who stopped it (Mortensen) comes under scrutiny. The film was a major critical success for all involved, but its box office returns were not what distributors New Line Cinema had in mind.
“Let’s say I’d done History, then wanted to do Spider [the film he made immediately before] for 25million. I wouldn’t have gotten it made!” Cronenberg pondered. “For example, after I did The Fly, which was a huge hit and my biggest hit when you correct for inflation, I still couldn’t get Dead Ringers made. In other words, people read that [script] and say, ‘gee, why don’t you make something more like The Fly?’ So, it’s not like there’s some magic where everyone is hypnotised by your last success and you can command them to do whatever you want. I wish that could happen, but it never does. People are pretty pragmatic, and they can see what a project is.”
While there are certainly body horror elements to Dead Ringers, which was remade as a TV show many years later, it doesn’t lean into the concept in quite the same way as Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly. By this point in his career, audiences and studios had come to expect certain things from his movies. He’d become a victim of his own success, trapped by the ideas others projected onto him and what they thought would be ‘best’ both creatively and financially.
This might explain why the director’s next few projects were so radically different. After Dead Ringers, he made Naked Lunch, a surrealist comedy based on the William S Burroughs novel of the same name. Next came something completely left field, a romantic drama named M Butterfly set in 1960s China. Cronenberg wouldn’t fully return to the body horror genre until 1999’s eXistenZ.
Navigating the film industry sounds exhausting. Even when you get something right, it can backfire massively and leave you in a creative limbo. Why Cronenberg has even bothered to keep going at all is a total mystery, but it’s remarkable that he has. He must really love watching people’s body parts blow up.
