Fashion Neurosis with David Cronenberg

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0:48Hi, come in.

0:55Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, David Cronenberg. Thank you. I'm very happy finally to be here on this couch. which I've been thinking about it since we last discussed it. I'm very happy to. Can you tell me what you're wearing today and why you chose these particular clothes? Well, I'm sure you're stunned by the elegance of this outfit. And I think it would be thought of right now as kind of standard COVID wear because it's basically sweats. sweatpants and a hoodie. In this case, it's made by a Canadian company called Raining Champ. So it's nothing amazing. It's just very well made and so on. So, yes, COVID wear.

1:46But, in fact, I was wearing this before COVID, in fact, for many years. When I travel, basically, on an airplane, I really just want to be comfortable and have the possibility of warmth on a hood. And I remember really quite a few years ago, I met, happened to re-meet Christopher Walken, who I'd worked with on the Dead Zone. And he, too, was wearing sweats. And he was at Heathrow. And he was flying somewhere. We both laughed because we were both wearing the same kind of stuff. It's just comfortable. It doesn't look particularly great, but it's comfortable. and then I took to just wearing it when I was home reading and so on watching tv whatever so it's I thought it would be legitimate and honest to wear it here because lying on a couch I would be wearing this well it's quite an agile outfit as well for a director and it feels a bit ninja as well as comfortable well actually now that you mention it i in fact do wear this when i'm directing basically uh on the film set um yeah i don't even think twice about it i i see photos of all those great directors of hollywood in the early days and not just Hollywood, in Europe as well, von Sternberg.

3:19I mean, they were all dressed beautifully, formally, even to the extent of boots and cravats and all kinds of stuff. And I'm really, I think it looks beautiful and elegant, I think, of what I'm wearing. But I wouldn't be happy wearing that stuff. And I wouldn't be happy spending the time on my wardrobe because I'm pretty lazy about that. And I keep thinking I have no sense of style, really. But maybe I have at some points in my life had some sense of style. I'm not sure I have it now. I think you do, because also you have this amazing hair, and that's part of your style. Well, it's funny you say that too, because I remember at the time that I did meet Chris Walken at the airport, he said, because we hadn't seen each other for quite a while, and he said, well, we've both got our hair.

4:24That's the important thing. when I was a teenager I think the hair was more slick back what we call a duck's ass duck's tail and it wasn't until I came to London in 1965 that I grew my hair long it was King's Road and so on and I saw the Rolling Stones at the London Palladium along with the Moody Blues and Unit 4 Plus 2, I remember. But before I went to Copenhagen, in London, I started to let my hair grow long. And in Copenhagen, if you spoke English and you had long hair, you were Mick Jagger and you were very, very attractive. And so in no time I had a beautiful Danish girlfriend. And I attributed that totally to my hair, really.

5:24And yet, when I left Copenhagen, which I had to do after three months, you have to go away and come back then, I ended up in Yugoslavia meeting a girl that I had met on the boat going over who lived in Ljubljana. But old people, old men spat at me on the streets because I had long hair. And of course, Yugoslavia was in the Eastern Bloc. And so the long hair was Western decadence and was a threat. And I suppose I was probably wearing bell-bottom jeans or something like that. So it was my, I was gradually, my sense of style certainly was influenced by the 60s. corduroy double-breasted jacket um flared trousers you know so i guess i was very conscious of the style i had to match my hair i guess but when i was um 13 14 15 in toronto and it was still the sort of elvis presley style i really i recall that i was into cardigans you You know, sleeveless cardigans, buttons.

6:44I think I had, I can remember setting them out on the bed, you know, different colors, deciding which one to wear, to go to a party in somebody's rec room, a rec room that stood for recreation room, and it usually was in a basement. And there you would have, there would be girls and boys all around the same age, maybe probably from the same school, and you would be listening to records and you would be dancing together. I remember I must have had a white shirt under my cardigan because I was very excited to come home one day to find that I actually did have lipstick on my collar, which was, you know, a song as well.

7:30So I thought, well, this is sex, you know. I mean, I'm entering the world of sex. This is fabulous. lipstick on my collar that's so good what else can i tell you and you're a much revered film director drawn to the themes of unusual and as a child were you attracted to people who stood out because of extreme beauty or because of anything they were wearing yeah i was i was always i was impressed by people who took a lot of care with what they wore even now i mean you see directors like spike lee for example has his own you know he's always he's never wearing the same thing twice even his glasses are changing you know he's taking a lot of care with what he looks like and what he wears um i've never been really that i've been somewhat conscious of it but not really uh it's never been really a huge part of my life i've never been compelled to really spend that much time on it um but yes i mean even when i did the movie crash it was the the difference between the jg ballard book which was very tough and in some ways deliberately ugly yeah but i could not resist the beauty of my actors i mean i think that's one of the things that i did that was quite different from the novel yeah um and jg ballard Jim really he loved the movie and defended it at Cannes when it was being attacked by hundreds of journalists who were attacking it I was quite shocked at how extreme the reaction was there was a Norwegian journalist who got up and said not unlike the English uh journalists who said that this was a movie beyond the bounds of depravity and he was a well-known uh journalist film critic and I can't remember his name right now, but we thought that would make a great poster, you know, beyond the bounds of depravity.

9:36Ballard, the Norwegian said, took a different tack on attacking. He said, you've betrayed the book because it's not the book. It's not as good as the book. It's not as extreme as the book. It's not this, it's not that. And Ballard took the mic and said, well, as a matter of fact, it's actually quite a bit better than the book. And of course, the journalist just had to sort of quietly sit down because there was a ballad right next to me telling him that my movie was better than his book, which was an incredibly generous thing, of course, for him to say. But I thought that it came to me when I was first adapting Stephen King's novel, The Dead Zone, which was my first adaptation, that to be faithful to the book, you must betray the book in some way.

10:29And with Crash, I think it was with the beauty of the lighting and the actors and actresses, that was my betrayal, but it was still being faithful somehow. No, it's so interesting that because often a bad book makes a good film and a good book is harder to make into a film because its complexities are more difficult to sort of simplify in a way. Yes. But I thought... The trick I felt with The Dead Zone, for example, was that the audience who might have read the book and liked it and revered Stephen King would feel that the movie was the book in its tone and so on. And they would forget about the details of character and so on, which in fact I had changed.

11:22So in a way you're faithful to the tone of the book, the vibration of the book. If it's a good book, you're never going to, there's no such thing as a translation really. The media are so totally different that the art forms, there's no such thing as a translation that way. So it's a reinvention, a recreation of something, of the book. I'm now in the position of working on a script based on my own novel, Consumed. I've written one novel and I'm working on a script, so I'm adapting my own book. And yes, I'm going to have to betray the book, definitely. I'm going to be very vicious. I am vicious.

12:12I'm brutal. I'm definitely brutal. What was the first thing that you wore that you knew would invite disapproval? Did it make you feel free or even more self-conscious? I was a motorcycle enthusiast. And at one point I had a beautiful Ducati Italian motorcycle 750 V-Twin. And I was wearing leathers. I was wearing motorcycle leathers. As it turned out, there were bell-bottom leather pants, which is not really normal motorcycle wear. But motorcycle boots, motorcycle jacket. There was the Marlon Brando movie, The Wild One, which featured a sort of motorcycle gang outlaw kind of jackets. And this was not what I was wearing.

13:10I was wearing something that was closer to what you would wear if you were racing a motorcycle. And I did. I raced motorcycles and cars. Wow. I can't say that I thought it would meet disapproval, but it wasn't normal kind of wear, even for a motorcyclist.

13:34And I felt very comfortable in it, even though it was odd. And at the time, this was when I had returned from Copenhagen and was one of the, I was quite alone really in having shoulder length hair at that point. So I had this motorcycle gear and this shoulder length hair. and at that time in Toronto, if you were going to grow your hair long, and I was one of the first, I can prove it because I have a photo of the graduating class from University of Toronto in 1967 and I'm the only male who has showed the length of hair. Wow. I look like a kind of ugly woman. but um you you couldn't go to a normal barber because they would cut your hair yeah more than you wanted you couldn't trust them you know there was a big struggle it was a big turning point and for a while I had to cut my own hair and I did not do a great job of it so it ended up being a kind of prince valiant cut you know like bangs and like long hair it was not very attractive But at least the hair stayed long.

14:53So that was me in my motorcycle gear. That's probably about as antisocial as I got. And it wasn't all that antisocial, really, but it was odd. There's one other moment of disapproval vis-a-vis wardrobe that I haven't thought of for a long time. And I'm just thinking of it now. When I was in high school at Harvard Collegiate in Toronto, we were required at the time to join the cadets, Army cadets, every once in a while, like every week. We would have to wear these kind of cadet clothes. It was sort of pseudo Army clothes, very scratchy and itchy and uncomfortable. And then we would go to the armories, which was a place in Toronto that no longer exists.

15:49It was a huge building that had been built during the war. And it was called the armories. And it's where the weaponry was kept and ammunition and where soldiers, young soldiers would go to train. And we were required to go there. And it was the Queen's Own Rifles. That's what it said on the badge, Queen's Own Rifles. don't ask i have no idea but um it was all khaki kind of you know itchy khaki pants and trousers and and jacket zip up button jacket and um we um we would we would take training with firearms we were shooting rifles they were 22s firing at targets all these high school kids And I was one of them.

16:43And honestly, it was kind of interesting to it was exciting to be shooting a rifle in especially, you know, the the gun culture of the US did not exist in Canada. So you didn't know anybody who had guns or shotguns, except maybe in the country, shotguns for farmers and so on. So it was quite interesting to be in this army uniform firing these guns. but i we were left to provide our own shoes and my shoes were white bucks oh wow um you know the elvis song blue suede shoes well these were white suede shoes basically and in the armories which is very dimly lit and everybody wearing this drab olive green kind of army stuff my white box shone like beacons and the we had a teacher at Harvard Collegiate who was also had been in the army and would appear at these training sessions wearing a kilt his name was Stapleton Caldecott and at a certain point and he was very tough at a certain point he yelled out to me and of course everybody could hear this echoing and the armories he said Cronenberg what are those things on your feet I said well the white bucks sir he said never wear those here again and I didn't but I was rather proud to carry the banner of because to me white Bucks was, it was, I have to admit, it was more associated with the singer Pat Boone, who was certainly not an idol of mine.

18:33I associated it with Elvis, even though I don't think he ever actually wore white bucks. But he did sing about blue suede shoes. So that was the connection. Anyway, that was public humiliation, although I didn't really feel quite humiliated under the circumstances. But there it was. Support for today's show is brought to you by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. I'm building a real budget for fashion neurosis. I opened Claude, dropped in last year's costs and sponsor forecasts, and asked it to help me think, not write for me. It turned my chaos into a zero-based plan, a model best and worst case revenue.

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19:29Your films are often about threat. How come you're so drawn to that? Was there something in your early life that reminded you of the experience of that feeling? I really had a very lovely childhood in Toronto with wonderful parents. My father was a writer, my mother was a pianist, musician, and her brother was a violinist. So there was always music and books in our house. And they were just very sweet people. So I can't say that I grew up feeling threatened in any way other than what a normal kid who had a street life in Toronto would have, which is certainly not, it was not a dangerous or difficult street either, Crawford Street that I lived on.

20:26But I really think in terms of my films, I was just always interested in this sort of outsider. But it's really George Bernard Shaw. You know, conflict is the essence of drama. So there's going to be conflict. Somebody's going to be threatened by something or somebody. and it just seemed very natural to me to tell a story that somehow was scary.

21:00I can't really think of it. It didn't feel sort of, in other words, it didn't feel autobiographical to me. Yeah. And do you think extreme arousal is a way of handling fear, almost like a vaccination? Who's calling me?

21:20that was paulo branco no i just oh my god i don't know why he's calling me i have no idea out of the blue i'll call him back isn't that funny that is funny our mutual how we met through paulo branco he obviously had some sort of instinct that this was a good moment must be in some ways he maybe has a project for me who knows well my spiel my basic spiel that I give whenever I'm talking to film students or whatever is that for me I'm an atheist I'm an existentialist maybe and as is the mantra in my second last film Crimes of the Future body is reality yeah and i really think what we are is a body and um when the body ends we end and that's the reality even though we try to avoid accepting that because it's a very difficult thing to accept your non-existence um and so and and also what is it that we photograph as filmmakers it's the human body i mean that is our subject face but also body is you know even the voice is really body so um obviously sex is immediately um a very uppermost in my thoughts when i'm making a movie even if a scene isn't overtly sexual um and it's it's a connection with the most primordial life force and i feel that it is um it's always there as a compelling connection to what is most basic to human existence as a body so for me it's no surprise that there should be sexuality uh a sexual element to um every every interaction really yeah um of my characters whether it's overt or not and uh to me it's just natural and normal it's not i mean people there's sometimes people say why are you obsessed with sex for example and i say it's it's not an obsession it's just an observation i mean i i see it it's evident So that's my take on all of that.

24:09And there is the whole human body becomes aroused in the face of danger. It's so strange. I was just before I came here, I'm reading an article. I think it was on the BBC website even. that was about people, very rare, maybe only 400 cases, of people who have lost the ability to experience fear because something is happening to their amygdala. And it was a discussion of how that plays out. God, how interesting. I think the fear arousal and the sexual arousal, It's sort of a stimulation of, it's an entire bodily neural response to anything that's threatening, that's fear-inducing, that's dangerous, and that's sexual.

25:05It's all interconnected. Yeah. So that's my approach, my understanding of that aspect of human life. Body horror is a term often attached to your work. and there's a lot of body horror in fashion but it's about body shame body horror in fashion is body shame you're very good at showing beauty and how do you approach that well i like that idea of um fashion body horror um i haven't really thought of it that way um yeah i mean I mean, there's just infinite ways that the body exists. I mean, can we say beauty is in the eye of the beholden? I'm not sure.

26:07Yeah, I don't know how to answer your question. I don't know. So I do find beauty in nature, and I do feel that the human body is part of nature. And there are just an infinite number of possibilities of human life on this planet. I always felt, even as a kid, when people were thinking, you know, science fiction, you must go to another planet to discover all these amazing life forms. And I thought I was an insect freak. I loved insects and animals in general. And I thought, well, we have the most incredible, bizarre animal life right here on the planet. It's as alien as you could possibly want.

26:57And, of course, we're still discovering it. There's so much of life on Earth that has not been discovered. And it's all, you know, you're even taking the possibilities of sexuality amongst insects, and it's just become so bizarre and so strange and so unearthly, even though it's ultimately totally earthly. And I just see that as all being beautiful because it's an expression of the life force, which frankly, it would not surprise me if there is no other life in the universe. really than on this planet i know there's always constant searching for it and i know there are many universes and many galaxies but it's just so unlikely that it should come together that it is and it's not a matter of arrogance it's a it's thinking oh well we're the only life you know intelligent life um it's just so complex i i think it's quite possible that we are alone in the universe uh which is another reason to not destroy the earth i don't want to get into that but um so uh i'm sure i haven't answered your question it's a great answer even if you haven't and and hair colors in your film seems to have a significance almost like a moral slant and I wondered why Debbie Harry was a brunette in Videodrome.

28:28Yeah, why was Debbie Harry a brunette in Videodrome? I think that, I didn't ask her to change her hair color. She was so good. I mean, when I met her, when we were thinking of her for that movie, that was her hair color. And I didn't, it didn't, I wasn't really trying to cast Blondie. I was trying to cast an actual character. But, you know, it's funny. I haven't thought of it until this very moment because it just seemed right for her and natural for her as that character. And, in fact, I suppose if we had discussed it, I would have said to her, I'd prefer you not to be blonde. Really? Gosh. Just because I don't want your stage persona to interfere with your development of this character as an actress she was awfully good i mean she's a brilliant actress she was not very experienced with film acting i think she'd only done one movie called union city before that which i had seen her in of course and um i did talk to her about it and there and there were moments on the set when i really had to say um i i remember distinctly saying debbie you're giving too much you know the camera is right here you're not performing to for an audience that's a thousand feet away from you you don't have to do that you know bring it way way down way way down she said you mean everything that i learned about performing on stage is is not valid i said it's worse than not valid is destructive you have to you have to be a film you have to be a film actress you know um and i mean and she understood it completely and and was quite able to do it but it was it was a discussion though that we had to have in your film crash the wife katherine was a blonde it gave her an almost virginal quality though she wasn't she was elegant did you aim to set her apart with these clothes and i i wondered did you decide what she was going to wear well in each movie um my my sister denise um who died a while ago um was a dancer was a ballet dancer and uh when she retired from dancing she became a costume designer and i worked with her on many movies and I think maybe The Fly was the first movie that she worked on.

31:10It's always a collaboration, hair, clothing, everything. It's not like I have, I don't do storyboards. I don't have, it's not like I have a vision of an entire movie and then you go out and try to, with your crew, realize that vision. It's very much an evolution and a collaboration. and with the actors, of course, as well. So it's finding the way. I mean, in the case of Crash, there was my script that was based on the J.G. Bell novel. That was our key to everything, but, of course, neither one of those things, as precise as my script was, it's still not actually creating the objects or the clothes or the characters, there's still a lot to be discovered.

32:02And of course, whatever you as a writer might have described in your screenplay, as soon as the actor is there, everything changes because now you have a living human being and that reality is much more forceful than whatever you wrote on the page. So, yeah, I mean, Fellini at one point, I adored Fellini. At one point he wrote that he said, you know, you're auditioning the actors and you are certain that you want this six foot five athletic, handsome character, actor for this role. And then in comes someone who's about five foot two and not handsome. And he is so charismatic that he completely takes over your imagination for this character.

32:53And you go with that actor instead. And in a way, it's the same thing from the script and the novel to the reality of the actors. You know, once you cast somebody like James Spader, who was quite a beauty at that time, very sort of androgynous beauty, in fact. Yeah. And that does not really match the character from the novel or from my screenplay. But it's so compelling, you know, that you go then with his beauty. and the same with the actresses. I seem to recall not feeling that anybody in the novel was beautiful. Yeah. And yet, once again, as I think we've just discussed, I was seduced by the beauty of the actors who came to audition, and I knew that I needed that for the film, and it was going to change the whole development of the film.

33:49So I don't think I really asked any actor or actress to change hair color, but the shaping of the hair in concert with the wardrobe was, as I say, a collaboration amongst the makeup people, costume people. and of course the lighting the camera work the lighting can change a lot in terms of the look of the clothes and the hair and of course the face so it was a collaboration and that's exciting I mean it would be very boring that's why I don't do storyboards I like the spontaneity of the discovery with your crew it really is a collaboration Yeah. In Crash, Rosanna Arquette plays a woman very disabled from an accident.

34:45She wears fishnet stockings and leather skirts, not clothes associated with a victim. Did this feel like a big risk to take? It's interesting that while we were being attacked for Crash, one of the attacks came from, I think he was someone who had a TV show as well, English we're talking about, who said, in describing how disgusting the movie was, he said, it even shows dismayable people having sex, he said. And, of course, he was suddenly on the wrong side of the fence at that point because he was then counterattacked by groups of the disabled who said that this movie, Crash, was the first movie they ever saw that showed the disabled having a real sex life and being sexually attractive.

35:45And we were very conscious of that when we were making the character that Rosanna Arkad played. that she was a sexual being and not only capable of sex but wanting sex and being good at sex and that she finds in the character of Jim Ballard played by James Spader someone quite willing to play sex with her however needed to be played and however she wanted to be played so we were never worried about it um i mean honestly i wasn't worried about anything when i made the movie because i i was really surprised that it became a scandal at can uh in in 1996 it was um uh because it was based on a 20 year old novel that by jim ballard was very well known and very accepted.

36:46I didn't really think it was going to cause much of a scandal at all. So I wasn't worried about it. It just seemed obvious to me that that's the way the character should be played. Yeah. And we went with it with full strength, no compromises. And of course, Rosanna was beyond willing to play that. Scars are a recurring feature in your films. In your most recent film, The Shrouds, the wife returns in Vincent Cassell's dreams with amputations and scars, and even the AI personal assistant suddenly appears on the screen naked with amputations and scars. Are scars almost like clothes or like underwear?

37:35I don't really think of scars as being like clothes or underwear because you can't take them off. Yeah. I have a few scars from motorcycle racing, and they're still right there. Shoulder separation, you know, over the handlebars. So, no, I think the scarring is a much more intimate, physical, it's a transformation, and you can't discard it. you have to find a way to absorb it and to accept it and to embody it. It is, of course, very physical, very much a bodily thing. So I don't think of it as being decorative at all, although obviously there are cultures in which scarification is decorative and does have ritual significance and possibly religious significance as well.

38:33but not in my movies. Yeah. The Shroud seems to me to be a deeply romantic film, which you made after the death of your wife. In it, Karsh says, I lived in Becca's body. It was the only place I felt alive. It was the meaning and purpose of the world. You make the story of sex so deep in your films. When people talk about meaningless sex, can sex ever be meaningless? I don't really think there's such a thing as meaningless sex, actually, in terms of, you know, the place that you go when you're experiencing sex. I don't think it's meaningless. I think it's very meaningful, although obviously it can be undertaken in a very superficial kind of way.

39:33But in terms of art, in terms of my movies, I don't think there's, there is no meaningless sex. In fact, most of my sex scenes are also dialogue scenes and particularly in The Shrouds. I did have a critic, a critic I know and who should have known better, but she did say there's a scene where they're, you know, Vincent Cassil and Diane Kruger are having sex, and it just goes on and on and on, and they're just grunting and moaning, and it just goes on and on. And I eventually got to meet her again and talk about it, and I said, you know, those were not grunts and moans. They were having a conversation.

40:23That is a dialogue scene. Yeah. And she had completely missed it. I think she had a hearing problem. although I should know because of my own. And she had not heard the dialogue that was being spoken in the scene. So for her, it was a meaningless sex scene. And of course, it's a very meaningful sex and dialogue scene. So in my movies, the sex is not superficial. It's not meaningless. It's extremely important. and I think that the sexual experience in most people's lives is quite important, is quite deep. Yeah, it's interesting. It's something that people so often say, I suppose, when they're caught out.