David Cronenberg laughed through tears as he wrote The Shrouds, his 23rd feature. Following his lifelong exploration of life and death — and how technology blurs the boundary — the film was influenced by the death of his wife of 38 years, Carolyn, who died of cancer in 2017.
The Shrouds follows eco-conscious businessman Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who mourns the death of his wife Becca (Diane Kruger) with a new technology he calls GraveTech: a shroud containing cameras that allows you to watch a loved one’s decay. The film raises the question of whether there can be life after death — not for the dead, but for those they leave behind.
Cronenberg’s films are known for a cool reserve that can play as deadpan humor, and he found that exploring intense emotions benefitted from professional detachment.
“When I was writing it, it was probably the most emotional part of it, but I was laughing too, by the way. But as you’re writing it, you are creating a fiction. So already at that point, you’re distancing yourself fromthe raw emotion of the events of your life,” he told MovieMaker when we spoke at the New York Film Festival in September.
“And then making the movie is a very technical thing. When you’re in the craft of making a film, that gives you distance. I think to make a really emotionally powerful film, ironically, you have to have distance from that emotion. You can’t be wallowing in your grief and create a good movie at the same time.
He reconnects with his emotions when screening the film for audiences.
“Suddenly, now you’re just in the audience and you have no control over it,” he said. “Now you are in some ways just an audience member, and that’s when it really hits you.”
Cronenberg’s influence is everywhere, from Julia Ducournau’s 2021 Palme d’Or-winning Titane, influenced by his 1996 Crash, to Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 The Substance, influenced by Cronenberg body horrors like The Fly and Dead Ringers. New corporate attempts to merge our bodies and technology — from Ray-Ban Meta “smart glasses” to palm-recognition payout at Whole Foods — can sometimes recall the moment in Cronenberg’s 1983 Videodrome when James Woods’ Max has a Betamax slipped into his torso.
We talked with the Canadian mastermind about aging, art, and atheism.
David Cronenberg on Holding on and Letting Go in The Shrouds
Joshua Encinias: At 82, what do you know about the body that you didn’t at the beginning of your career?
David Cronenberg: Well, there are a lot of things that can go wrong with you that you never knew about. Some of them are very subtle and strange, despite all the literature and whatever research you might have done on health and so on.
I do find that I spend a lot of time talking to my contemporaries about what’s wrong with them and what drugs they’re taking. In response to that, it’s kind of entertaining and it’s kind of horrific at the same time. But I must say, I know a lot of very young people. I have three children and four grandchildren, and everybody’s talking about that. It’s not really just an age-related thing. Everybody’s dealing with strange stuff. I think it’s partly the accessibility to medical information that you can get from the internet. It’s really unprecedented. For most people in the old days before the internet, you would depend on your doctor for any medical information.
But anyway, it’s an interesting period. I hope you’ll get to experience it.
Joshua Encinias:In The Shrouds, the sound of Becca’s hip breaking in bed is one of the most disturbing sounds I’ve heard in a long time. But it’s also beautiful, in a way, because Becca and Karsh knew something would happen to her bones if they had sex, and they chose to do it anyway.
David Cronenberg:Yes. I like that very much, and I think you’re right, quite frankly. Our sound guys, our foley guys spent a lot of time getting that right with my guidance, because I’ve experienced that myself.
Joshua Encinias:Why do you think the Cannes audience didn’t find The Shrouds veryfunny, but audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival did?
David Cronenberg: I think the audience felt that they would be disrespectful laughing at a movie about death and grief and all that. It made for a very subdued screening, which is inevitable, but nonetheless, it was a very forceful screening. I prefer the reaction that you would get in Toronto or New York.
Joshua Encinias: Why is the audience at Cannes more serious?
David Cronenberg:You have to remember, the Cannes Film Festival audience is a very strange mix of things: You do have some locals from Cannes, and you have a lot of distributors who are coming to look at your movie to see if they want to make a deal for their territory. You get a lot of celebrities who are showing up. So it’s not really a normal audience.
Add to that the language factor. The fact that the movie has two sets of subtitles, English and French, as well as the dialogue. Of course, a lot of jokes don’t translate when they’re in subtitles. The final factor is that there’s such pressure. It’s a very glamorous, prestigious event. The red carpet Cannes screening in the evening is a big deal.
Joshua Encinias: I was at The Shrouds’ New York Film Festival screening that was interrupted by climate protesters. It happened during the scene where graves were vandalized by protestors. Filmmaker Ari Aster was behind me filming the whole thing happening, and that made it feel surreal, or like guerilla marketing.
David Cronenberg:I didn’t know that. That’s great timing. I wish I thought of doing that, I really do. Even in the movie, it’s mentioned people are protesting Karsh’s graves because he’s injecting technology into the bosom of Mother Earth. It’s ironic they protested this particular movie in which the main character drives an electric car and is very climate-change conscious. I get it. Obviously, they didn’t really know what movie they were interrupting. They just wanted the publicity for their cause.
Joshua Encinias: You’ve said that when you broke out in the ’70s and ’80s, American filmmakers had to hide their artistic ambitions. Why is that?
David Cronenberg:I don’t know if it’s still the case, but American filmmakers really took a lot of strength and protection from saying, “Hey, we’re just making scary movies. Don’t take it too seriously. You don’t want to get too intellectual about it. We’re not like Jean-Luc Godard who says ‘Cinema is truth 24 times a second.’”
I think it was protecting them, but I think they did have ambition, and they did think that what they were doing was artistically interesting and strong. But it was considered, at that time, bad form to say something like that. It was considered pretentious. Whereas, it wasn’t considered pretentious to me. I just thought, “Hey, that’s the reality.”
I long ago understood film as a medium of art and that you can do powerful artistic expression through film. If you grew up watching cowboy and sword-fighting movies, which I did, you might think that film is just for kids or just for idle entertainment. And that, to some extent, was the American, Hollywood way. Whereas if you were a European, you were seeing Ingmar Bergman, who I guess in Hollywood would have been considered very pretentious.
In Toronto, I’m halfway between Hollywood and Europe physically, and I think, artistically and emotionally. I always thought that you could do both. Serious filmmakers can make genre or horror films as artistic statements. It’s been done many times in Europe, like Vampyr by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer.
Joshua Encinias: At the beginning of your career, unless you were working for Roger Corman, making low-budget horror films was not the way to build an audience. But today, most people begin their careers in the horror genre. What’s changed?
David Cronenberg:I hope I’m not misquoting him, but I think Wes Craven said that I was one of the only ones to truly break out of the genre. I guess that he, George Romero and others tried to do that and were not successful at it, and then reverted to making horror films. I had no qualms about making another horror film, but I was also confident that I had the chops to make a film that wasn’t just protected by the genre. Of course, some of them were other genres, like A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, those little gangster movies. Something like Dead Ringers or A Dangerous Method doesn’t really fall into any genre.
Joshua Encinias:You adapted William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, and Luca Guadagnino just adapted Burroughs’ Queer. We rarely see his work on screen because it’s so difficult to adapt. I’m curious if you have insight about it.
David Cronenberg:Queer is really an autobiography of Burroughs as a relatively young man. I used some of that in my adaptation of Naked Lunch. I said to William, “I really want to use your shooting of your wife and all of the stuff that happened in Mexico and some of your other works,” and he said, “I don’t separate my life from my art, so ahead.” I’m sure that Luca has a very different approach to Queer.
I’ve been criticized by some of the gay rights front for suggesting that Burroughs was not 100% gay, or something like that. But I took all of that from his own writing. The fact that it took him a while to come to terms with being gay. And yes, he did marry a woman, she was his wife, and he had a kid. My defense is to say that I’m outside of gay politics one way or the other, but in terms of the movie, I felt it was legitimate in terms of Burroughs in his life.
Joshua Encinias: What did you think of the R-rated version of Crash?
David Cronenberg: I hated the fact that there was an R-rated version because the NC-17 version is the real movie. But those were the times and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was just glad that somebody somewhere had access to the real version, and of course, eventually, that was released as well. It really reduced the number of theaters we could be in because many malls would not show NC-17 movies.
Joshua Encinias:Media theorist Marshall McLuhan influenced and inspired one of your characters in Videodrome. Being an atheist, I wonder if you’ve given thought to McLuhan’s conversion to Catholicism as important to his philosophical underpinning.
David Cronenberg:I’m absolutely sure his Catholicism was important because he was a profound thinker. He was so incredibly literate and well-read, and I’m sure that all of those things came into his understanding of things, including media. I’m sure that it all factored in. There could well be a dissertation somewhere that discusses his religion and his philosophical understandings.
Joshua Encinias:Is your atheism important to the philosophy of your work?
David Cronenberg: 100%. An existentialist-atheist understanding of life and human interaction is fundamental to everything I’ve done.
The Shrouds arrives in theaters Friday from Sideshow and Janus Films.
Main image: Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in The Shrouds.