David Cronenberg Quotes on Movies (16 Quotes)

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be.

It's a funny movie, too. People may wonder what's going on when they hear that about a movie that has the title A History of Violence . I think once they see it, they'll get it.

For example I don't work with William Hurt the same way that I will work with Viggo. They're different guys and they work in different ways. So a good sensitive director has his general style and technique and personality that he uses but you don't impose that on the actors.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.

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.

The problem with doing a schlocky or big budget studio film is that it wouldn't actually be fun for me. It wouldn't be exciting.

You could say it's a Hollywood film because the characters are agents, actors and managers, but it is not a satire like The Player.

Even though he did not originate the story, Cronenberg does feels connected to it in strange ways -- as he does to all of his film projects. They're all highly personal, ... I didn't write the script of Spider, either. It was based on a novel (and someone else wrote the script). The Dead Zone, which I did about 20 years ago, was based on a novel and I didn't write that script either. Now, in each case, I'm very involved with the script and, in the case of this movie, I did do a rewrite myself.

I don't think I've made a movie that isn't funny, on one level or another, despite having other things going on at the same time, ... and this is no exception. I do ask the audience to take some twists and turns with me in terms of tone, because there's a moment that's funny that immediately turns into something emotionally devastating. Movies these days tend to be pretty clumpy here's the sad scene with the sad music and the sad everything, and now we go to the reconciliation. Cue the happy music That's not asking for much from the audience. And that's not the way anyone's day goes.

The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog.

I remember somebody saying to Joel Schumacher about one of his Batman movies, 'Isn't that over the top' ... And he said, 'Well, nobody pays to see under the top.' I wish I could just say that. But I think you learn something when you go to extremes.

But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult - and it's very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder.

Well I don't think sex and violence have ever stopped a movie from being mainstream.

I've been to screenings where people laugh at certain points and can see that they are entertained. But this movie is the furthest thing from ironic. If you are entertained, if you laugh, I hope you would ask yourself why. I would hope to make a movie in which the audience questions everything.

I've managed, really, to be pretty successful in terms of getting what I want in a movie. I leave people very happy with what we've done, even when I end up getting what I wanted and they don't get what they wanted.

The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.