David Cronenberg doesn’t fear the future. This revelation might surprise some fans of the Canadian writer-director, whose reputation as “the king of body horror” precedes him, and whose movies examine strange days of tomorrow as often as they inspect the amorphous insides of his characters.

But at a press conference the day after the Festival de Cannes premiere of his anticipated Crimes of the Future (in US cinemas now), Cronenberg said what scares him more than unknowns of human evolution and technological advancement are the efforts he sees from bureaucratic entities to hold such progress back. “It’s a constant in history that somewhere in the world there’s some government that wants to control its population,” he told journalists at the festival, adding that Crimes of the Future “addresses, though not in an overtly political way, the question of who owns whose body.”

Set in a crumbling near-future where most people no longer feel pain, Crimes of the Future is Cronenberg’s first feature since Maps to the Stars in 2014, and a novel, Consumed, published in the same year. Crimes centers on body artist Saul Tenser (Cronenberg regular Viggo Mortensen), who grows new, non-functional organs at a rapid rate. Diagnosed as “Accelerated Evolution Syndrome”, this affliction is central to performance pieces in which his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) surgically—and erotically—removes the growths in front of a live audience. Tenser lies in a biomorphic autopsy machine as she operates, writhing in pleasure while she first tattoos, then excises, the “neo-organs” inside him.

“Body is reality,” Cronenberg exclaimed at that Cannes conference, spelling out one of Crimes’ main themes: if you control humanity’s flesh, you control its future. In the film, Tenser and Caprice encounter the National Organ Registry, an agency that fears “human evolution is going wrong” and sends agent Timlin (Kristen Stewart) to intervene. Once she sees Saul Tenser’s act, though, Timlin is titillated: “Surgery is the new sex,” she says, shivering at the concept.

It’s a classic Cronenberg line, up there with James Woods declaring “Long live the new flesh” at the end of Videodrome—which makes sense, given that the 79-year-old director first wrote the script for this Crimes of the Future more than twenty years ago, having made an earlier Crimes of the Future (1970) three decades before that, which featured a patient with the same fast-organ-growth affliction as Saul Tenser.

What made Cronenberg decide to make this long-gestating Crimes, now? “I usually short-circuit that question by just answering: money,” he tells us the day after the press conference. “There’s no straightforward line. I had, at a certain point, thought that maybe Maps to the Stars would be my last movie. I was happy writing a novel and I thought, ‘I don’t need the hassle.’”

Ultimately, it was the prompting of his long-time producer, Robert Lantos, that encouraged Cronenberg to give Crimes of the Future another go. “I said, ‘It’s science-fiction, technology has moved on, the world has moved on, and it’s obviously going to be irrelevant,’” Cronenberg recalls. “And he said, ‘No, it’s more relevant than ever.’ That was a clever line, a good producer’s line, and induced me to reread it.”

This was, remarkably, Cronenberg’s sixth time at Cannes, a festival not known for transgressive genre fare. His first visit, in 1996, was particularly memorable; Crash, his flesh-and-metal psychodrama about car crash fetishists, prompted boos and walkouts, then won a special jury prize created for it. The jury president at the time, Francis Ford Coppola (reportedly no fan of Crash), announced its award “for originality, for daring and for audacity” after—as Cannes legend has it—failing to dissuade his fellow jurors from recognizing the film altogether. (He refused to personally present the award to Cronenberg.)

The director’s subsequent trips to the Croisette have been less controversial, perhaps because the films he’s brought there since—Spider, A History of Violence, Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars—have shifted away from body horror, still favoring psychological turmoil and cold-blooded humor but largely keeping their provocations under the skin. In this sense, Crimes of the Future can be read as a return to form.

In person during our interview, with his shock of white hair and neo-retro sunglasses, not to mention the ever-fleshy substance of his cinema, Cronenberg most strongly resembles a mad scientist fresh from the lab. But as he lounges on a hotel terrace overlooking the Mediterranean, he holds court more like an elder statesman. Though he’s spent all month in , the Toronto-based director only arrived in Cannes a few days before Crimes premiered; he prefers just a small dose of the glitzy, garrulous atmosphere that overtakes the French Riviera this time of year.

“Walking the streets is difficult, because people want autographs, which is sweet but means you can’t get anywhere,” he says. “If you haven’t had that before, it might be quite thrilling. I totally take it as a compliment. But you can only give so much of yourself.” As if to prove his point, a man approaches, brandishing a smartphone; of all things, he wants to show Cronenberg his Wordle score (2/6). Patiently, the director shares his own (4/6) and responds that he loses the game each day to his children—one of whom, Possessor’s Brandon Cronenberg, has followed his father into genre filmmaking—before tactfully shooing the man off.

“It’s pretty intense, isn’t it?” Cronenberg remarks, waving one hand in the direction of the Croisette as he refocuses on our conversation.

Crimes of the Future marks your first film at Cannes in eight years. Ahead of its premiere, you’d predicted there would be walkouts. What have you made of the reception thus far?
David Cronenberg: It has been quite different. It’s a different film, and it’s possible that it was never going to be as controversial as something like Crash, because there isn’t sex, as per what the film is about. But, honestly, the things I’d thought would be difficult—like the opening scene, which depicts the murder of a child—the audience has appeared well able to take in stride. I’d thought some people, especially parents, might be put off by that, though it is of course a crucial scene that has ripple effects throughout the whole movie. It’s not a “shock” scene. I thought that would be difficult, but it seems it was not. I’m sure other audiences might have that moment.

It’s not that I felt I had to say something about that, necessarily. It’s just that I found that intriguing and interesting. When I step back, having made the film, I can say, “Yes, this is what art is to me: that you are really giving everything you have.” And for me, “everything” is the body. That’s the most that you can give. I’m interested in performance artists, because they do that. A performance artist who alters their body in a permanent way is giving a lot. It’s a real commitment to your art.

Tenser and Caprice’s performances involve her removing organs from his body. It’s a striking way to think about creating art, as ridding yourself of these masses growing inside you. Do you see it as commenting on your own approach to art or any previous films you’ve made?
I have no desire for any referential elements. I know that they will be there. It’s all coming from me, so I know there’ll be connections. But, creatively, it doesn’t give me anything to say, “This will remind people of eXistenZ, or this will remind people of movies as far back as Videodrome.” I know that will happen, but this movie does not know about those other movies. I’m trying only to bring this movie to life, to create its ambience.

You establish an anesthetized atmosphere, a sense of dead space that feels aligned with a dystopian setting where people no longer feel pain. What did you want from that ambience?
It’s particularly difficult, because it is a non-existent ambience I’m trying to create, unlike any of my other movies, wherein the outside world was well understood and the audience felt at least comfortable with that. In this case, everything has to be created or suggested. I have to decide how much the audience needs to know about the politics of this world, how much they have to know about the criminal system. Is there a president, a dictator or a prime minister? How is this country run? Is it run, or is it not run?

It’s either a dream of a country, or it’s that your plane accidentally lands in a country that you have no understanding of. Maybe it’s a small country in Africa that you had never researched or come across. And there you suddenly are. You have to function. How do you do that? Maybe you don’t speak the language. What do you do then? It’s that kind of disconcerting destabilization, which you hope works for the film, as opposed to against it.

It’s a strange, intuitive thing, casting. I’ve called it a black art. You have pressure to get someone who has enough fame to the budget that you want. And if they’re not enough on their own, you want another actor who can help fill the gaps. So there’s that pressure, which doesn’t really have anything to do with how fit this person is for the role. But the most mysterious thing, ultimately, is what you’re talking about: there you are, on set, you’ve got these people, they are in the movie. Now, is it going to work?

As Tenser, Viggo gives a grotesque performance; retching, gurgling, contorting. There’s a multiplicity to it, this sense of his body rebelling like a separate being inside him.
Exactly. And the character is also trying to find his own character. In a weird way, it’s a little like Spider, with Ralph Fiennes. This is a character who does not know how to create an identity. He has no idea who he is or what he is. In that state, how do you react to anything? How do you react to other people? You’re flailing constantly. And there’s some of that with Saul Tenser. He’s using his art to try to figure out what he is.

There’s a collision of organic and synthetic textures in Tenser’s art and life that’s also present in the design of his fleshy OrchidBed; in the skeletal BreakFaster chair that helps him eat; and in the Sark machine used during performances. How did you and production designer Carol Spier approach the look of these devices?
It starts with my imagined world. I describe these machines intricately in the script—but not to the extent of boredom, because people reading a script don’t want that much information. Carol was always saying, “What are these going to look like, and can we afford that?”

The OrchidBed that you can see Viggo in was originally going to be something called the SpiderWebBed, looking like a giant spiderweb that could move as its threads were pulled. When we tried to design it, it didn’t look good. It didn’t feel good. It didn’t work well. Mechanically, it was going to be very difficult. And so Carol and I looked at each other and said, “Okay, we have to go in a different direction.” We had to take our design of the BreakFaster chair and the Sark, then start to think more organically—I mean, a spiderweb is organic, but we needed something more fleshy. We had to redesign it, basically, after our first attempt.

Fortunately, at that point, we were doing pre-pre-production, so we had enough time to look at different designs. We got a graphic artist and said, “We need something that looks more like a fleshy plant or an orchid. Let’s start with that. Does that work?” It’s always trial and error. And you always leave yourself open to both. It’s like found art. Suddenly, you come across a picture in a book, or you look at a plant and you say, “Yes, that!” You take from everywhere, because the whole world is yours to take, you know?

In Toronto, film was not accessible. You didn’t even remotely imagine that you would make a film. I know it’s hard to believe now, because everybody thinks they can make a film, but then it would be like thinking you can make an automobile. Winter Kept Us Warm was important, because it was a student film, which did not exist as a category back then. It was a real movie, and it starred people I knew. I was shocked to see not stars from Hollywood or Ingmar Bergman movies, but my fellow students, in a real movie that looked like a movie. I suddenly thought I could have access to moviemaking. That was a shock, so that was the most influential film for me.