On directing > As an Artist your Responsibility is to be Irresponsible

David Cronenberg

“As a citizen, of course. As a parent, of course. But as an artist, that’s where the paradox is – your responsibility is to be irresponsible. As soon as you talk about political or social responsibility, you’ve amputated the best limbs you’ve got as an artist.”

“As an artist you look into yourself to understand the human potential to be all kinds of things that are not necessarily pleasant but are real – a criminal, a murderer, a sadist, a rapist; to be all of these things that many people are. You can’t allow yourself to say, ‘I’m a different species from those people.’ Because you aren’t.”

“The criminal as monster is kind of common. That’s very convenient because you can then say, ‘Of course I’m not a monster, therefore I’m not a criminal therefore I have no potential in tern of criminality.’ And that lets you off the hook. That gives you a nice wall between yourself and them.”

Shivers, 1975

“Drugs and creativity don’t go together for me. Like everybody in the ’60s, I had one acid trip and some cocaine and hash, you know, the stuff everyone did. But it’s been 30 or 40 years since I bothered to do that. What I need is clarity. Even not having enough sleep is a problem for me, never mind doing any kind of drugs.”

“When you’re in the muck you can only see muck. If you somehow manage to float above it, you still see the muck but you see it from a different perspective. And you see other things too. That’s the consolation of philosophy.”

“Civilization is repression. You don’t get civilization without repression of the unconscious, of the id. And the basic appeal of art is to the unconscious. Therefore, art is somewhat subversive of civilization. And yet at the same time it seems necessary for civilization. You don’t get civilization without art.”

Rabid, 1977

“Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality.”

“If you look at a baby, the most fascinating thing to a baby, a newborn, is the human face. The baby will look at your face and watch your face move and want to touch it. If it’s a fantastic head and what it’s talking about is fantastic, then you can’t have anything better. It’s the best!”

“We’ve all got the disease – the disease of being finite. Death is the basis of all horror.”

The Brood, 1979

“I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you’re making a horror film doesn’t mean you can’t make an artful film.”

“Bambi [1942] is a terrifying film for a kid because Bambi’s mother is killed. When you’re a child that’s a terrifying thing. So does that qualify? There’s a movie called The Blue Lagoon (1949), which was really scary for me as a kid. It’s kids on a boat, the boat sinks, the parents drown, the kids are alone on the island with a drunken sailor.”

“A superhero movie, by definition, you know, it’s comic book. It’s for kids. It’s adolescent in its core.”

Videodrome, 1983

“It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable.”

“You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism.”

“Well, yes,when you no longer have any desire, you are dead. Even desire for a product, a consumer item, is better than no desire at all. Desire for a camera, for instance, even a cheap one, a tawdry one, is enough to keep death at bay.” a wicked smile, an inhale of the cigarette with those lips. “If the desire is real, of course.”

The Fly, 1986

“Since I see technology as being an extension of the human body, it’s inevitable that it should come home to roost.”

“Long live the New Flesh!”

“Philosophy is surgery; surgery is philosophy.”

“The internet is now a forum for public prosecution.”

“Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism.”

“I identify with the parasites.”

Dead Ringers, 1988

“We’re all photojournalists now. It’s no longer enough just to write.”

“Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother?”

“Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.”

“I’m a totally anti-storyboard person.”

Naked Lunch, 1991

“I have no rules. For me, it’s a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You’re looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I’d like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you’re a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.”

“I have no demons. I was always a nature boy. I loved nature and animals and insects. And [my son Brandon Cronenberg] proved to have that same kind of sensibility, which undoubtedly has something to do with the kind of movies I’ve made and that he seems to be making as well. It comes from a real affection for the strangeness of animal life on earth. I’s very pure and very direct.”

Crash, 1996

“Dolphins read each other’s emotions by sonar and it’s the inside of the body, the configuration of the viscera, that lets dolphins know whether the dolphin they are meeting is tense or happy. Their emotions are much more connected with the insides of each other’s bodies. We don’t have that. It’s like denying 90% of what we are physically, not knowing it.”

“I think I can say that the characters in my films don’t really I respond to a political stance or a schematic. They’re not meant to be an illustration of a theory.. I never really worry about a character being sympathetic or not.”

“My movies are body-conscious. The first fact of human existence is the human body. If you get away from physical reality, you’re fudging, in fantasy land, not coming to grips with what violence does.”

eXistenZ, 1999

“Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they’re whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they’ve got. I can’t possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.”

“We can’t worry about meaning. Ari proposed to us that meaning is a consumer item. Some people manufacture it through religion, philosophy, nationhood, politics, and some people buy it. But an artist is not a manufacturer.”

“But so strong is our desire for meaning, an innate desire, that we construct meanings where there are none.”

Crimes of the Future, 2022

“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.”

“To me, the life that we live is heaven. My idea of paradise is life on Earth. But we often don’t know it, and can’t see it that way, until, I’m sure, we start to leave it. I guess that’s the way I feel about film.”

“Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death.”

David Cronenberg, 1943-