David Cronenberg is a king of big screen body horror and his newest release, Crimes of the Future, lets him use that skill set to the fullest — and then some.
The story takes place in the not-so-distant future when the body has adapted to the synthetic environment mankind created. Many have “accelerated evolution syndrome” like Viggo Mortensen’s Saul Tenser whose body continuously grows new organs. While these evolutionary changes are not widely accepted, there is a community that embraces them in the form of art. In Saul’s case, his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) removes these new organs surgically in front of a live crowd as performance art.
With Crimes of the Future now playing in theaters, I got the chance to chat with Cronenberg about his experience evolving his craft through this new film. Again, Cronenberg is quite well known for his extensive and iconic use of makeup effects and prosthetics, but he also emphasized the importance of advancements in digital effects as well. He explained:
“Visual effects has come along beautifully and wonderfully, and it’s just an amazing tool. Of course I’ve used it in the past. Even eXistenZ we created some creatures that were completely CG, but now it’s relatively inexpensive, relatively quick to manifest, and to experiment with. And some of the tools in the Sarc for example, we created physically and they were puppeteered, but in other scenes where we couldn’t do puppeteering, they are completely CG and they’re based on what we created physically, and they’re so good you really cannot tell the difference. It’s really quite remarkable, and very affordable! It allows you such freedom in terms of the way you position the cameras and what the actors can do. It’s really fabulous.”
While it certainly sounds like Cronenberg had a very firm handle on his goals for the film and how to achieve them, Crimes of the Future does mark a rather one-of-a-kind production that demanded the actors take bold swings tackling extremely unique material. During a press conference for the film, Kristen Stewart even admitted, "We, the actors, spent every single day after work being like, 'What the f*ck are we doing?' But then I watched the movie last night and it was so crystal clear to me.”
Cronenberg was joined by Crimes of the Future star Scott Speedman during our chat, so I opted to ask him if he had a similar experience to Stewart; did he ever wonder “what the f*ck am I doing” while on set? Here’s what he said:
“To be honest, the movie to me is exactly how I would have loved for it to turn out and watch. I think I understand what she’s saying, but you immerse yourself so deeply in this world that it ceases to be absurd or different or futuristic or anything, and that becomes normalized. It has to so you can play the scene. So watching the movie, it’s a relief for what we were doing for those six or seven weeks in Greece showing up on screen for me as an actor. Where I am in my career, that’s just so amazing because that doesn’t happen all the time. Oftentimes there’s a big discrepancy between what you think you’re shooting and what ends up on the screen and that’s the great joy of this movie for me.”
Cronenberg jumped in to counter Stewart’s thoughts on her own work, and also to reveal what he says to an actor who’s concerned that they don’t know what they’re doing:
“I’ve heard from many actors, in fact, they confess to me, ‘I really don’t know what I’m doing.’ And I say, ‘That’s great. Just keep doing what you don’t know,’ because they do know what they’re doing. And Kristen absolutely knew what she was doing, if unconsciously. And honestly, it’s a little like life, isn’t it? At any moment in my life, I can look around and say, ‘What the f*ck am I doing,’ and have no idea, really. But somehow I still function, so that’s just a life reality I think Kristen is expressing and she was incredibly focused and precise and fantastic in the movie so somewhere she knew what she was doing.”
While the unforgettable imagery in Crimes of the Future is something one might prefer to see on the big screen, Cronenberg has mentioned that he has no preference for how viewers watch this movie. In fact, that mentality even applied to some of his earlier films like 1975’s Shivers and 1977’s Rabid.
“Even as far back as Shivers and Rabid, my first two sort of commercial movies, I was always aware that more people would see it on television than they would on a big screen. Even then because you have a release, it’s in the theaters, after that, it’s on television and so I made sure, because in those days, the television screen was 4x3, it was very square, but we were shooting more wide screen, so I made sure that those movies were framed in such a way that they could be shown on television and still not sort of deranged in terms of the framing and the composition. So for me, this is not a new thing. I assume that more people are gonna see Crimes of the Future on their Apple Watch than they are gonna see it in a big theater.”
After admitting that I do indeed find watching films on iPads especially immersive, Cronenberg added:
“It’s like reading a book! You have it here. It’s right here. It fills your field of vision. What’s the problem? If the resolution and the color and the sound are good, it’s good! And to me, that still counts as a cinematic experience. I think that that’s where cinema is going. I think that theaters, there will be fewer of them. They’ll be niche venues where only specific things, maybe Marvel movies only, I’m not sure, will be shown there, and for the rest of us, it’ll be watching on our own private screens.
Looking for more from Cronenberg and Speedman on the making of Crimes of the Future? You can watch our full conversation in the video interview at the top of this article!