David Cronenberg

[Moonbeaux Rainfox]

My Impression: Ni-Type. Process. ILI.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/sep/14/david-cronenberg-interview-my-imagination-not-a-place-of-horror



[More Pictures]

Your films often contain loops: life and death, body and mind, the conscious and unconscious. What are the challenges in evoking endless returns within a medium that is experientially finite? I’m not sure that I quite understand! But for me, my movie-making is like a diamond, in the sense that it has many facets but when you look in each facet, you are looking into the inner core of the same diamond. That diamond is really my experience of life, that’s all it is, and so it’s inevitable I return to the same themes and tropes and considerations but from slightly different angles.

What’s the most frightening film ever made? That’s totally subjective because what frightens some people is like a laugher to somebody else. For each person there might be a different answer to that question. Bambi is a terrifying film for a kid because Bambi’s mother is killed. When you’re a child that’s a terrifying thing. So does that qualify?

10 Things you never knew about David Cronenberg.

[...] 2. He doesn't watch his own films. The director has admitted to almost never watching his own back catalogue, claiming that, because he is so intently involved in the making of the films, it's impossible for him to simply enjoy them as movies. [...] 6. When it comes to filmmaking, he knows exactly what he wants. Keira Knightley, who worked with Cronenberg on his 2011 film A Dangerous Method, has said that the director rarely shoots scenes more than once or twice. In an interview from the time, Cronenberg described how, as he became more confident as a director, he started shooting less and less footage, already having an "edited" vision of his films in his head. ”I think of it in terms of Samuel Beckett, actually — a kind of extreme asceticism and refinement to the point of near-madness," he said.

​More Quotes

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.

When you're in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That's the consolation of philosophy.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It's impossible to do.

Technology is us. There is no separation. It's a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe. I'm rather sure of that.

So not only can you not imagine dying, you can't really imagine existence before you were born.

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge.

You're seeing me develop, not only as a filmmaker if you've seen my earlier films, but you're seeing me kind of learn how to be a human, how my philosophy has evolved.