David Cronenberg Quotes (57 Quotes)

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

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.

Certainly, it is more mainstream than Crash or Spider, ... so I thought maybe it was too much of a normal movie for Cannes.

Each kid has a different level of expertise and some of them are very raw and inexperienced and some are incredibly mature and experienced. So you just have to go with what they are rather than have some abstract technique that you're going to try to apply to them.

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 way a child discovers the world constantly replicates the way science began. You start to notice what's around you, and you get very curious about how things work. How things interrelate. It's as simple as seeing a bug that intrigues you.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

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.

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.

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.

People are saying, are you feeling the love now for History of Violence,' and I say, Yeah,' and that's a scary thing, because it could get addictive,

A History of More Violence' ... I think not. That reminds me of somebody's joke about Gandhi - 'Gandhi 2 Even More Non-Violent.'

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.

We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things.

Yeah. I mean, technology wants to be in our bodies, because it sort of came out of our bodies. In a crude way, that's what I'm thinking.

Nah, I've done sex scenes before, you know, like in video.

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well.

if you want the exhilaration of seeing the bad guys go down, then you have to accept the consequences.

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me.

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.

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.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It's not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

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.

It's the perfect car, the dream ... a combination of beauty and technology,

I don't have a moral plan, I'm a Canadian.

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally.

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.

We joked about that on the set. There was a sense this was a portrait of a marriage in all kinds of ways, especially under duress.

It's not as though I have a message . . . I haven't solved any problem. It's a discussion, it's a meditation on the complexity of it.

If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it's obviously going to be a disaster.

I have no idea why I wasn't told, but I said I guess I better read it, and I did. It took awhile for them to dig it up, because it was long out of print. I could see that although the basic premise was obviously the same, we had already gone off in a direction with the script, first because Josh had done it on his own and then I worked more that way with himit went on a completely different direction from the novel to the extent that the novel really had nothing to offer me because it was just so different. That was basically it. I can't really say, in a sense, creatively, that I had the experience of adapting a graphic novel, because it always felt like it was Josh's original script to me. The visual elements of the novel were pretty irrelevant.

There's a certain intimacy involved. You have to get very close to the person who's threatening you. It's the opposite of what your instinct is.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

You have to believe in God before you can say there are things that man was not meant to know. I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do.

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.

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

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

I wrote a script that I thought had a lot of potential,

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.

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.

I see technology as being an extension of the human body.

Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I've done that since the beginning. So that's not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet.

I don't think that the flesh is necessarily treacherous, evil, bad. It is cantankerous, and it is independent. The idea of independence is the key. It really is like colonialism. The colonies suddenly decide that they can and should exist with their own personality and should detach from the control of the mother country. At first the colony is perceived as being treacherous. It's a betrayal. Ultimately, it can be seen as the separation of a partner that could be very valuable as an equal rather than as something you dominate.

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.

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.