User:Artoasis/sandbox/Body

Cronenberg: An intellectual with ominous powers

I'm always working on the same thing, the creation of an identity. It's mysterious: We think identity is genetically given, but I believe there is creative will involved with the decision of who we are going to be. All my movies are concerned with this.

The only thing I heard was that the jury president [Emir Kusturica] said that if this had been a jury that loved genre films, they would have given a prize to 'A History of Violence.' If they saw it as a gangster thriller, I guess they didn't get it. But that's Cannes: You have an international jury and people coming from many different cultures ...

My parents were atheist, but the intellectual and artistic elements were strong. In the '40s there was a lot of anti-Semitism in Canada; it didn't touch me then, but I realize it was there.

I know that many artists feel that they are frauds - that's part of the pleasure of creativity.

David Cronenberg's Body Language

It is a bit of a black art. But it's a matter of your temperament as well. Because if you're a very confrontational, hostile person and you're working with other people who are like that, then there's going to be a lot of yelling and a lot of wasted energy. I'm not like that. I'm much more Machiavellian. I'm very reasonable; I listen to reason and I talk to people, but in the end I don't really end up doing anything I don't want to do. That's my technique. I negotiate to the point where I still get exactly what I want.

I think all my movies are commercial. That's my delusion. I thought 'Naked Lunch' was wildly entertaining, so what do I know?

I'm an atheist, and so I have a philosophical problem with demonology and supporting the mythology of Satan, which involves God and heaven and hell and all that stuff. I'm not just a nonbeliever, I'm an antibeliever - I think it's a destructive philosophy.

To me, the film [The Fly] is a metaphor for aging," he said. "It's a compression of any love affair that goes to the end of one of the lovers' lives. We've all got the disease - the disease of being finite. Death is the basis of all horror.

The reason for making a film is to find out what it was that made you want to make that film in the first place.

If you live long enough, you'll lose everybody else, and if you don't, they'll lose you. There is sadness; there is separation; there is loss; there is physical decay. And if you want to say that you've embraced life fully, you have to embrace all of those things. A lot of natural processes are considered horrific or disgusting or repulsive, and I always found that really hard to understand, even though I might have experienced it myself. You do not turn away from these things.