Why did David Cronenberg question Oliver Stone’s enjoyment of filmmaking?
One is a pioneering body horror master with a love for blood, guts, and exploding heads. The other is a Purple Heart-winning veteran known for his varied and eclectic filmography. On the surface, there isn’t much connecting David Cronenberg and Oliver Stone, apart from the fact that they both make films that have a tendency to shock and appal.
The Canadian horror maestro is a walking controversy. His 1981 work Scanners blew people’s minds when it first came out (literally) and he has left a gooey, visceral trail in his wake ever since. Movies like The Fly, Videodrome, and Crash have cemented his legacy as one of cinema’s most disturbed and disturbing filmmakers, and although he has branched out with the likes of A History of Violence and Cosmopolis, violent horror is still very much his home turf.
As for the American Stone, his modus operandi is more challenging to pin down. Wall Street, Platoon, Any Given Sunday, Snowden, JFK. His catalogue is deep and often completely unconnected. Certain themes do reoccur – with examinations of power, holding public figures to account, and exploring unconventional theories about well-known events – but you never know what you’re going to get with a Stone film. That’s the only thing that is certain about his work, and it’s also half the fun.
Aside from creating talking points, there isn’t much to link these two, which might be why the former has a less-than-favourable opinion of the latter. “I don’t know if Oliver Stone really enjoys what he does in terms of controversy,” Cronenberg told Filmmaker in 1997. “I feel without ever having met him that maybe he is a more combative and confrontational kind of person than I am. And maybe he’s truly gleeful when he upsets people. I’m not. If everyone who saw Crash said, ‘I enjoyed it’, I’d be perfectly happy.”
Even though they have both made their name defying social norms, the two directors approach controversy in very different ways. Cronenberg is an out-and-out creative, relying on his own twisted imagination to come up with uniquely horrifying scenarios and then bring them to life, often with the use of groundbreaking practical or visual effects. As for Stone, his most controversial movies stem from real life. Take JFK, for example, which played upon several pre-existing conspiracy theories about the presidential assassination. He has also made films about Richard Nixon, George W Bush, Larry Flynt, and Alexander the Great, as well as historical events like the Vietnam War and 9/11.
Perhaps this is what irks Cronenberg so much. Stone’s approach to filmmaking is more opinion-based. It comes from tearing people down instead of building up one’s own ideas and is often a vessel for Stone’s personal views. As for his work, that’s often ideologically flexible and open to interpretation. It’s designed to shock but also to make people think. As Cronenberg said, he’d never met Stone up to this point, so perhaps these comments were a little out of pocket. Still, it’s interesting to see how two men with ostensibly the same mission statement can approach things from two entirely different viewpoints.
Elsewhere in the discussion, Cronenberg talked about how controversy is viewed differently in different places. He used his movie Crash as an example, saying, “What happens in the UK, here you see the press deform the film before your very eyes, demonising it, turning it into something it is not – that is very depressing.” However, when discussing the movie’s reception in France, he said it prompted “some good healthy debate about what the cinema should do and sexuality. That’s exciting.”
He finished by dismissing the idea that all publicity is good publicity, ominously finishing with, “Talk to Salman Rushdie.”
