If any single thing distinguishes directors from auteurs, the capacity to put oneself into the film might be a strong dividing line. Few living directors have defined themselves so strongly as David Cronenberg, and while this sets expectations that can very well engender confused responses, it’s all the more opportunity to surprise––such as a sold-out New York Film Festival crowd being hushed into stunned silence when they realized his new film, The Shrouds, was less of the Videodrome or Scanners variety than an unsparing film about grief and loss, albeit a study spring-loaded with doppelgängers, vaguely futuristic tech, and dense conspiracy plotting.

When all is said and done, The Shrouds might very well emerge one of Cronenberg’s best films. I sat down with him some 12 hours after its U.S. premiere, the film still swimming in my mind, attempting (then failing) to ask questions that weren’t laced with admiration and observation. But The Shrouds offers more than enough for two conversations, and Cronenberg hasn’t shied from discussing a film that bares something major.

The Film Stage: I finally got to see the film last night.

David Cronenberg: Oh, it was a good screening. 

A great experience. 

Yeah, I think in Cannes––as I talked in the Q&A afterwards––the audience wasn’t really getting all the humor. So it was a little strange, but understandable. Because, first of all, there’s the language problem––reading subtitles––but the other thing is: I think that everybody gets intimidated in Cannes. I think––I have a feeling; it’s just my intuition––that they felt it would be, like, disrespectful if they laughed or something like that. So they’re not sure whether they’re supposed to laugh or not. [Laughs] Anyway, Toronto and here is more like what I would have expected from the moment.

The crowd loved the line about “turning me on so much intellectually, psychologically.” Being with people who also laugh at that is very special. 

[Laughs] That’s sweet. 

I really don’t want to seem like I’m being obsequious or insincere when I say I found it just unbearably moving. 

Thank you. I think that’s a very legitimate response and I’m happy [Laughs] that you had that reaction.

It gets on emotional wavelengths I’ve never quite seen onscreen before.

Yes, I think that’s true. I mean––not to boast or anything––I haven’t seen anything quite like that. It’s also, when my wife died, I read all of the well-known grief books, like the Joan Didion and the C.S. Lewis book, several others. And in none of them did I feel that exact thing. I mean, the Joan Didion is very disembodied. She barely mentions her husband’s body and missing that. She misses his voice, you know, and really I thought… well, at that point I thought all grief is unique because the people are unique, and so is their relationship. So you can’t find your griefs in some other relationship. That’s its weirdly special thing. 

I know that there was a version of this production that had Léa Seydoux in the role(s) Diane Kruger eventually took. I don’t imagine the film misses a step––she’s amazing in these multiple parts you’ve given her. 

Yes. 

I do wonder––because it feels like that’s a job where an actor really has to carry a lot––if your conception of these characters and the film’s emotional wavelength shifted at all when you went from Seydoux to Kruger. 

Oh, yes. It would have definitely changed. For one thing: Léa is quite a bit younger. And therefore there’s a bigger gap with Vincent, and in that sense Diane is a better match for Vincent and that role, really. It’s just I love working with Léa so much; we really got along very well on Crimes. So it would immediately be different. Léa would have spoken with an accent, and Diane was able to speak with no accent, which is pretty amazing; it’s really hard to do that. But that’s movies and that’s casting, you know? I mean, Léa and I still love each other and we want to work together again. But she, at that point, had done five movies in a row, and she just was burnt-out and she needed to spend time with her son. That’s what happened.

There are certain connectivities between Crimes of the Future and The Shrouds, and at the Q&A last night you actually answered a question I had, which is the recent absence of Peter Suschitzky, your longtime cinematographer.

Yes.

Because of co-production… mishegoss. I think there were some who had slight worries with Crimes just because you and Suschitzky worked so well for decades. But then when you see Crimes, it doesn’t feel like you’ve missed a step in this new creative partnership with Douglas Koch.

Yes.

Same is true with Shrouds. I’m curious how you’ve found the process of having a new cinematographer. It still seems you have quite a bit of autonomy with the film’s visual shape.

Oh, yes. Absolutely. Well, Doug is a totally different guy from Peter. He’s somewhat younger, but that’s not a lot. And he’s a very Canadian, very Toronto guy, where Peter is very, very British. But it’s really… Doug, I think, had seen the work that Peter did. It’s not that he was trying to emulate it because it’s a whole different thing. But it all begins with the production design and the costumes and so on before you’re really thinking about lighting. And I do have a lot of input into the lighting as we’re working, developing a scene. And one of the reasons I love digital is because what you’re seeing on the monitor is the lighting you’re getting.

Whereas with film… I mean, this is something that film aficionados who love film, and I really don’t like film at all; it’s horrible to work with. And one of the things that’s horrible about it is that you don’t know what you’re getting until you see it. Even for the cameraman: he doesn’t really know what he’s getting, however experienced he is. Then, if he doesn’t like it, you can’t change it. Whereas with digital, you can do a lot of relighting afterwards. So there’s that, too. And when we are doing the post-production there’s a lot of working with the cameraman and we go over every shot, and you can do so much changing of things; you can really relight a scene. 

I mean, Peter was very reluctant to switch from film because of course he had become a master at shooting film––until he realized that he could actually relight a scene in post-production. So if he somehow missed it––something that he wanted, he missed it––he can get it later. Because you can relight a part of the frame, not the whole frame. Which, in film, is almost impossible to do without degrading the quality of the film. I mean, it’s his own sensibility––Doug as well––in his collaboration, absolutely. But he certainly had an idea of what I like and what I don’t like.

Photo by Sean DiSerio, courtesy of the 62nd New York Film Festival.

You have a really masterful command of the shot-reverse dynamic. And I do wonder how much that’s established in a screenwriting process––at least having a sense of when to cut, when to emphasize––and how much that comes to you in the editing room. If you have multiple cameras running, perhaps.

I never do. It’s always, totally single-camera. The only time would be if it was a really, sort of one-shot action scene and you needed five cameras because you couldn’t do it the second time. So: for Crash. But even with Crash, I rarely shot with more than one camera. Yeah, I’ve never done that. And part of the reason is that you can’t get the best lighting. I mean, you simply can’t. You can’t get the best lighting for each camera. With digital––once again––that’s less of an issue because you can control more, reshape more, but I’ve never shot multiple cameras. But when I’m writing the script, I don’t think about… I think about the rhythm of a scene. When it should end. If it’s ending on a line of dialogue that’s like a punchline. But beyond that, I don’t think about how I’m going to shoot it; I don’t think about it all. And I don’t do storyboards.

So when we come to the set, I’ve got my actors, I have my cameraman, I have my script person, I don’t have anybody else, and we figure out what the choreography of the scene is––in a great detail. Because this is then when you put your stand-ins in the set and they do the exact same movements that the… that’s what they’re there for: for lighting, really. So yeah: I don’t think about it when I’m writing this script in terms of, “There’s a long dolly shot, there’s this crane shot.” I don’t think about it at all.

The Shrouds began as a Netflix project for which you’d written two episodes––I think you’ve said this second episode ends with him flying off to Budapest––and watching the film is a really interesting experience where I’m thinking about how this would work as a longer narrative. There’s a lot of discussing stuff that happens off-screen, a lot of people who kind of go unseen. How was it working in that format––embracing the open-ended, dangling-threads of it all?

As I recall, the first episode that I wrote has him flying to Iceland. And the second episode takes place in Iceland. And after that, it was going to be Budapest, but we never got around to that. So that shifted. And then some of what would have been in Iceland is now on his phone with the Icelandic guy that he talks to. Most of my movies are somewhat open-ended, I think, and really it’s not like the concept of “the well-made play”––you know, the whole Victorian idea of a perfectly made play, or the French play as well––where everything is tied up neatly at the end.

I think cinema has, in general, sort of gotten away from that. Nobody’s talking about “the well-made movie,” you know, that’s everything falling into place. Because there’s the sense that these characters live beyond the movie––that they have a life beyond the movie, that they’re still out there somewhere. Karsh, I don’t know where he is; he might be in China by now. So it feels very natural and correct and real to me to have an open-ended movie. And so that aspect of it didn’t bother me. I had tons of pages of notes of where the series would go and could go. And is it too bad that I didn’t get to do that? I don’t know. [Laughs] Maybe yes, maybe no.

I think the film is really special because of that quality. I think it’ll retain in your mind longer.

Well, that’s good and I’m happy to hear that. Because, you know, the experience of doing a series would be so different from doing a film. I mean, it would be unlikely that I would be able to write and direct every episode––let’s say especially if it was an eight-episode season or something. So that means that you become a “showrunner,” which is a profession that didn’t exist when I started making movies; I’m still not sure it does. But, you know, you’d have to be basically overseeing other directors directing episodes and other writers writing other episodes. It would be a challenge.

I wrote recently to Steve Zaillian, who I know somewhat, because I really thought his Ripley series was terrific. And he wrote and directed every one of them. But he said it’s an enormous investment of time and energy––that’s your life for like two years, three years. But I’m impressed that people do it. Some people, like David Lynch and others, who did it and then completely destroyed themselves for a while afterwards. How do you recover from that? That’s tough.

You talk about the sequence where he’s talking to the guy in Iceland on his phone. I think a lot of people have observed that many great living filmmakers aren’t making movies in the modern world; a lot of them are now making period pieces.

Yes.

And this idea that maybe the modern world has this sterility and disconnect that’s hard to portray. Your approaches for shooting an iPhone, we see it as we do in the real world: a hand holding it. Or the Mac that Karsh has: you see it from his perspective, as it’s on the desk. But then there are things like the graves, which had particular visual interest because it’s a new, imagined technology.

Yeah.

I’m curious about some philosophies for photographing these devices––embracing the quotidian nature of a phone is being held versus observing this device that doesn’t exist.

Sure. Yeah. Well, when I was first thinking about it––and even when I was later, much later when I was writing my novel, Consumed––you can worry about the transitory nature of all technology that’s constantly changing. If you read Consumed, you’ve got a guy shooting with a Nikon, it’s an iPhone 4.

I think all the time about that book, because it was 10 years ago, but still feels futuristic to me.

Right. Well, that’s sort of the trick––because you could do both. In fact, the present is kind of futuristic as well, and the kernel of the future is here if only we can see it. And if you’re writing a novel or making a movie about now, here, you should be able to reveal some of that kernel that is the future. But you can worry about obsolescence––you know, of dating. You’re worried that you’re dating your work. And the cycle of dating is no longer, like, 25 years; it’s now, you know, 25 days. But then if you do that, you’ve stripped away incredibly rich referential possibilities of the use of phones. I mean, when I’m watching a series, as long as it’s not a period piece, there are phones everywhere; there are screens everywhere. It’s now become just part of the atmosphere of the earth. It’s the ambience that’s right there.

So the only way you can get away from addressing that is to make a period piece in which there were no phones and there were no screens. And that’s a whole other reality you have to create. Meditations on technology have always been a part of my work and so I can’t… it’s just because it’s natural. It’s not really because I want to engage with the sci-fi universe or anything; it’s just because it seems ubiquitous and it always has seemed like an extension of the human body. So being body-obsessed––as I think all filmmakers actually are, because that’s what we photograph––you can’t really avoid it.

So, to me, it’s just natural to have technology as a component part of everybody’s life in my movies. And it doesn’t really matter how possible or viable it is or not; the shrouds could absolutely be created now. I mean, it wouldn’t look like my shrouds, but you could absolutely do it. So this is not really sci-fi in the purest sense at all. It’s an imagined technology probably nobody really wants, but I’m saying: what if somebody did want it?

Some people do want it.

I’m sure that––as I said to the crowd [Laughs] last night––you could be franchisees. We’ll see how many people really are offended or grossed-out by this and how many actually secretly would go for it.

The thought crossed my mind.

Yeah, well, it crossed my mind too. Obviously.

It is funny you say “extension of the body” because the way that you shoot the phones or the computers, it literally is [Picks up phone] their fingers wrapped around it, right?

Yes.

Connected to the body.

Yeah. And there’s practical considerations. For example: some of these shots on phones––which I see in series all the time––the shots are too short for me to actually read everything that’s on the phone or the shot is too loose, given that they know this is going to be a TV series. It’s not a movie, so it’s going to be on a relatively small screen. So why do they make it so difficult to read? [Laughs] I’m thinking very much, “I want the audience to see this, to read it, to have time to read it or to see the face or whatever.” So that’s part of the consideration. But yes: it’s people walking down the street with their phone. I mean, it’s part of their body.

I really love the scene where Diane Kruger films Guy Pearce. It reminded me of your short The Nest.

She actually shot that.

She did?

Oh, yeah. With an iPhone.

She did a good job.

She did a great job! I think we only had to do one take. She and Guy, it was great. And in fact, the Icelandic thing was overseen by an Icelandic friend of mine who’s a director who knew that actor. I wasn’t in Iceland, and it was shot 100% on an iPhone.

Great second-unit work.

Yeah, absolutely. And once again: the actor shot it himself.

I do know that about 15 years ago you had been contracted to write a sequel of sorts to The Fly, which you had called “a meditation on flyness.” I don’t know if you’re at liberty to say or if you’ve any interest in expanding on that.

I think––I remember––Stuart Cornfeld, who was the line producer for Mel Brooks on the first Fly, he… a lot of it was 3D printing. It was my idea that the teleportation would be, actually, a 3D printing of a human being. And they kind of didn’t like that idea, whoever was at Fox or whatever, and then much later––much later––Stuart got in touch with me and said, “Once again, you were very prophetic and it was such a mistake that we decided not to go with this.” Because now, obviously, 3D printing––and 3D printing of flesh, biological material––is everywhere and it’s a reality. So it would’ve been right in zeitgeist. But they didn’t see it.

And listen: that’s one of the things that happens. Especially if you’re working within a studio system––which I’ve barely done––you, the filmmaker, are limited to the imaginations of your studio people, your producers. Of course it’s your responsibility to make them see it, but you can only go so far writing a script. After that, anybody reading a script has to have some cinematic imagination. Because it’s not like a novel.

I mean, something I love about The Shrouds is that it feels like it is coming from a very direct place. And I would have loved to see the Netflix version of it, to just have more of it. But I love it as it’s contained.

Yeah, you’ve really got the best part of it, though. I think it’s in the movie. The other stuff would start taking it to other places. I mean––just as a matter of interest––with Netflix, I was willing to discuss with them why they thought the sequel was taking it someplace that they didn’t want to go and to see if maybe there was some compromise or some modification or some explanation. They didn’t really want to talk. They just wanted to say “thanks, but goodbye.” [Laughs] So that was very studio-like of them.

The Shrouds opens in theaters on Friday, April 18.