Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/hold me in your arms/Mondo 2000/David-Cronenberg

Text File | 1993-01-01 | 45KB | 739 lines

DAVID CRONENBERG

I'm not interested in the latest camera development.  I'm very anti-
techno.  I've never shot  in CinemaScope.  I'm not interested.  But I
can't understand a director who doesn't really  understand what
different lenses do.  I've got to tell my cameraman what lens I want.
He  can't tell me.  If you don't have some technological understanding
of why that looks that  way, you'll never understand that it can be
different.

I could see what was going on with Stanley Kubrick at a certain point:
an obsession with  technology.  I thought, 'Why is there so much
Steadicam in The Shining ?'  It didn't  surprise me when I heard that
the guy had been hired to do one day and stayed for nine  months!  It
was a new toy.  In Barry Lyndon  it was the emphasis on being able to
shoot  candlelit scenes by true candlelight, and modifying stills camera
lenses for use on a movie  camera.  But why?  The illusion is fine!  It's
the illusion I want.  The reality is totally  irrelevant.

Yet, inevitably, when you do special effects it's always an invention.
It's always a new  experiment, because the context is always different.
Even in Dead Ringers  I was breaking  some new ground in small
ways with motion control.  Not because I wanted to, but  because I
had to, and wanted to survive the experience.

I had no influence whatsoever.  I don't mean that in an arrogant way,
but in a very tangible  way for me.  I didn't feel the hand of someone
on my shoulder, like Hitchcock's on Brian  De Palma.  There was not
one film-maker who was so almost me that I couldn't get to the  real
me.  An important element in my decision to go into film was because
it did come  relatively easily.  I'm sure that was one of the reasons I
wrote 'Orgy of the Blood Parasites'  (Shivers ).  It just sprang up.
There was some other momentum there, when I was writing  for the
screen, that wasn't there in the novel.  That was exhilarating.
Interestingly, both Crimes of the Future  and Stereo  were influenced
by Ron Mlodzik, a  very elegant gay scholar, an intellectual who was
studying at Massey College.  He played  the lead character in both of
them.  When I showed Stereo  in Montreal, after a screening a  young
man came up to me and started to proposition me.  I told him I was
flattered that he  should want me to go to bed with him because he
liked my movie, but I wasn't gay.  He  was shocked.  He was sure after
seeing Stereo  that I was.  I attributed that to the  translation of Ron
Mlodzik's presence in Stereo  and Crimes of the Future.  How that
translates to the other films I'm not sure.  It's still very illuminating
about my own  sensibility though, simply because I chose to use Ron
as lead player in those films.  How  directly that connects with my own
sexuality or not, it certainly connects very directly to  my aesthetic
sense of his space, and his medieval gay sensibility, which I like a lot.
His  Catholicism was very medieval, and so was his sense of style.

I'm not particularly insecure or paranoid, but I always thought I
would much more likely be  put in jail for my art than for my
Jewishness.  A friend who saw Videodrome  said he  really liked it and
added, 'You know, someday they're going to lock you up,' and
walked  away.  That did not help.  I suppose underneath I always had
a feeling that my existence as  a member of standing of the community
was in grave jeopardy for whatever reason.  It's as  though society had
suddenly discovered what I really am, what is really going on inside,
and wants to destroy it.

My role in Stereo  was as Dr Luther Stringfellow, the absentee
scientist who actually set up  the experiment, because in a sense, I had
set up an experiment.  In Crimes of the Future  I  am Antoine Rouge,
the absentee mentor who has died and who is reincarnated as a little
girl.

One of the things you want to do with any kind of art is to find out
what you're thinking  about, what is important to you, what disturbs
you.  Some people go to confession or talk  to close friends on the
phone to do the same thing.  And of course, your dreams are
important.  I've never approached mine in any methodological or
psychoanalytic way, but I  recognize that they're interesting- a version
of my own reality.  I have to pay attention to  that.  That's another
way to let yourself know what you're thinking about.  You have to
subvert your psyche sometimes to know what's really going on.

I often wonder what it's like to be a cell in a body.  Just one cell in skin
or in a brain or an  eye.  What is the experience of that cell?  It has an
independent existence, and yet it seems  to be part of something that
doesn't depend on it, and that has an existence quite separate  from it.
When you think of colonies of ants or bees, they aren't physically
joined the way  an organism made up of cells is, but it's the same
thing.  They have an independent  existence, an independent history.
But they are part of a whole that is composed of them.   That's what
fascinates me about institutions.  An institution is really like an
organism, a  multi-celled animal in which the people are the cells.  The
very word 'corporation' means  body.  An incorporation of people
into one body.  That's how the romans thought of it.   Five people
would incorporate and become a sixth body, subject to the same laws
as they  would as individuals.  I connect this with the concept of a
human body, in which the cells  change regularly.  They live and die
their own lives, and yet the overall flow of the  existence of the body
as an individual seems to be consistent.  How does that work?  It's
very mysterious.

People are fascinated by little sections of the CIA, which might be said
to develop  independent of the body of the CIA.  It's like a tumor or
a liver or a spleen that decides it  will have its own independent
existence.  It still needs to share the common blood that  flows through
all the organs, but the spleen wants to go off and do a few things.  It'll
come  back.  It has to.  But it wants to have its own adventures.
That's fascinating to me.  I don't  think of it as a threat.  It's only a
real threat if all your organs decide to go off in different  directions.
At a certain point the chaos equals destruction.  But at the same time
the  potential for adventure and creative difference is exciting.

In Crimes of the Future  I talk about a world in which there are no
women.  Men have to  absorb the femaleness that is gone from the
planet.  It can't just cease to exist because  women aren't around.  It
starts to bring out their own femaleness more, because that  duality
and balance is necessary.  The ultimate version would be that a man
should die and  re-emerge as a woman and be completely aware of his
former life as a man.  In a strange  way this would be a very physical
fusion of those two halves of himself.  That's what  Crimes of the
Future i is about.  Ivan Reitman once told me it could have been a
great  commercial success if I'd done the movie straight.

William Burroughs doesn't just say that men and women are different
species, he says  they're different species with different wills and
purposes.  That's where you arrive at the  struggle between the sexes.
I think Burroughs really touches a nerve there.  The attempt to  make
men and women not different- little girls and boys are exactly the
same, it's only  social pressure, influence and environmental factors
that makes them go separate ways- just  doesn't work.  Anyone who
has kids knows that.  There is a femaleness and a maleness.   We each
partake of both in different proportions.  But Burroughs is talking
about  something else: will and purpose.

If you think of a female will, a universal will, and a male will and
purpose in life, that's  beyond the bisexual question.  A man can be
bisexual, but he's still a man.  The same for a  woman.  They still have
different wills that knock against each other, are perhaps in  conflict.
If we inhabited different planets, we would see the female planet go
entirely one  way and the male another.  Maybe that's why we're on
the same planet, because either  extreme might be worse.  I think
Burrough's comments are illuminating.  Maybe they're a  bit too
cosmic to deal with in daily life, but you hear it reflected in all the
hideous clichÈs of  songs:  'you can't live with 'em, and you can't live
without 'em.'

Burroughs was fascinated when I told him about a species of butterfly
where the male and  female are so different it took forty years before
lepidopterists realized.  They couldn't find  the male of one species and
the female of another.  But they were the same species.  One  was huge
and brightly coloured and the other was tiny and black.  They didn't
look like  they belonged together.  When Burroughs talks about men
and women being different  species, it does have some resonance in
other forms of life.  But there are also  hermaphrodite versions of this
butterfly.  They are totally bizarre.  One half is huge and  bright and
the other half- split right sown the middle of the body- is small and
dark.  I can't  imagine it being able to fly.  There's no balance
whatsoever.

I don't think of my films as being radical.  They're often received that
way, or are  perceived with horror of a different kind by censors and
by people who feel they must  protect the common will.  Because of
that I look at them and say, 'I suppose if I were in  their shoes, and my
understanding of human endeavor were theirs, then these are radical.'
 But I don't think somebody in a country that banned one of my films
would say it was  because the film was politically dangerous.  I don't
think 'political' would be the right word  in this context.  I think it's
because of the imagery, not the philosophical suggestions behind  the
imagery.  It's the imagery that strikes them first, and then the general
disturbing quality  of the films.

If it were just a question a mutilating bodies the way that hack-and-
slash movies often do, I  wouldn't find extreme imagery interesting.
People often say to me, 'Why don't you do it  the way Hitchcock did
and just suggest things?'  First of all I say, 'Have you seen Frenzy  ?',
which has a couple of very nasty scenes.  The man did them- he
wanted to, no one was  forcing him.  I think that Hitchcock's reticence
to show stuff had more to do with the  temper and censorship of the
times than it did his own demons.  I have to show things  because I'm
showing things that people could not imagine.  If I had done them off-
screen,  they would not exist.  If you're talking about shooting
someone, or cutting throats, you  could do that off-screen and the
audience would have some idea of what was going on.   But if you
imagine Max Renn in Videodrome  and the slit in his stomach_If I'd
done that  off-screen, what would the audience think was going on?
It simply wouldn't work. I'm presenting audiences with imagery and
with possibilities that have to be shown.  There  is no other way to do
it.  It's not done for shock value.  I haven't made a single film that
hasn't surprised me in terms of audience response; they have been
moved, shocked or  touched by things that I thought wouldn't nudge
them one inch.  For me, it's really a  question of conceptual imagery.
It's not just 'Let's show someone killing a pig on screen  and we'll get
a good reaction.'  You would.  So what?

I don't know where these extreme images come from.  It seems very
straightforward and  natural and obvious to me as it happens.  Often
they come from the philosophical  imperative of a narrative and
therefore lead me to certain things that are demanded by the  film.  I
don't impose them.  The film or the script itself demands a certain
image, a certain  moment in the film, dramatically.  And it emerges.
It's like the philosophy of Emergent  Evolution, which says that
certain unpredictable peaks emerge from the natural flow of  things
and carry you forward to another stage.  I guess each film has its own
version of  Emergent Evolution.  It's just like plugging into a wall
socket.  You look around for the  plug point and, when you find it, the
electricity is there- assuming that the powerhouse is  still working.
That's as close to describing the process as I can get.

The lead actress, Sue Helen Petrie, had been in a couple of the Cinepix
porno films.  In  fact, she was in almost every Canadian film being
made then.  She was very voluptuous  but very pretty, and not a bad
actress.  Funny and very bright.  We're on set and we're  doing this
scene, and she has to cry.  She really has to cry a lot in the movie
because her  husband is weird right from the start.  She says, 'David,
I've got a confession.  I can't cry  on screen.  I've never been able to do
it.'  I said, 'You've got to!'  She says, 'That's why I  wanted to do this
role- to show that i can cry.  But I can't.'  I said, 'Oh my God, what
are  we going to do now?'  So she says, 'I'm going to grate onions and
put them in my eyes,  and then you're going to slap me across the face,
and then I'll go in front of the cameras  and do it.'  She wasn't
kidding; this was another kind of desperation I was having to deal
with.

So I say to the crew, 'OK, you're going to roll and we're not going to
be on set, and then  Sue's going to run in.  So just keep rolling.'  We
go around the corner of the kitchen (we  were shooting in a very small
apartment), and she rubs the onions in her eyes.  It doesn't  look like
she's crying.  She said, 'Hit me,' so I gave her a little tap.  'That's not
hard  enough, you've really got to hit me.'  So I hit her, really hard.
then she said, 'OK, now do  it ten more times.'  So, five on each cheek.
My hands were burning.  She shrieks.  Shriek,  whack, whack, shriek.
Then she ran out and we shot immediately.
Then Barbara Steele arrives, and the first scene she has to do with Sue
is when she gives  her a parasite kiss.  So it's pretty tricky; low-budget
stuff throws you into that because you  have no time for niceties.  So
Barbara is sitting there, and everybody on the crew is now  completely
blasÈ about our technique for making Sue cry.  The make-up lady
comes to me  and says, 'She's on the verge of bruising now and I won't
be able to cover it.  You better  take that into consideration.'  But it's
business as usual.  We roll the camera.  Barbara's all  ready, but i
don't say 'Action.'  Sue and I go into the kitchen.  Barbara's
wondering what  the fuck's going on.  So it's smack, smack, smack;
shriek, shriek, shriek.  Sue comes out  sobbing.  Great.  Barbara is
horrified; there's a look of total shock and anger on her face.  I  say,
'Action, action.  Do it, do it!'

When it's 'Cut', Barbara stands up (she's real big, and she was in high
heels) and literally  grabs me by the lapels and lifts me up.  She says,
'You bastard!  I've worked with some of  the best directors in the
world.  I've worked with Fellini.  I've never, in my life, seen a  director
treat an actress like that.  You bastard!'  She was going to punch me
out.  I said,  'No, Barbara, don't hit me.  She made me.  I hate doing
it.  I'm afraid to do take two_'   'Really?' she says.  'Yes, really.'
Barbara lets me go.  'How hard were you hitting her?'  she asks, 'show
me.'  She holds out her forearm and i hit it hard.  'That hard?'  'Yes,'
I  say.  'Hmm,' says Barbara.  A pause, and then her eyes fix on me.
'Do I have any scenes  where I cry?'  That was my introduction to the
world of actresses.  People who see Shivers   and think that I didn't
deal with acting and actors are completely wrong.   Each of my films
has a little demon in the corner that you don't see, but it's there.  The
demon in Shivers  is that people vicariously enjoy the scenes where
guys kick down doors  and do whatever they want to the people
inside.  They love the scenes where people are  running, screaming,
naked through the halls.  But they might just hate themselves for
liking  them.  This is no new process; it's obvious that there is a
vicarious thrill involved in seeing  the forbidden.

French critics really saw Shivers  as being an attack on the bourgeois
life, and bourgeois  ideas of morality and sexuality.  They sensed the
glee with which we were tearing them  apart.  Living on Nuns' Island
we all wanted to rip that place apart and run, naked,  screaming
through the halls.

The standard way of looking at Shivers  is as a tragedy, but there's a
paradox in it that also  extends to the way society looks at me.  Here's
a man who walks around and is sweet: he  likes people, he's warm,
friendly, articulate and he makes these horrible, diseased,  grotesque,
disgusting movies.  Now, what's real?  Those two things are both real
for the  person standing outside.  For me, those two parts of myself
are inextricably bound  together.  The reason I'm secure is because I'm
crazy.  The reason I'm stable is because  I'm nuts.  It's palpable to me.


At the beginning of my career I encouraged labels like 'the reigning
king of schlock  horror.'  It was a defense.  To say that what you do
is in some way artistic leaves you  vulnerable.  Andy Warhol stood on
that defense himself.  He said, 'Oh yeah, my stuff is  trash.  No
question about it.'  It's very hard for people to attack you when you
say that.   Plus the fact that my acceptance of that crown connected
me with AIP and Roger Corman,  which wasn't such a bad thing.

Why should I be beaten over the head by what was written about me
in The American  Nightmare.   What Robin Wood says is 'these are
good film-makers who are on the side of  progressiveness, and these
are bad film-makers who are reactionary.'  I don't think that is  what
art's about, or what criticism is about.  I don't think that films have
to be positive or  uplifting to be valid experiences.  A film can be
depressing and still be exhilarating. The critics I have admired the
most are a lot less schematically inclined because i don't  base my life's
value and work's value in any ideology.  There is a very strident moral
imperative being broadcast from Robin's work that is really saying
that, despite the fact this  piece of film by Larry Cohen is awful, it is
admirable and should be seen because it  proposes what I think it right
for human beings to do in society.  Now that is very twisted.

Why do actors love death scenes?  Partly because they know the
scene's going to get them  some attention.  But part of it is mastery
over death; to be able to die, come back to life,  and refine it.  'Let me
try that again.'  They're trying out what's aesthetically and
philosophically pleasing.  Same for me.  'Here's Martin Sheen
committing suicide in The  Dead Zone.  Should he put a gun in his
mouth?  No.  ClichÈd.  How about under the chin?   He's a guy who
would go out with his chin up.'  You can't help thinking, when you
hear  the gun click, 'Would I have the guts to do that?'  You're
deciding the moment and style  of your death.  I thought at the time
it was a defeat when Hemingway shot himself.  Since  then I've come
to feel it was a very courageous act.  He said the only things that
meant  anything to him were fucking, fishing and writing, and he
couldn't do any of them worth a  damn any more.  He lived by his
word.
This sounds very dreary and serious and very involved.  Of course, it's
not like that at all.   It's much more like play.  That's really the way I
think of film.  It's the adult version of  tigers' play.

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 think that  the flesh
in my films is like that.  I notice that my characters talk about the flesh
undergoing  revolution at times.  I think to myself:  'That's what it is:
the independence of the body,  relative to the mind, and the difficulty
of the mind accepting what that revolution might  entail.'

The most accessible version of the 'New Flesh' in Videodrome  would
be that you can  actually change what it means to be a human being
in a physical way.  We've certainly  changed in a psychological way
since the beginning of mankind.  In fact, we have changed  in a
physical way as well.  We are physically different from our forefathers,
partly because  of what we take into our bodies, and partly because of
things like glasses and surgery.  But  there is a further step that could
happen, which would be that you could grow another arm,  that you
could actually physically change the way you look- mutate.

Human beings could swap sexual organs, or do without sexual organs
per se , for  procreation.  We're free to develop different kinds of
organs that would give pleasure, and  that have nothing to do with
sex.  The distinction between male and female would  diminish, and
perhaps we would become less polarized and more integrated
creatures.   I'm not talking about transsexual operations.  I'm talking
about the possibility that human  beings would be able to physically
mutate at will, even if it took five years to complete that  mutation.
Sheer force of will would allow you to change your physical self.

To understand physical process on earth requires a revision of the
theory that we're all  God's creatures- all that Victorian sentiment.  It
should certainly be extended to encompass  disease, virus and bacteria.
Why not?  A virus is only doing its job.  It's trying to live its  life.  The
fact that it's destroying you by doing so is not its fault.  It's about
trying to  understand interrelationships among organisms, even those
we perceive as disease.  To  understand it from the disease's point of
view, it's just a matter of life.  It has nothing to do  with disease.  I
think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases
at all.   It's a very negative connotation.  For them, it's very positive
when they take over your  body and destroy you.  It's a triumph.  It's
all part of trying to reverse the normal  understanding of what goes on
physically, psychologically and biologically to us. The characters in
Shivers  experience horror because they are still standard,
straightforward  members of the middle-class high-rise generation.  I
identify with them after they're  infected.  I identify with the parasites,
basically.  Of course they're going to react with  horror on a conscious
level.  They're bound to resist.  They're going to be dragged kicking
and screaming into this new experience.  But, underneath, there is
something else, and  that's what we see at the end of the film.  They
look beautiful at the end.  They don't look  diseased or awful.

Why not look at the process of ageing and dying, for example, as a
transformation?  This is  what I did in The Fly.  It's necessary to be
tough though.  You look at it and it's ugly, it's  nasty , it's not pretty.
It's very hard to alter our aesthetic sense to accommodate ageing,
never mind disease.  We say, 'That's a fine-looking old man; sure he
smells a bit, and he's  got funny patches on his face.'  But we do that.
There is an impulse to try and  accommodate ageing into our
aesthetic.  You might do the same for disease:  'That's a  fine, cancer-
ridden young man.'  It's hard, and you might say 'why bother?'  Well,
because the man still exists.  He has to look at himself.

That's why it seems very natural for me to be sympathetic to disease.
It doesn't mean that  I want to get any.  But that's one of the reasons
I try to deal with that, because I know that  it's inevitable that I will
get some.  We could talk about the tobacco mosaic virus but that
wouldn't interest us much, not being tobacco plants ourselves.
Naturally we're interested  in human diseases.  But how does the
disease perceive us?  That illuminates what we are.

It was an odd movie.  The crew was really freaked out by it; most of
them people I'd  worked with many times.  We had some ladies come
in and take their clothes off, then  we'd chain them to the Videodrome
wall and beat them- not for real.  One of two of them  quite loved it.
Most of them were extras, and had never had this kind of attention.
But the  weirdness of it actually excited a couple of them.  One kept
reappearing on set, very made-up, very dressed, and just floated
around.  It was strange; she was someone who'd been  strangled and
beaten in the scene.  So it was undeniably freaky being on that set.  It
makes  sense that it was; it was supposed to be.

I had to make speeches to the crew every once in a while, because at
a certain point we  were in disarray.  I was indecisive at certain
junctures as we got closer to the end.  We  would set up in a place to
shoot and then I'd take it apart and go somewhere else.  I was  feeling
my way through a difficult film.  Despite the fact that I talk about
liking to have a  script together, it's not because i think that means
you've solved every problem or  understand your film.  I was
beginning to understand more of what was going on in the  movie, and
that what i originally thought would work wasn't going to.  At one
point on the  Videodrome chamber set, I actually told the crew what
was going on and what i was  thinking, to reassure them things were
in hand.  They were wondering if i was falling apart,  or under
pressure because of something they didn't know about.  I suppose the
immediate  thing crews think of is 'Is this picture going to be cancelled
tomorrow?  Am I going to be  out of work?'

A film like Videodrome , which deals specifically with sadomasochism,
violence and  torture, is naturally going to have a lot of nervous
systems on edge.  There was a woman  politician in Canada who had
pickets out on the streets of Ottawa.  They finally got the  picture
removed from a theatre there because the owner just didn't want the
hassle.  That's  fine.  That's his right.  But this woman was a politician,
connected with a certain party in  Canada, and had many particular
axes to grind.

I've talked about admiring Naked Lunch.  One of the barriers to my
being totally 100  percent with William Burroughs is that Burroughs's
general sexuality is homosexual.  It's  very obvious in what he writes
that his dark fantasies happen to be sodomizing young boys  as they're
hanging.  I can actually relate to that to quite an extent.  I really
understand  what's going on.  But if I were to fantasize something
similar, it would be more like the  parasite coming up the drain, and
it would be attacking a woman, not a man.  To say that's  sexist is
politicizing something that is not political.  It's sexual, not sexist-
that's just my  sexual orientation.  I have no reason to think that I
have to give equal time to all sexual  fantasies whether they're my own
or not.  Let those people make their own movies- leave  me alone to
make mine.  I feel censored in a strange way.  I feel that meanings are
being  twisted and imposed on me.  And more than meanings- value
judgements.

As a creator of characters, I believe I have the freedom to create a
character who is not  meant to represent all characters.  I can create
a woman as a character who does not  represent all women.  If I depict
a character as a middle-class dumbo, why does this have  to mean that
I think all women are middle-class dumbos?  There are some women
out  there who are.  Why can they not be characters in my film?  If I
show Debby Harry as a  character who burns her breast with a
cigarette, does that mean that I'm suggesting that all  women want to
burn their breasts with cigarettes?  That's juvenile.  To give guidelines
to  the kind of characters you can create, and the kind of acts they can
do_that's obscene, a  Kafka hell.

It's very difficult to divine what's unconscious and what's conscious,
but if you were to  find by analyzing my films, for example, that I'm
afraid of women, unconsciously that is, I  would say, 'OK, so what?
What's wrong with that?'  If I am an example of the North  American
male, and my films are showing that I'm afraid of women, then that's
something  which could perhaps be discussed, perhaps even decried.
But where do you really go from  there?

I would never censor myself.  To censor myself, to censor my
fantasies, to censor my  unconscious would devalue myself as a film-
maker.  It's like telling a surrealist not to  dream.  The way I portray
women is much more complex than any ideological approach is  going
to uncover.  The advertisement says that the image of a woman sitting
on top of the  car in a bathing suit is what a woman should aspire to.
This is more insidious.  A twelve-year-old girl who sees Videodrome
might be very disturbed because she is attracted and  repelled by the
sexuality- an image of a woman burning herself springs to mind- and
by the  imagery.  But that's different.  There's no clear message in the
film that a twelve-year-old  would absorb about how she is to behave
when she is mature.  that's not the purpose of  art- to tell us how we
should live.

To me politics does not mean sexual politics.  Politics has to do with
power struggles, and  parties and revolutions.  People use the term
sexual revolution in a metaphorical way.  It's  a semantic thing.

I remember being shocked to see black ladies coming with their two-
year-old kids, because  it was a free movie and they didn't have a
babysitter.  One baby screamed all the way  through.  I realized that
I was in trouble.  They saw the movie; it had no music and no
temporary track- I didn't know about temporary tracks.  So there
were all these audio holes  in the movie, which is disturbing to people
who don't know how movies are made.   Complete disaster.  I don't
know if there was one card that said anything nice.  Basically it  was
'You're fucked.'  But everyone was very sweet.  It was 'How can we
help you make  this better?  Let's figure out what went wrong.'  Tom
Mount was very blunt:  'This is  terrible and bad.'  But he never said
the picture was lost.  And with all these cards on the  floor: 'Listen to
this one- "I hated your fucking film."'  It was excruciating.   In a way,
what you're asking for is the judgement of strangers when you make
art of any  kind.  You're asking them to relate and respond to it.  But
the cards are brutal.

When I had to deal with the Toronto Censor Board over The Broad
, the experience was  so unexpectedly personal and intimate, it really
shocked me; pain, anguish, the sense of  humiliation, degradation,
violation.  Now I do have a conditioned reflex!  I can only explain  the
feeling by analogy.  You send your beautiful kid to school and he
comes back with one  hand missing.  Just a bandaged stump.  You
phone the school and they say that they really  thought, all things
considered, the child would be more socially acceptable without that
hand, which was a rather naughty hand.  Everyone was better off with
it removed.  It was  for everyone's good.  That's exactly how it felt to
me.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with
illusion.  People  worry about the effects on children of two thousand
acts of murder on TV every half hour.   You have to point out that
they have seen a representation of murder.  They have not seen
murder.  It's the real stumbling-block.

Charles Manson found a message in a Beatles song that told him what
he must do and why  he must kill.  Suppressing everything one might
think of as potentially dangerous, explosive  or provocative would not
prevent a true psychotic from finding something that will trigger  his
own particular psychosis.  For those of us who are normal, and who
understand the  difference between reality and fantasy, play, illusion-
as most children most readily do-  there is enough distance and
balance.  It's innate.

Censors don't understand how human beings work, and they don't
understand the creative  process.  They don't even understand the
social function of art and expression through art.   You might say they
don't have to and you could be right.  If you believe that censorship
is  a noble office, then you don't have to understand anything.  You
just have to understand  censorship.

It becomes complex when it gets mixed up with the women's
movement.  You find great  splits there between those who think
censorship is necessary and those who still believe in  total free
expression.  An image of a man whipping a woman, for instance.  It
must come  out of a film, whether the movie is set up in such a way
that the audience understands this  is just play between two lovers
been together for forty years and have twenty kids.  That  wouldn't
matter.  The image has to go.  So censors become image police: they
don't care  what the context of the image is; it's only the image itself.

The belief is that an image can kill.  Literally.  It's like Scanners:  if
thoughts can kill,  images can kill.  So the very suggestion of
sadomasochism, for instance, will somehow  trigger off masses of
psychotics out there to do things they would never have done had
they not been exposed to that image.  That's why film classification,
as opposed to  censorship, is legitimate; when it's a suggestion rather
than a law.  But then, no one is  particularly more qualified to be a
classifier than anyone else, which is the problem with  censorship.
How can someone who is my age, my contemporary, see a film and
say that i  cannot see the film?  I don't understand that.

What I love about guys like Max Renn (Videodrome ) and Seth
Brundle (The Fly)  is that  they cannot turn the mind off; and the mind
undercuts, interprets, puts into context.  To  allow themselves to go
totally into the emotional reality of what's happening to them is to  be
destroyed completely.  They're still trying to salvage something out of
the situation:   'Maybe this isn't a disease at all.  Maybe it's a
transformation.'  So I have my reasons for  having my characters
articulate a lot.  It seems real to me.  Characters who will not allow
themselves to get bathetic.  Seth Brundle has built his whole career, life
and understanding  of the world on cerebration and the thought
process.  He cannot totally let go of it.  He has  to get drunk to get
jealous, to talk to the ape.

A mainstream movie is on that isn't going to rattle too many cages, is
not going to shake  people up, push them too far or muscle them
around.  It's not going to depress them.   That's why I don't think that
The Fly  is mainstream.  No horror film is truly mainstream.   When
people say, "Great, another Cronenberg movie!  Let's take everybody
and have  popcorn'- then I'll know I'm mainstream.

One of our touchstones for reality is our bodies.  And yet they too are
by definition  ephemeral.  So to whatever degree we center our reality-
and our understanding of reality-  in our bodies, we are surrendering
that sense of reality to our bodies' ephemerality.  That's  maybe a
connection between Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers  and Videodrome.
 By  affecting the body- whether it's with TV, drugs (invented or
otherwise)- you alter your  reality.  Maybe that's an advance.  I don't
know if I'm evolving at all in terms of the  struggle.

Gynecologic is such a beautiful metaphor for the mind/body split.
Here it is:  the mind of  men- or women- trying to understand sexual
organs.  I make my twins as kids extremely  cerebral and analytical.
They want to understand femaleness in a clinical way by dissection
and analysis, not by experience, emotion or intuition.  'Can we dissect
out the essence of  femaleness?  We're afraid of the emotional
immediacy of womanness, but we're drawn to  it.  How can we come
to terms with it?  Let's dissect it.'

People who find gynecologic icky say, 'I don't find sex icky.'  They've
never gone into  why.  Men who put their fingers up their girlfriends
can turn around and say the concept of  gynecology is disgusting.
What are they talking about?  That's one of the things I wanted  to
look at.  What makes gynecology icky for people is the formality of it.
The clinical  sterility, the fact that it's a stranger.  The woman is
paying the gynecologist let's say it's a  man- ann allowing him to have
intimate knowledge of her sexual organs, which are  normally reserved
for lovers and husbands.  Everyone agrees to suppress any element of
eroticism, emotion, passion, intimacy.  There's not a gynecologist in
the world who would  tell you he's been intimate with eight hundred
thousand women.

The other reason gynecology weirds men out is that they are jealous.
Their wife is known  better, not just physically because, yes, you could
look up there yourself with a flashlight.   The gynecologists
understanding of what it all does and how it all works is greater than
yours.  And he does it all the time.  He can compare your wife with
other women:  structure- does it look pre-cancerous?- all this stuff.
It's his knowing stuff that you can  never know.  I don't want to
discuss whether I've looked up my wife with a flashlight or  not, but
absolutely I wouldn't be afraid if I needed to.  Neither would she.  But
it's  something else.  It's a very potent metaphor, such a perfect core
to discuss all this stuff.

In a crude sense, it's certainly the least macho movie I've done: there
are no guns, no cars.   Scanners  was very masculine by comparison.
Even The Fly   was machinery-dominated.   In Dead Ringers  the
machinery is the gynecological instruments.  They're very menacing
on screen, but actually rather effete.  The Dead Zone  had a lot of
femaleness in it, and not  just because it's more emotional.  But it's too
simplistic to say that when a movie's  emotionally right out there it's
female and when it's repressed it's male.

In Dead Ringers  the truth, anticipated by Beverly's parents- or
whoever named him- was  that he was the female part of the yin/yang
whole.  Elliot and Beverly are a couple, not  complete in themselves.
Both the characters have a femaleness in them.  The idea that  Beverly
is the wife of the couple is unacceptable to him.  He can't accept that
they are a  couple.  Elliot has fucked more women, has a greater
facility with the superficialities of  everything, with the superficialities
of sex.  But in terms of ever establishing an emotional  rapport with
women, Elliot is totally unsuccessful.  Beverly is successful, but he
doesn't see  this success as a positive thing.  He sees that as another
part of his weakness.  He's a part  of his brother's view of society and
has great difficulty accepting his own version.  He's  been colonized;
he's bought the imperialist's line about what is beautiful, proper and
correct.  He has a lot of trouble hearing his own voice.

Venereal disease is very pro-sex, because no sex, no venereal disease.
I know that some  people think this is disgusting stuff, but in Shivers
I was saying, 'I love sex, but I love sex  as a venereal disease.  I am
syphilis.  I am enthusiastic about it in a very different way from  you,
and I'm going to make a movie about it.'  It's trying to turn things
upside down.   Critics often think I'm disapproving of every possible
kind of sex.  Not at all.  With Shivers   I'm a venereal disease having
the greatest time of my life, and encouraging everybody to  get into it.
To take a venereal disease's point of view might be considered
demonic,  depending on who you are.  In a way, Robert Fulford's
attack on me at the time is more  understandable; he was a good
bourgeois, responding with horror to everything I did.  He  would not
take the disease's point of view, not even for ninety minutes.

As an artist, one is not a citizen of society.  An artist is bound to
explore every aspect of  human experience, the darkest corners- not
necessarily-- but if that is where one is led,  that's where one must go.
You cannot worry about what the structure of your own  particular
segment of society considers bad behavior, good behavior; good
exploration, bad  exploration.  So, at the time you're being an artist,
you're not a citizen.  You have, in fact,  no social responsibility
whatsoever.

If someone says, 'Now you must be the citizen and step back to see
what happens,  examine why you have an impulse to create and show
these things,' that puts me in a  different position.  I'm no longer being
an artist; I'm being an analyst of the act itself.   There are many artists
who don't feel the need to examine the process, or who fear that if
they do, it will go away or change.

Nabokov said that and nobody threw rocks at him.  I could say in the
same breath that I am  a citizen and I do have social responsibilities,
and I do take that seriously.  But as an artist  the responsibility is to
allow yourself complete freedom.  That's your function, what you're
there for.  Society and art exist uneasily together; that's always been
the case.  If art is anti-repression, then art and civilization were not
meant for each other.  You don't have to be a  Freudian to see that.
The pressure in the unconscious, the voltage, is to be heard, to
express.  It's irrepressible.  It will come out some way.

When I write, I must not censor my own imagery or connections.  I
must not worry about  what critics will say, what leftists will say, what
environmentalists will say.  I must ignore all  that.  If I listen to all
these voices I will be paralyzed, because none of this can be resolved.
 I have to go back to the voice that spoke before all these structures
were imposed on it, and  let it speak these terrible truths.  By being
irresponsible I will be responsible.

There are two main problems.  One is the scope of it.  It really is quite
epic.  It's the  mother of all epics.  It would cost $400-$500 million if
you were to film it literally, and of  course it would be banned in every
country in the world.  There would be no culture that  could withstand
that film.  That is what I was faced with: the difficulty any audience
would  have plugging into it.  As a book, you dip into it, you don't
read it from start to finish.  It's  like the Bible; it's a little bit here, a
little bit there; cross-references.  You find your favorite  parts, like the
i ching.  You look in it when you need it, and you find something
there.

To make a metaphor in which you compare imagination to disease is
to illuminate some  aspect of human imagination that perhaps has not
been seen or perceived that way before.   I think that imagination and
creativity are completely natural and also, under certain
circumstances, quite dangerous.  The fact that they're dangerous
doesn't mean they are not  necessary and should be repressed.

This is something that's very straightforwardly perceived by tyrants
of every kind.  The  very existence of imagination means that you can
posit an existence different from the one  you're living.  If you are
trying to create a repressive society in which people will submit to
whatever you give them, then the very fact of them being able to
imagine something else-  not necessarily better, just different- is a
threat.  So even on that very simple level,  imagination is dangerous.
If you accept, at least to some extent, the Freudian dictum that
civilization is repression, then imagination- and unrepressed creativity-
is dangerous to  civilization.  But it's a complex formula; imagination
is also an innate part of civilization.  If  you destroy it, you might also
destroy civilization.

We've become very blase in the West about the freedom, the
invulnerability of writers.   We take it for granted, particularly on the
level of physical safety.  But look what happened  to Salman Rushdie.
And now we find that under their dictatorship, Romanians had to
register their typewriters as dangerous weapons!  They couldn't own
photocopiers.  Every  year you had to supply two pages of typing
using all the keys, so that anything typed on  your machine could be
traced back to you.  That is true fear of the power of the written
word.

But even in the West, writing can be perilous.  Taking his cue from
Jean Genet, Burroughs  says that you must allow yourself to create
characters and situations that could be a danger  to you in every way.
Even physically.  He in fact insists  that writing be recognized and
accepted as a dangerous act.  A writer must not be tempted to avoid
writing the truth just  because he knows that what he creates might
come back to haunt him.  That's the nature  of the bargain you make
with your writing machine.