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Global News
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Global News
‘The body is reality': Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg on mortality and making movies
For nearly his entire career, David Cronenberg has been considered a trailblazer of the 'body horror' subgenre — and it's easy to see why. The renowned Canadian filmmaker is behind Scanners, Videodrome and the 1986 remake of The Fly — just some of the highly influential sci-fi and horror classics he's made throughout the decades. Many of the films share a focus on disturbing and graphic violations of the human body. Yet the 82-year-old Torontonian has only reluctantly accepted that title — or allowed others to connect the phrase 'body horror' to his films. 'I've never used that term to describe my own work,' Cronenberg says in an interview with Global National's Eric Sorensen. 'But it has stuck, and I'm stuck with it.' Personal connections For the average moviegoer, Cronenberg's latest work, The Shrouds, won't necessarily help with his defence. The film is all about a tech entrepreneur inventing a machine that monitors corpses as they decompose inside their graves — allowing people to watch their dead and buried loved ones slowly wither away. But it is one of Cronenberg's most personal films yet, having been inspired by the death of his wife in 2017 and the grief that followed. The movie itself makes that no secret. Like Cronenberg, the morbid inventions of the film's protagonist are a product of his longing for his own late spouse. In past interviews, Cronenberg had described an intense urge to join his wife inside her coffin during her burial — a feeling also mentioned in the film. Advertisement 'The death of my wife was the instigator of this movie. I wouldn't have made this movie, I wouldn't have thought to write it, if it hadn't been for that. But I think you could overstress the idea of the personal aspect of it because I think all art is personal in some way,' Cronenberg says. View image in full screen Director David Cronenberg poses on the red carpet for the movie 'The Shrouds' during the Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Wednesday, September 11, 2024. Nathan Denette / The Canadian Press 'There's always an autobiographic element because it's your life that allows you to understand what your characters are, who they are, how people relate to each other.' For the uninitiated, that raises questions about what else inspires the disturbing visions present in Cronenberg's other movies, such as a man's sexual fetish for deadly car collisions in Crash or the harrowing human mutations driven by technology in Crimes of the Future. [Embed GN story here] But for Cronenberg — long fascinated with the human body — these extremes simply reflect just how intense our anxieties are for our changing bodies and our mortality. 'There comes a time when a child learns that the child will not live forever … That's pretty difficult. That's a major turning point in any human's life,' he says. 'The body is reality. Once you start with that and then you consider death is inevitable — and if you're an atheist like me, you consider that death is oblivion — I mean, it is the end of you. You disappear. We put all that together, then you have my movies.' True to Canada Cronenberg never made it a point to be this subversive when he started making movies more than 50 years ago. Son of a musician and a writer, he was just a creative attracted by the potential of the medium to express his ideas. With short films and no formal training, all he cared about then was being any good at it. 'It wasn't even the idea of the subject matter that was considered. It was my ability to be a filmmaker technically,' he says, while recollecting the challenges of making his first commercial film. 'At first, I thought, 'Oh my God, I don't think I can do this. The faces of the heads are the wrong size in the frame. The angle is not right. The two shots don't really work together.' And I thought maybe I really don't have the sensibility.' Cronenberg also wasn't sure whether his career as a filmmaker would even thrive in Canada. Partly motivated by better financial incentives in the American film industry, he pitched his first feature, Shivers, to Hollywood executives first. He also considered moving permanently to the U.S. since he already had personal ties south of the border through his American father. It was only when he secured funding from the Canadian Film Development Corporation, now Telefilm Canada, that he decided to stay. He preferred that anyway and still does. 'I really felt that my sensibility was Canadian and different from the U.S.,' he says. 'I don't think in the U.S., they imagine that Canadians were different, but I really could feel it when I went to America how different it was.' View image in full screen Canadian film director and screenwriter David Cronenberg is honoured at the Marrakech International Film Festival, in Morocco, on Dec. 2, 2024. Mosa'ab Elshamy / The Associated Press Quintessentially Cronenberg…and Canadian Decades of international acclaim later, the eccentricity of Cronenberg's movies is now considered quintessential Canadian cinema. His impact and influence beyond it is also emblematic of how Canada's filmmakers do their best work when they are not trying to mimic mainstream Hollywood. Advertisement Not that Cronenberg hasn't found success there either, having directed star-studded dramas like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. He was even initially approached to work on crowd-pleasers like Top Gun, Star Wars and, to his confusion, Flashdance. 'I thought I probably would have destroyed that film (Flashdance) somehow,' Cronenberg admits. '[But] I took it as a positive appraisal of my skills as a director.' It's clear Cronenberg's distinct body of work will continue to fascinate audiences and aspiring filmmakers alike long after he's gone. Even if that also means his name will be forever associated with the 'body horror' genre. But true to his beliefs, he's not all too concerned about legacy. 'I'm not worried about it,' he says. 'Once I'm dead, it's not going to be a problem.'
USA Today
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Would you watch your loved ones decompose? 'The Shrouds' imagines a grave future
Would you watch your loved ones decompose? 'The Shrouds' imagines a grave future Show Caption Hide Caption A man clings to his dead wife in David Cronenberg's 'The Shrouds' Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger star in David Cronenberg's "The Shrouds," following a husband haunted by the memory of his late wife. David Cronenberg knows exactly how he wants to be buried. In his new movie 'The Shrouds' (in theaters nationwide April 25), the Canadian filmmaker imagines a near future where high-definition cameras are placed in luxury coffins, allowing people to check in on their loved ones via livestream after they die. It may sound macabre, watching your family and friends as their bodies gradually decay through the years. But if such technology actually existed, Cronenberg would be all in. 'I would have done that, I really would,' he says on a Zoom call. 'In Toronto, we have a walk of fame with plaques in the sidewalk. I thought, 'I would like to be buried under my plaque.' In fact, it should have Plexiglass so people could look down and see me there disintegrating. I know my fans would love that.' Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY's movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox 'The Shrouds' movie tells a 'very personal' story about grief 'The Shrouds' follows an anguished entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who starts a casket surveillance company known as GraveTech following the death of his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger). But after her cemetery plot is vandalized one night, along with many others, Karsh sets out to catch the culprits and uncover the secrets of Becca's past. The film is extremely meaningful to Cronenberg, 82, the body-horror maestro behind 'Scanners,' 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly.' In 2017, he lost his frequent collaborator and wife of 38 years, Carolyn Zeifman, to cancer. She was 66. 'I made a lot of notes throughout the two years I was taking care of my wife,' Cronenberg says. Writing this movie, 'I just had to remind myself what I was thinking and feeling.' In an early scene, Karsh explains to a blind date (Jennifer Dale) why he invented GraveTech. Watching as Becca was lowered into the ground, he felt an intense urge to hop in there with her. ('I couldn't stand it that she was alone in there, and that I would never know what was happening to her,' Karsh says.) That sentiment is drawn from Cronenberg's own grieving experience. 'I might not have jumped, but I would have been in there,' Cronenberg says. 'Those were feelings that really surprised me; I didn't anticipate them, but they hit me very hard. Without really being conscious of it, I always thought I was her protector. When she died, I realized how vulnerable I was to the world and that she had been protecting me all that time.' Kruger plays three characters in the movie, including Becca's consoling twin sister, Terry, and Karsh's A.I. assistant bot, Hunny. Reading the script, 'there seemed to be this enduring love story in the film that was very emotional and touched me profoundly,' the German actress says. Meeting him afterward, "David was very generous in sharing a lot of stories and inspirations for these characters. It made it very personal.' 'Shrouds' helped Kruger to understand the physical torment of losing your soulmate. She wonders how it must have felt for her grandfather, who was married to her grandmother for 70 years before she died. 'The pain of continuing to exist, and not having her body, has new meaning to me,' Kruger, 48, says. 'It's uncomfortable and sad to think about death: the fear of really being gone and not seeing that person again. It's not something I particularly look forward to.' 'Shrouds' director David Cronenberg reflects on his own mortality, legacy Cronenberg, who is atheist, has long-explored mortality and the unhappy realities of the human body, most recently in his 2022 sci-fi drama 'Crimes of the Future.' British writer Christopher Hitchens once said that 'death causes religion,' and 'I think that's the truth,' Cronenberg says. 'People can't face it. It's very powerful for us to imagine not existing, and so to avoid imagining our own oblivion, we make up stories that say you will not really disappear; that you'll be in heaven or get reincarnated.' But ultimately, life is about 'accepting the beauty and absurdity of existence. It's that very beauty that makes it so painful to imagine leaving it.' Cronenberg has worked steadily for six decades, directing Oscar-nominated films such as 'Eastern Promises' and 'A History of Violence,' although he himself has never been nominated. The unassuming filmmaker downplays his Hollywood impact, but speaks highly of horror provocateurs Coralie Fargeat ('The Substance') and Julia Ducournau ('Titane'), both of whom have cited him as a major influence. 'They're really talented and it's very sweet. They're like my cinematic daughters,' Cronenberg says. 'The fact that I've inspired younger filmmakers is lovely, but it doesn't pay the bills.' He also has little patience for directors like Quentin Tarantino, who has proclaimed for years that he plans to retire after his 10th and final movie, as a career 'mic drop.' 'Who cares? The people who like his films won't remember which order they were in,' Cronenberg says with a shrug. 'Frankly, you're kidding yourself if you think you're in control of your legacy. You aren't."
New York Times
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
David Cronenberg Lost His Wife and the Will to Make Movies. Then Came ‘The Shrouds'
In 2017, during the funeral of his wife and longtime collaborator Carolyn Zeifman, the director David Cronenberg found himself struck by an unusual impulse: As the coffin holding her dead body was lowered into the ground, he wanted more than anything to get into that box with her. That reluctance to let go is taken to even more morbid extremes in Cronenberg's new movie, 'The Shrouds,' about a high-tech cemetery where the ongoing decomposition of a corpse can be viewed through a video livestream meant for the loved ones left behind. When those graves are mysteriously vandalized, it's up to the cemetery owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel) to determine the culprits, who he suspects may have something to do with the death of his own wife (Diane Kruger). The 82-year-old Cronenberg has always been guided by a unique point of view as a filmmaker, and his classics like 'Scanners,' 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly' helped establish the body-horror genre. Still, he admitted in an interview via Zoom this month that 'The Shrouds' could be considered one of his most personal films: It's not for nothing that Cassel is costumed to look like his director, donning dark suits and teasing his gray hair upward in a familiar manner. Even so, Cronenberg cautioned against drawing too many links between himself and his lead character. 'As soon as you start to write a screenplay, you're writing fiction, no matter what the impetus was in your own life,' Cronenberg said. 'Suddenly, you're creating characters that need to come to life. And when you start to write them, they start to push you around if they're really alive.' Here are edited excerpts from our conversation. As your wife was dying, did you think you might channel what you felt into your work someday? Or did it feel too taboo to tackle? At that point, I thought I wouldn't make any more movies. I thought possibly I'd end up writing another novel, but the moviemaking process seemed just too overwhelming. I just didn't think I'd have the heart for it when my wife died, which surprised me because it made me realize how much her support meant to me in everything that I was doing. I wouldn't have thought that it would be: 'She's gone. I can't work anymore.' But that's how I felt, really. Does making a film like 'The Shrouds' give you any perspective on what you've gone through? Not really, no. It's the exercise it's always been, which is to understand and explore the human condition as you personally experience it. So in that sense, it's cathartic, but it's not in the sense that it can alleviate or lessen grief. In other words, I don't think of art as therapy. I think it might work better for people who see it than for me. Meanwhile, I'm just left with the grief that I always had. 'The Shrouds' originally began as a show you pitched to Netflix. What intrigued you about tackling it as a series rather than a film? I was really fascinated by the whole streaming phenomenon. It's a different kind of cinema, in the sense that a movie is more like a short story or novella but a series is quite close to being a novel and that lets you take your time and really get into details of things that you cannot do in a movie. I've never made a movie that was two hours long — they've all been under two hours. So the idea of making a 10-hour movie, wow, that's pretty shocking. Honestly, I don't know if I would have had the stamina to do that. I talked to Steve Zaillian about 'Ripley,' which I thought was a fantastically good series that he wrote and directed every episode, and it took three or four years. Very exhausting. I talked to Alfonso Cuarón about 'Disclaimer' — same thing, he wrote and directed every episode. I asked him if he would do that again and he said, 'I'm not really sure I would.' And I knew that David Lynch had just about destroyed himself doing 20 episodes of 'Twin Peaks.' How did Netflix receive your pitch? They liked it enough to finance the writing of the first episode, then they liked that enough to finance the writing of a second episode. And at that point, they decided not to continue with it. I was disappointed, but I had to say: 'Well, thank you Netflix for at least getting me to this point. I have two episodes written that I quite like and I'm going to try and see if I can make this as a feature film.' What I was pitching to Netflix, and perhaps this was one of the things that scared them, was that every episode would take place in a different country. So if it was eight episodes, it'd be eight countries. Now that is an expensive series, and although they had a lot of money at that point, the pinch was already starting with Netflix. They could see that once they hit the upper limit of their subscribers, they were not going to be able to finance $300 million for a series so simply. Streamers used to spend that money like it was nothing. I think the streaming entities are very conservative now. They pulled back on their financing and they're getting to be very mainstream in their thinking. I went to Netflix hoping that they would be some strange alternative to the studio system where they would be more willing to take chances and basically do independent filmmaking, but what I felt there was that they were already well on the way to becoming just another studio entity. It's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I was hoping they'd be a little more radical. You've previously compared cinema to a cemetery and said, 'I'm often watching movies in order to see dead people.' Particularly during the pandemic, when I was watching a lot of old movies, it occurred to me that every person who worked on this movie is dead now. The director, the producers, the actors — they're all dead, and I'm watching their ghosts. I suppose somewhere back in my head there was that idea with Karsh's shrouds that basically the shrouds are cinema. The audiovisual presence of the dead in our lives has certainly grown over time. It used to just be pictures or letters. Now there are so many more ways that the dead feel present in a way that's nearly tangible. And beyond that is the artificial-intelligence avatar where people now have enough data on their loved ones — videos that they've taken, recordings of their voice — that it's very possible to find a company that will create a very spookily realistic avatar of the dead person you're missing who can actually talk to you. The thing that will always be there, though, is that they're still disembodied. You still can't hug them. You can't go to bed with them. You can't walk down the street holding their hand. So is that more frustrating? Is it going to exacerbate the grief or will it alleviate it? We shall see. But at the moment, body is reality, as the line from 'Crimes of the Future' goes. That's one way to use A.I., and Karsh has his own A.I. assistant in 'The Shrouds.' But what do you make of A.I. that's based on art that you've made, that could be trained on screenplays that you've written? I understand the copyright wars but honestly, once it's out there, it's up for grabs. It always has been. I mean, when James Joyce wrote 'Ulysses' and showed English-speaking writers a different way to write a novel, that was up for grabs and you could use that in the work that you were doing. So in a way, it's not really different, the A.I. thing. The complexity of copyright — Is it theft or plagiarism? — you have to let that play out in specific cases with lawyers. But it doesn't surprise me and I think it's inevitable and in a way it's always been there, frankly. How would you feel if we went to ChatGPT right now and said, 'Generate a plot summary for a new David Cronenberg movie?' It's been done. I haven't done it myself with my own work but apparently, sometimes the results are actually quite viable. It's like, 'Yeah, this is a movie that could get made.' And does that unnerve you or tickle you? No, no, it tickles me. I enjoy it, actually. We have filmmakers like Coralie Fargeat and Julia Ducournau who are obviously taking inspiration from you. Oh, yes, I watched 'The Substance,' I saw 'Titane.' I've met Coralie, I've met Julia. It's very sweet, they're like my cinematic daughters. And I have a son and a daughter who are also moviemakers, so it doesn't threaten me, I don't feel like I've been taken advantage of. Especially in those cases, they completely acknowledged that I have influenced them and it doesn't diminish my movies. Coralie got a couple of Oscar nominations that I've never had for writing and best picture and director, so it pleases me, honestly. Viggo Mortensen, who starred in many of your films, has chastised the Academy for never nominating you. What do you make of those snubs? 'The Fly' won an Oscar for best makeup, and that was my first time attending the Oscars. It was interesting and fun, but you can only take it so seriously. I think I have 50 lifetime achievement awards from various festivals and things and it would be nice if I could live those 50 lifetimes, so it's all in perspective. [At least] I wouldn't have to make an Oscar speech and get really nervous and perhaps fall as I went up onto the stage and break my hip like old guys tend to do. So that's the upside. When 'The Shrouds' premiered at Cannes last summer, there was speculation that it could be your last film. Is that your intention? No, I'm writing a script based on my novel 'Consumed,' so we'll see how that works out. Definitely, I'd be willing to do another movie. I felt doing the last two movies that I did have the focus and the stamina and all that stuff that you need. Eventually, I might get to the point where I don't feel that I have the energy or the focus because it is rough making a movie. It's physically difficult. But at the moment, I seem to be OK, so we'll see what happens. Does the notion of your eventual final film have any importance to you? For example, Quentin Tarantino has announced he only plans to make one more movie, but he's had some difficulty picking a project that feels like a worthy end point. It means nothing to me. Zero. You never think, 'Well, if this is my last movie, at least it feels right'? No. Five years later, they won't even know it's your last movie. They won't know which movie you made when and they won't care, either.
Los Angeles Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
After losing his wife of 43 years, David Cronenberg turned the camera on grief itself
David Cronenberg never planned to become an adjective. But now that he is one, he's happy to claim it. 'Ever since 'Bergmanesque' and 'Felliniesque,' I think one has to aspire to becoming an adjective,' the 82-year-old Canadian filmmaker says dryly on a recent morning over Zoom from a book-lined office in his home in Toronto. 'That means there's a sensibility that perhaps didn't exist as a recognizable thing until you made it one with your films. So I accept that. I welcome it.' For a long time, that Cronenbergian sensibility — intellectual but visceral, philosophical but perverse, driven by the belief that the human body is a kind of temple of doom — kept him on the margins of the mainstream. Over the course of nearly two dozen films spanning more than 50 years, from 'Videodrome' and 'The Fly' to 'Dead Ringers' and 'Crash' (not the Oscar-winning one — the one where gruesome car crashes are a sexual kink), Cronenberg has reshaped the horror genre into something colder, brainier and more disturbingly intimate: an arena of mutation, contagion and psychic rupture. Once dismissed by some as a chilly provocateur, Cronenberg now looks more like a seer. In an age of body hacks and AI intimacy, the world has started to look — and feel — more Cronenbergian by the day. Coralie Fargeat's gruesome 'The Substance,' steeped in his brand of body horror, earned nominations for best picture and director this year. But even as his aesthetic has seeped into the cultural bloodstream, Cronenberg's latest film, 'The Shrouds' (opening Friday in Los Angeles and New York), comes from somewhere far more personal. Written in the aftermath of his wife Carolyn's death in 2017 — at age 66 after 43 years of marriage — the film centers on a grieving tech entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) who invents a system that allows people to monitor the decaying corpses of their interred loved ones in real time. Diane Kruger plays three versions of the same woman, Karsh's wife, her sister and an AI companion modeled after her called Hunny, blurring the lines between memory and desire as the story spirals into paranoia, conspiracy and erotic obsession. Cronenberg didn't think he would ever make another film after his wife's death. It was only after his longtime producer, Robert Lantos, encouraged him to return to work — first with 2022's 'Crimes of the Future' — that he realized he still had the focus and energy to keep going. And when it came time to think about what to do next, the answer was clear. 'It obviously had to be about my wife's death, in its fictionalized form,' he says. 'I started to go through in my mind things that I had felt. In the movie, Vincent Cassel's character says, 'I wanted to get into the box with her.' That was a really visceral feeling. And it was true.' For Cronenberg, the grief of losing his wife, like so much psychic pain in his films, was rooted in the body. In mourning, he read Joan Didion's 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' her memoir about the death of her husband, and found himself alienated by what he saw as Didion's disembodied restraint. 'I read all the grief books and none of them matched exactly my grief,' he says. 'Didion barely mentions her husband's body at all. It's as though they never had sex and the loss of that didn't mean anything to her. It was all very intellectual. And I thought, well, that's not the way I feel. For me, it's really physical. Really physical, along with everything else.' (The first line of dialogue in 'The Shrouds' — 'Grief is rotting your teeth' — is quintessentially Cronenbergian.) Kruger, who had never worked with Cronenberg before, says she was initially struck by how much more emotional and even touching the script felt than she expected from his recent work. It wasn't until they met in Paris to discuss the role that he told her the story had been inspired by the death of his wife. 'I was a little bit shocked because it became so clear to me that this film was, if not about him, obviously very personal to him,' Kruger said. 'We talked for hours and hours. You know, when you see pictures of him, he looks so cool and his films are so intense. So I just assumed that's what he would be like. And he's really not. I was very surprised by how open he was and how willing he was to share stories.' Cronenberg is used to upending such expectations. 'After he saw 'Shivers,' Martin Scorsese said he was afraid to meet me,' Cronenberg remembers with a laugh, referring to his 1975 breakthrough, a low-budget shocker about a parasite that turns residents of a Montreal apartment complex into homicidal, sex-crazed zombies. 'I told him, 'You, the guy who made 'Taxi Driver,' were afraid to meet me? I was afraid to meet you!' We've become friends since then.' He grins. 'But yes — I'm a sweetheart.' Though 'The Shrouds' deals with grief, loss and decay, it is also laced with macabre humor, including an early scene in which Karsh takes a blind date to view his wife's decomposing body. Cronenberg believes that tone was largely missed by the audience at Cannes, where the film premiered last year. 'All of my movies are funny, really,' he says. 'Because life is absurd. I guess I am a Darwinian, in that sense. I think we evolved to have humor in order to survive.' Asked whether making 'The Shrouds' was in any way cathartic or therapeutic, however, he shakes his head. 'Art, to me, is not therapy — it's something else,' Cronenberg says. 'Even a somber movie, it's really playtime. You're in the sandbox. You're putting on funny mustaches and funny voices, playing people that you aren't. The creativity, the playfulness — that's life-affirming. But the pain and the grief is exactly the same as it was.' That tension between anguish and absurdity runs throughout 'The Shrouds,' where technology becomes a conduit for grief and obsession. Like Cronenberg, a longtime automotive buff who raced cars in the 1980s, Karsh drives a Tesla, a character detail that now carries more baggage than he anticipated. 'One of the bad reviews said it was like a Tesla commercial,' said Cronenberg, noting that he is still as stung by negative reviews as ever. 'But when we made the movie, it was just a breakthrough car. Of course a guy like Karsh would be charmed by it. But now, yes, it feels very Musk-like, this idea that tech can fix everything, even grief.' It's not just Tesla and Musk. As the political landscape has gotten weirder around him, Cronenberg has seen the contours of his cinematic universe bleed into other real-world figures as well, most notably Donald Trump, with his obsession with dominance and his theatrical, uncanny physical presence. 'Trump is a little less subtle than my characters,' Cronenberg says with a wry smile. 'Even the fact of his orange face — how can he not see what he is? Is he fooling people that he has a suntan? I don't get it.' With 'The Shrouds' hitting theaters just as Trump leans into his fixation on annexing Cronenberg's native Canada, the filmmaker has wondered whether his prior criticisms of the president could cause him trouble during his American press tour. 'It's possible I'll be forbidden to come into the U.S. just because of something I've said,' he says. 'It's very heavy times when you have to think like that. Trump could be Putin, you know. He obviously idolizes him.' If the world is starting to look more like a Cronenberg film, it may finally be starting to honor them as well. Cronenberg's own work has earned just a single Oscar, a makeup award for 1986's 'The Fly,' but last year's 'The Substance' — a deeply Cronenbergian exploration of beauty, identity and transformation — scored six nods. Cronenberg regards the success of that film, along with Julia Ducournau's equally Cronenbergian 2021 film Palme d'Or winner 'Titane,' like a bemused godfather. 'I've met Coralie and Julia and they're like my surrogate daughters,' he says. 'It's very sweet. They've acknowledged the influence. It's not like it's a secret.' Whether 'The Shrouds' will prove to be Cronenberg's final film remains uncertain. He originally pitched the story to Netflix as a streaming series, hoping the platform would offer him more creative freedom. But the experience, he says, felt disappointingly familiar. 'I was hoping Netflix would take more risks with interesting, edgy series,' he said. 'But it turns out they're hitting their subscriber limit, and they've become much more conservative as a result. My experience with them was much more like the old days with the studios than I thought.' Even making 'The Shrouds' as a relatively low-budget feature wasn't easy. 'This film cost less than the catering on one of those Netflix shows,' he says. 'And even then, it was really tough to get it made. My son [Brandon] and my youngest daughter [Caitlin] are both filmmakers now, and they find it hard. In independent film, it's difficult to get the next movie made.' Still, Cronenberg hasn't ruled out directing again. He just isn't counting on it. 'We all have some kind of arrogance,' he offers, thoughtfully. 'But I don't have that much. The world does not need my next movie.' Asked if he feels any grief at the idea that 'The Shrouds,' a film about the crushing weight of loss, might be his last, he pauses. 'Well, yes and no,' he says. 'Even when I thought I might never make another movie, I never thought I'd stop being creative. I thought maybe I'd write another novel. There are many ways you can be creative.' The real hesitation, he says, isn't about ideas but about stamina. 'Directing is physical and it really takes it out of you,' he says. 'You could certainly imagine a moment where you're halfway through a movie and you say, 'I actually can't do this anymore. I'm not focused enough to be good at it. I don't even know if I can survive today. ' 'Then again,' he adds, 'there's Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese director who was still making films at 103.' He pauses. 'Now that is something to aspire to,' he says. As in so much of Cronenberg's work, it ultimately comes down to the body. 'I'm not tempting fate — I will knock wood, even though it's not the cross,' he says, rapping his knuckles on the desk. 'I hope I'm healthy enough. I seem to be healthy enough. But you never know.'
