“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.” – David Cronenberg

David Paul Cronenberg was born in Toronto, Ontario, His father was a bookstore owner and sometime columnist for the Toronto Telegram. Mother was a piano rehearsal accompanist for the National Ballet. As a child he wrote constantly and was fascinated by bugs and insects. He studied botany and lepidopterology in high school which led him to enter the Honours Science program at the University of Toronto in 1963. He switched to Honours English Language and Literature later in his first year.

One of his classmates, David Secter, directed, produced and co-wrote a feature-length romantic drama, Winter Kept Us Warm (1965). the film was the first English-language Canadian film ever screened at the Cannes Film Festival and is considered a major milestone in Canadian film. It acted as the inspiration for Cronenberg to turn his creativity toward filmmaking.

Cronenberg was inspired by the New York underground film scene and made two 16mm shorts, Transfer (1966) and From the Drain (1967) before taking a year off in Europe. When he returned he made two features. The first, Stereo (1969) was shot in black and white and the sound dubbed in afterwards as the 35mm Arriflex camera was too noisy for sound recording. He secured funding for the film from the Canadian government by pretending he was writing a novel. Crimes of the Future (1970) was set in 1997 and details the wanderings of Adrian Tripod (Ronald Mlodzik), sometime director of a dermatological clinic called the House of Skin, who is searching for his mentor, the mad dermatologist Antoine Rouge. Neither film did well, indeed Kim Newman, in his 1988 book Nightmare Movies, has described Crimes of the Future as being “more fun to read about in synopsis than to watch”, and as proving, along with Stereo, that “it’s possible to be boring and interesting at the same time”.

Cronenberg worked in TV for the next few years before writing and directing Shivers (1975) also known as The Parasite Murders, They Came from Within and, in the French-Canadian market, Frissons. It is an example of the body horror genre, a subgenre of horror which intentionally showcases graphic or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body. These violations may manifest through aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body. Body horror did not originate with Cronenberg but he is regarded as one of the principal exponents of the genre in film.

Shivers tells the story of the residents of a suburban high-rise apartment building who are being infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact. The film attracted negative or neutral reviews. Canadian journalist Robert Fulford attacked the content of “Shivers” in the pages of the national magazine “Saturday Night.” Since Cronenberg’s film was partially financed by the taxpayer-funded National Film Board of Canada (or NFB), Fulford headlined the article “You Should Know How Bad This Movie Is: You Paid for It.”

Not only did this high-profile attack make it more difficult for Cronenberg to obtain funding for his subsequent movies, Cronenberg later said that Fulford’s attack also resulted in him being kicked out of his Toronto apartment due to a morality clause in the lease being activated by his landlord. Roger Ebert struck a more positive note remarking that he expected a dismal exploitation film since Shivers was part of a double-bill with the faux-snuff film Snuff, but instead was impressed by a lot of the film and ended up giving it a two-and-a-half-star rating (out of four).

His 1977 film Rabid was a breakthrough in that it found international distributors which gave Cronenberg exposure outside of Canada and reduced his reliance on Canadian government funding. Rabid was another body horror with the protagonist being a woman who, after being injured in a motorcycle accident and undergoing a surgical operation, develops an orifice under one of her armpits. The orifice hides a phallic stinger that she uses to feed on people’s blood. Soon, those she feeds upon become infected, whose bite spreads the disease and soon causes massive chaos starting with Quebec and ending up in Montreal.

Cronenberg wanted Sissy Spacek in the lead role but the studio vetoed his choice because of her Texas accent. Executive producer Ivan Reitman had heard that porn star Marilyn Chambers was looking for a mainstream role and felt that it would be easier to market the film in different territories if a well-known porn star portrayed the main character. Cronenberg stated that Chambers put in a lot of hard work on the film and that he was impressed with her. Cronenberg further states he had not seen Chambers’ most well-known film, Behind the Green Door, prior to casting her. Spacek’s film Carrie was released during this film’s production and proved to be a massive hit (and a movie poster for the film appears when Chambers walks by a movie theatre).

Scanners (1981) starred Stephen Lack, Jennifer O’Neill, Michael Ironside, and Patrick McGoohan. In the film, “scanners” are people with unusual telepathic and telekinetic powers. ConSec, a purveyor of weaponry and security systems, searches out scanners to use them for its own purposes. One iconic scene involved an exploding head which was , as makeup artist Stephen Dupuis recalled, “packed with latex scraps, some wax, and just bits and bobs and a lot of stringy stuff that we figured would fly through the air a little bit better. We even used leftover burgers.” Using conventional explosives didn’t give the required results so special effects supervisor Gary Zeller told the crew to roll cameras and get inside the trucks with doors and windows closed, and proceeded to lie down behind the dummy and fire a shotgun at the back of the head.

Cronenberg felt rushed during prouction, beginning principal photography with an unfinished script. and a strict two-month time scale so that the film could qualify for tax breaks further frustrated the writer/director. Cronenberg had also to deal with cast clashes, particularly between Patrick McGoohan and Jennifer O’Neill.

“He had extreme Catholic views about sexuality, which came onto the set. My leading lady… came to me incredibly distraught and said, ‘Patrick said, ‘Are you a whore? Are you a slut?’ And he started to lay into her because she’d had, like, five husbands. That was Patrick, and those were the things I had to deal with as a relatively young director. He was probably the most difficult actor I ever worked with, though he gave a fantastic performance.” “He said to me, ‘If I didn’t drink I’d be afraid I’d kill someone.’ He looks at you that way and you just say, ‘Keep drinking.'”

David Cronenberg’s biggest commercial success came with The Fly (1986). The film was inspired by the 1958 film of the same name starring Vincent Price, itself an adaptation of George Langelaan’s 1957 short story. The new film had been in development for several years and Brooksfilms, Mel Brooks’ production company had become involved. Originally Tim Burton was slated to direct although Brooks favoured David Cronenberg but he was working on an adaptation of Total Recall for Dino De Laurentiis and was unable to accept. Burton became unavailable so British director Robert Bierman was engaged. Before filming began his daughter was killed in an accident; Brooks postponed production for three months but at the end of that time Bierman felt unable to commit to the project. By that time Cronenberg was no longer associated with Total Recall and agreed to direct – if he could rewrite Charles Edward Pogue’s script. Despite the extensive rewrite Cronenberg insisted that he and Pogue share screenplay credit since he felt that his version could not have come to pass without Pogue’s script to serve as a foundation.

David Cronenberg met with some opposition when he announced that he wanted to cast Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. The executive at Fox who was supervising the project felt that Goldblum was not a bankable star, and creature effects supervisor Chris Walas felt that his face would be difficult to work with for the make-up effects. David Cronenberg met with some opposition when he announced that he wanted to cast Jeff Goldblum in the lead role. The executive at Fox who was supervising the project felt that Goldblum was not a bankable star, and Chris Walas felt that his face would be difficult to work with for the make-up effects. Cronenberg himself later had reservations when Goldblum suggested Geena Davis, his girlfriend at the time, for the other lead role, as he did not want to have to work with a real-life couple. Cronenberg was convinced after Davis’s first reading that she was right for the role. Davis persuded Cronenberg to make a cameo appearance as a gynaecologist after Martin Scorsese had met him and said he looked like a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. Scorcese had also said that he was terrified” to meet him in person. Cronenberg responded to Scorsese: “You’re the guy who made Taxi Driver and you’re afraid to meet me?” The Fly was critically acclaimed with most praise going to Goldblum’s performance and the special effects. Despite being a gory remake of a classic made by a controversial, non-mainstream director, the film was a commercial success, the biggest of Cronenberg’s career, grossing over $60 million worldwide from a $1 million budget.

David Cronenberg was surprised when The Fly was seen by some critics as a cultural metaphor for AIDS, since he originally intended the film to be a more general analogy for disease itself, terminal conditions like cancer and, more specifically, the aging process: “If you, or your lover, has AIDS, you watch that film and of course you’ll see AIDS in it, but you don’t have to have that experience to respond emotionally to the movie and I think that’s really its power. This is not to say that AIDS didn’t have an incredible impact on everyone and, of course, after a certain point, people were seeing AIDS stories everywhere, so I don’t take any offence that people see that in my movie. For me though, there was something about The Fly story that was much more universal: ageing and death—something all of us have to deal with.”

Cronenberg followed the success of the Fly with the critically acclaimed Dead Ringers (1988), which was his first collaboration with cinematographer Peter Suschitzkywho was the director of photography for The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Cronenberg remarked that Suschitzky’s work in that film “was the only one of those movies that actually looked good.” Their second film, the 1991 adaptation of the William Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch, was again a critical success but was a box-office bomb, grossing less than $3 million for a $17 million budget. Cronenberg directed his own adaptation of J G Ballard’s 1973 novel for the film Crash (1996). The film was controversial, as was the book, because of its vivid depictions of graphic sexual acts instigated by violence.In the United Kingdom, The Daily Mail newspaper led the calls for the film to be banned with a front-page headline reading, “Ban This Car Crash Sex Film.” In response to this outcry, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) inquired with a Queen’s Counsel and a psychologist, none of whom found any justification to ban it, and 11 disabled people, who saw no offence with its portrayal of the physically challenged. Seeing no evidence for a ban, Crash was passed by the BBFC uncut with an 18 rating in March 1997

In his contemporary review, Roger Ebert gave the film 3.5 out of 4 stars, writing:

“Crash is about characters entranced by a sexual fetish that, in fact, no one has. Cronenberg has made a movie that is pornographic in form, but not in result… [Crash is] like a porno movie made by a computer: It downloads gigabytes of information about sex, it discovers our love affair with cars, and it combines them in a mistaken algorithm. The result is challenging, courageous and original — a dissection of the mechanics of pornography. I admired it, although I cannot say I “liked” it”

In 1999 David Cronenberg filmed his last self-penned movie until 2012’s Cosmopolis. Ir was also his first original screenplay since Videodrome (1983). eXistenZ came about after Cronenberg conducted an interview with Salman Rushdie for Shift magazine in 1995. At the time, Rushdie was in hiding due to a Fatwa being put on his life by Muslim extremists due to his controversial book The Satanic Verses. Rushdie’s dilemma gave Cronenberg an idea of “a Fatwa against a virtual-reality game designer”. Existenz was originally pitched to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but they did not green-light the film due to its complex structure. The film was part funded by the Canadian Government. Jennifer Jason Leigh had already finished shooting her role in Eyes Wide Shut (1999) when she took on this role. When her scenes in that film required re-shooting, the schedule required for it interfered with this one. Leigh chose to stay on this film and her role in Eyes Wide Shut was re-cast. Roger Ebert gave the film three stars in his review of the film. Noting its release after fellow science-fiction film The Matrix, he compared the two, stating that while both have special effects, he stated that Cronenberg’s film was stranger along with having his best effects involve “gooey, indescribable organic things”.

Cosmopolis is a 2012 drama-thriller film written, produced, and directed by David Cronenberg and starring Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche. Colin Farrell ad originally been cast in the main role but left due to scheduling difficulties with Total Recall (2012). the film is based on the novel of the same name by Don DeLillo. David Cronenberg wrote the script in six days. He has admitted that when he converted the book into screenplay format on his computer, he realized it was so perfect that his only work was to separate dialogues from narration. Unusually, the scenes were shot in chronological order. Cronenberg’s last film to date has been Maps to the Stars (2014), a 2014 internationally co-produced satirical drama. Plans for the film hit financial difficulties and it was in development for around six years. During the promotion of Cosmopolis in May 2012 at Cannes, David Cronenberg said that “It’s not a “go” picture. We have a script that I love that Bruce wrote, it’s a very difficult film to get made as was ‘Cosmopolis’ actually. Whether I can get this movie to happen, I tried it five years ago, I couldn’t get it made, so I still might not be able to get it made.”[38] He also added that “Maps To The Stars is very extreme. It’s not obviously a very big commercial movie, and even as an independent film, it’s difficult. ‘Maps To the Stars’ is completely different [from ‘Cosmopolis’], but it’s very acerbic and satirical, it’s a hard sell.”

In a May 2016 interview, Viggo Mortensen revealed that Cronenberg is considering retiring due to difficulty financing his film projects.

“Hollywood is a world that is seductive and repellent at the same time, and it is the combination of the two that makes it so potent.”

— David Cronenberg

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