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.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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