“You’ve made a career out of bodies,” a character observes of Karsh (Vincent Cassel), the protagonist of David Cronenberg’s deeply personal genre-bender, The Shrouds. In addition to their chosen jobs (Karsh was a producer of industrial videos before turning his focus to cemetery technology), he and his creator share many similarities. Some are external—a shock of white hair, a serve of white sneakers—but the core is internal, as both have been dealt the life-altering blow of losing their respective wives, and pour their grief into their work.

Known as the “king of body horror”, the Canadian writer-director has also dabbled in sci-fi, gangster flicks, human drama and yes, romance. In fact, he believes that all of his films are romantic, and comedic, in some way or another. We sat down to chat about his lasting legacy (props from his projects have been showcased in exhibits around the world, and a new generation has recently embraced 1996’s Crash), as well as the various overarching themes of his filmography—from fusing the organic and the inorganic, a lifelong ion for biology and creatures, to… the eroticism of “hole horror”. Read on to find out what that means.

I would love to start with your 2014 novel Consumed, because out of all of your works, The Shrouds reminded me the most of this one. Check it out: I got it secondhand at a bookstore—
David Cronenberg: I’m impressed!

Thank you! It has this beautiful handwritten love letter inscription in it.
What happened to that love, though?

I’ve thought about that as well, because it’s romantic at first, but then it becomes a little bit devastating when you it ended up in a used bookstore.
Exactly.

Both Consumed and The Shrouds feature geopolitical intrigue and conspiracy and the ing of a loved one. But what I’d really like to focus on is the way that they both very respectfully and profoundly explore this strange beauty of mutilation.
Yes, in fact, in Consumed, it’s even more prominent. In a strange way, it’s almost an analog for aging. You are with someone, you’re living with someone, you’re both young and beautiful, and then you gradually get older and maybe not so beautiful. How does that affect your sex life, your love life, your home life, your spiritual life, whatever.

Yes, they’re also a lot funnier than they get credit for. You’ve talked about how some audiences have maybe missed the intended humor of The Shrouds, but Letterboxd have really been praising it for threading that needle between being laugh-out-loud funny and also genuinely very moving. Can you talk about the important role that humor plays in your work, and reassure the people that it is okay to laugh?
It’s okay to laugh, yes, absolutely. In fact, I insist that you laugh. I think that we have evolved a sense of humor in order to survive what our brains deliver to us—our understanding of life, of death, of the absurdity of life. If you’re an existentialist, you are very much into the absurdity of life, the theater of the absurd and so on.

Not too many animals have a sense of humor, and we have a very sophisticated one. That is essential to surviving life—it’s a survival strategy, humor. And it comes naturally. In my writing of screenplays, my characters are always funny, even if they’re not aware of how funny they are, because people are like that. To me, it’s just being very realistic. You’re trying to create characters who are alive and feel like real people, even though you’re creating fictional people. One of the things that they do is they say funny things, and they surprise you with the things they say and the things that they do. Then you know that you’ve created living characters. Humor is always a part of it.

Another very prevalent theme in your work is the relationship between the body and technology, merging the organic and the inorganic and discovering that they’re not as dissimilar as they may seem on the surface.
Well, I think everybody is sort of fascinated by [technology] in one way or another. For example, of course, I’m wearing glasses. That’s technology. But also, my eyes, I’ve had cataract surgery, so I’m seeing you not only through the internet and satellites but I’m also looking at you through plastic lenses in my eyes. I’m hearing you with the new hearing aids that incorporate an artificial intelligence chip.

It’s very straightforward and very realistic for me to be thinking about bodies and technology and how they fuse, because as far as we know, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, people were trying to cure diseases using whatever technology existed at the time. People were cutting open their bodies, sewing their bodies together, doing all kinds of things to try to cure things, change things, decorate their bodies. So, it’s not just me—I’m just actualizing my version of what has been going on with humans since the beginning of human society.

How has it felt to know that film is finally enjoying its rightful resurgence?
Well, I we had a screening at the Venice Film Festival of the new 4K version of Crash. When it was initially shown in 1996 at the Cannes Film Festival, it was a big scandal and people were scandalized and journalists were yelling at me and they were saying this is an outrage, it’s hideous, it’s an attack on human dignity, everything they could think of.

Then when we showed it in Venice, it was a very young audience, and it was no big deal for them. I mean, they liked it—they were intrigued by it and so on—but they were not shocked. They were not scandalized. So, the world has sort of caught up with Ballard and Crash, and it’s very satisfying.

These themes of merging the organic and inorganic are also probed at great length in my personal favorite of yours, eXistenZ, as I’m a gamer girl. David, were you playing video games back in the late ’90s? And do you game now?
I do not game now, and I only gamed a little bit then. I playing MechWarrior and I playing Metroid. My son was sort of guiding me through some of that. I did find it intriguing and really enthralling, and I have seen the evolution of games become more and more realistic and quite spectacular and beautiful.

At a certain point, my son, Brandon, who’s directed three movies now, we were working with a company in Toronto to develop our own video game. It never happened for various reasons. It had to do with that company. It didn’t work out very well. Of course, now making a video game is like making a huge movie series, you know? Then, it was not so expensive and extensive, but now, obviously, it’s a big enterprise. So, I observe it all, but I must confess, I’m not really a gamer.

I was at the eXistenZ Q&A at the Academy Museum that you did a few months ago, and you mentioned that you enjoyed inventing your own types of creatures and bringing them into the world. You’ve made so many, from the Shivers sex worms, to those little guys from The Brood, to, of course, The Fly. Could you talk about what have been some of your favorite creatures to create?
I don’t know if I have a favorite, really. As a kid, I was definitely a nature boy and I loved insects and animals in general. I had thoughts about blending with them, to feel fusing with them. Part of it would be to create them, to write them, to invent new creatures.

There are so many creatures on Earth that we have not yet discovered—in the depths of the ocean and other places—and we’re constantly finding them. As a kid, I was always thinking about science fiction: they want other worlds, aliens from outer space and creatures out there. I thought, ‘We have the most amazing creatures right here on Earth.’ I mean, insect life in itself is unbelievable in its variety and the strange sexuality of it. That still excites me, and it still overwhelms me, the beauty of Earth and what Earth is. To fuse with that, to become part of that, was just natural for me once I started making films.

Sadly, there were almost no creatures in The Shrouds. There were some koi fish, there were some dogs.
Well, the creatures in The Shrouds are the humans. I do think that I’m creating these humans and they are animals, they are creatures—body is reality. And then there are a couple of dogs, you know. I do think of my characters as creatures, I have to tell you.

That’s a really beautiful way to look at your characters. There were also some very interesting tools in The Shrouds, much like in Dead Ringers. I’d love for you to talk about how you feel when your art directors and production designers present you with these tangible versions of these tools and technology that you’ve envisioned.
First of all, my scripts are usually very specific and precise. But then creating these things in reality is always a huge jump. For example, the way I describe The Shrouds in my script is not really the way they ended up.

You have many collaborators, and you surround yourself with wonderful people who bring you all kinds of ideas. It’s like, ‘What about this? What about this material? How would that photograph? Do you want it shinier or not? Is it more complex or not? And what’s the shape?’ And I say, ‘Well, I really think it’s like a chrysalis. It’s like a butterfly’s chrysalis, maybe a monarch butterfly.’ And we try that. People have all kinds of ideas and also have the ability to physically create these things, which I don’t have. You want the best people that you can find working with you, definitely.

Some of your tools’ legacies really live on—as I’m sure you know, the eXistenZ GamePod and Naked Lunch bug typewriter are on display at the Academy Museum in LA right now. Have you gotten a chance to see that exhibit?
Yes, I did go there. It was really very lovely to see. It was exciting.

Could you talk a bit about your experiences of seeing your work on display in museums?
Well, it’s not the first time that I’ve seen something like that, because I’ve donated a lot of the artifacts from my films to the Toronto International Film Festival’s archives, and they have had exhibitions that displayed a lot of those things. It’s pretty neat because it’s like a whole universe that you’ve created, that has accumulated. When I see them physically—in display cases and on display in videos—it shows the connections amongst them, and you get the feeling that you’ve created your own universe in its very sense.

Thank you very much for answering that funny little question.
A very good question.

As we wrap up this conversation, I’d love to look towards the future by bringing it right back to Consumed, because I’ve read that you’ve been trying to make that into a film. Is that still on the table?
It is. For a while, it was maybe going to be a series, and then it was going to be a film and then it was maybe going to be a series again. I am working on a script version of it. Whether it will work out and be financeable… Because I must say, for independent films these days, anything extreme is not easy to finance. It’s a tough moment right now. It’s not just my films—everybody who makes non-Amazon or Netflix movies is feeling it. It’s interesting for me to come back to my own novel after all these years and read it and think, ‘Yeah, that’s not so bad. You know, it’s actually pretty good.’ So, we shall see. But I’m trying.