by MATTHEW HAYS

David Cronenberg looks surprisingly calm as we sit down to discuss his latest, feature, Spider. Nothing seems to faze this man. His feature, which has received mainly intensely positive reviews since it played Cannes and the Toronto International fests last year, was passed over as the opening film for the Hog Town event in favour of Atom Egoyan’s Ararat, which has been widely trashed.

This doesn’t bother Cronenberg. And unlike a lot of people in this business, I take the man completely at his word. He really doesn’t seem to care, feeling no sense of competition over whose film would ultimately take the coveted spot of opening night in T.O. Besides, he tells me, holding a grudge against a film fest that has consistently supported his work would be foolish.

With Spider, Cronenberg tackles the difficult task of representing schizophrenia. Based on Patrick McGrath’s ’88 novel, the film has Ralph Fiennes - in what is undoubtedly one of the celebrated actor’s finest performances - playing a schizophrenic man whose memories are triggered, forcing him to confront the troubled past that has made him the man he is. Many are already suggesting this is Cronenberg’s most accomplished work since Dead Ringers.

It’s certainly different than much of what we’ve seen before from Cronenberg, Canada’s most famous auteur. And it’s certainly a relief after his self-parody eXistenZ, a film many (myself included) found only semi-successful. Cronenberg sat down to discuss Spider with the Mirror at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, where he discussed representing schizophrenia, his place in the horror pantheon and Robin Wood’s famous attack on the Cronenberg oeuvre.

Mirror: How did you approach the thorny issue or representing a central character who’s schizophrenic?

David Cronenberg: My identification was with Spider, and my first feeling about Spider is not about craziness or schizophrenia, but rather the complexity of what it is to be human, and dealing with memory, which is a very slippery, constantly shifting, evolving thing. When you consider that our identities are based on our memories, that means our identities are really up for grabs, that they’re constantly shifting. It’s always been my feeling that much of the energy we put into everyday life is maintaining this identity that we’ve carefully constructed for ourselves. We wake up, we don’t know who we are, and then gradually, we say, I’ve got to do this, I’m this, and this is what we’re known for. It’s always fascinating to me to know that it could shift radically in any person, whether it’s because of a stroke or an organic thing or economic thing. So I think, without being cute about it, that I’m that close to being Spider, that I could be walking in the streets mumbling to myself with all my possessions in one small suitcase. I can see me being like that. I don’t want to be that, so I’m therefore interested in exploring that and exploring my relationship with that creature.

M: You also touch on how trauma affects memory…

DC: Yes, and later trauma can affect your memory of the first trauma. It’s a variable thing, memory, and it’s a willful thing, an emotional thing, not a documentary you can play back identically every time. It’s a very constructed thing.

The return of restraint

M: With Spider, you don’t explode anything, no one has things flying out of various orifices. You feel very restrained here…

DC: To me, each movie tells you what it wants to be. Right after Videodrome, I did The Dead Zone, and everyone said I was very restrained, because there wasn’t a lot of blood and gore. Then right after that I did The Fly [laughs]. And there were a lot of special effects and gore. I don’t think of myself in terms of just me or my career or the arc of this or that, each project makes its own demands. You are creating a unique world with its own ecosystem. The original script had a lot of effects in it, he had a lot of bleeding potatoes and this and that, and for a while, I left them in the script, and I even had guys making the bleeding potatoes. But then those things started to feel like they were from some other movie, and in the novel upon which the film is based, there’s a lot of stuff that would normally translate into special effects in various hallucinations. But I felt the character was more of a Beckett or a Kafka. And you don’t fight that when the feeling arrives. You don’t say, ‘Oh, that doesn’t fit in with my career.’ You go with it.

M: It’s certainly been the case that directors working within the horror genre simply haven’t received as much respect as directors working within more mainstream genres. Do you ever feel marginilized, politically and artistically?

DC: Two things happen with genre stuff, one is that ghettoization, the other is that you’re protected, you’re protected and bathed, you have built-in fans who are very enthusiastic. The fact that when you’re a beginning filmmaker your films are not necessarily judged in the same way because they’re genre films is actually a blessing, because you get to mess around, to experiment, to make mistakes, without being Orson Welles, without your first film being Citizen Kane. What a blessing and a curse that was for him. I have no regrets about that. From the beginning, I was often compared to John Carpenter. But I knew from the beginning that we were very different filmmakers and that our goals are very different. And now, John is making Ghosts of Mars and I’m making Spider. But it took a lot of years for me to discover who I was as a filmmaker and for others to recognize it. When people introduce me as the Baron of Blood or the King of Venereal Horror I have to think that they’ve dropped the ball a bit. But I indulge because I accepted those labels when I was a kid filmmaker and used them as a source of power. So if they’ve come back to haunt me I’ve only got myself to blame.

Robin’s respite

M: I recall Robin Wood’s famous article about your work, in which he characterized your oeuvre as “dangerous.” How do you feel about that article, looking back on it now?

DC: I feel the way I felt then. I thought being labelled dangerous was great, but I thought that Robin also completely missed the boat. He thought that I was on the other side of where he was and I thought I was on the same side. We discussed that in public at the time on a panel discussion. He’s a lovely articulate guy and we had great fun, but he was wearing a T-shirt at the time that said, you know, “Gay Marxist whatever,” and he was wearing his labels proudly. But he thought that I was on the side of right-wing reactionaries, he thought I was a Reaganite, which I wasn’t. I thought Shivers was a subversive film, not one in support of the status quo, and he couldn’t see that. So we had a disagreement. What he thinks of my filmmaking now I’ve no idea.

M: You’ve portrayed fear and anxiety so well in your films. I’ve often wondered: what scares David Cronenberg?

DC: I’ve raced motorcycles and cars, so machinery and speed don’t terrify me. When we went to the Telluride Film Festival we had quite a scary ride in the plane, and perhaps that was scary to me, because you’re being flown and not in control. So I can say that I’m not crazy about the modern flying experience, but I can say it has more to do with the airports than the planes. I think most people aren’t wild about that. My fears are very mundane. I’m a parent, I fear for my children - they’re getting older, they’re driving, they’re doing this and that. But I have no exotic fears.

M: No phobias?

DC: No phobias. I worry that the people I love might get sick. One of the things that’s been surprising to me is how vulnerable parenting makes you. People don’t talk about that as part of parenthood. However much you might be scared about your own person is nothing compared to how fearful you can be about your own children. I’m not talking about kidnapping, I’m talking simply about stepping off the curb and getting hit by a car. Or even their pain at getting mocked at school. But I swear, I’d tell you, if I thought I had some really cool fear. My fears are very middle-class and North American, really.

M: Woody Allen has said that he likes to stay busy to keep his mind off his mortality. Do you fear mortality?

DC: A lot of what I do in my films is to come to terms with mortality. Sex and death are the two great subjects, and they’re flip sides of the same coin. Coming to terms with the fear of mortality is a huge part of the creative process. I’m not as extreme nor as prolific as Woody, but yeah, I’d say the same dynamics are working beneath the surface for me. :

Spider opens at the Cinéma du Parc this Friday, Feb. 28

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