Cronenberg Quotes & Sayings

I'm very anti-religious because religion tends to disembody you. — David Cronenberg

The only authentic literature of the modern era is the owner's manual. — David Cronenberg

I see technology as being an extension of the human body. — David Cronenberg

But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult - and it's very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder. — David Cronenberg

I also think the relationship I have with my audience is a lot more complex than what Hitchcock seemed to want his to be - although I think he had more going on under the surface as well. — David Cronenberg

For her, the message from Romme, the love letter's message, was: Cut off your left breast, that rustling bag of insects, because if you don't, those insects will spread their insect religion to your entire body. — David Cronenberg

I have learned the password of two of my neighbors' wireless home networks, so you can use theirs if you like. Be a parasite on their network. Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. Connect to anywhere in the world you like. — David Cronenberg

To me it's very obvious there are huge cultural differences between Americans and Canadians. But a lot of what we are is American. — David Cronenberg

It was apparent to me that religion was an invented thing, a wish-fulfillment thing, a fantasy thing. It was much more real, dangerous, to accept that mortality was the end for you as an individual. As an atheist, I don't believe in an afterlife, so if you're thinking of murder, if your subject is murder, then that's a physical act of absolute destruction because you're ending something, a body, that is unique. That person never existed before, will never exist again, will not be karmically recycled, will not go to heaven, therefore I take it seriously. — David Cronenberg

I suppose a good director is like a teacher. I think that someone like David Cronenberg was very much like a teacher, because there's an openness, but a certain set of rules of behavior, and a certain conduct expected. But there's an atmosphere that's relaxed and conducive to exploration, and that is created by someone like Cronenberg. — Viggo Mortensen

When I am creating art, I have absolutely no social responsibility. It's like dreaming. — David Cronenberg

Asians love schoolgirls in uniforms. They say the Japanese can buy used schoolgirl panties from vending machines. And from shops hidden away in apartment buildings. Burusera shops, they call them. The smell is very important; it adds value to the commodity. I wonder how Marx would have dealt with that? — David Cronenberg

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. — David Cronenberg

I like being a part of David Cronenberg's world, I feel very at home there — Robert Pattinson

Do I shock you? We are very playful here. It's a good tone for an operating theatre. It is a theatre, after all. — David Cronenberg

She pulled the phone back to look at her photo, then, drawn by its ruthless intensity, kissed the image. Her lips left semen smears on the screen. Commodity fetishism at its finest. — David Cronenberg

Global digital parasitism is the new Trotskyism. — David Cronenberg

The widest, most open, most accepting aperture, the one providing the narrowest, most demanding depth of field. She and Naomi had joked about the sexuality of camera apertures, that they needed to write a woman's monograph on the symbolism and cultural relevance of the mechanics of image-making as it related to sex, so that, for example, stopping down the fixed 35mm lens's diaphragm - elegantly composed of nine leaf-shutter blades - to a tight f/16 would be the equivalent of executing a Kegel pelvic floor exercise. — David Cronenberg

I don't think there's anything man wasn't meant to know. There are just some stupid things that people shouldn't do. — David Cronenberg

The internet is now a forum for public prosecution. — David Cronenberg

Well I don't think sex and violence have ever stopped a movie from being mainstream. — David Cronenberg

I'm just observing the world. I was born into it, like you were, and then I found out there were some really disturbing aspects to being alive, like the fact that you weren't going to be alive forever - that bothered me. — David Cronenberg

Since 'A Dangerous Method,' I've had meetings with everyone from J.J. Abrams to the producers of 'Drive.' And they all have the same thing in common; they say: 'Wow you worked with Cronenberg.' He gave me instant film cred. — Sarah Gadon

Mischievous smile. I remember reading about Calvin Klein's daughter. Every time she pulled down a lover's pants, she was confronted by her father's name on the band of his underwear. A total sex killer. — David Cronenberg

It had been Ari who proposed the term Kimunism for the strange form of xenophobic nationalism practiced under the Kim family dynasty; it was not really socialism, nor was it communism in even the Maoist form, despite the heaviness of its cult of personality. Ari had felt that it was the severity and chimeric plasticity of the system, so provocative, that made it appealing to French intellectuals. — David Cronenberg

You know, those unboxing videos you see everywhere on YouTube. They are the epitome of consumerist fetishism. — David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg's mainstream Crash comes out of absolutely nowhere to win something called Best Alternative Adult Feature Film. — David Foster Wallace

You start selling the movie before you make it. — David Cronenberg

Long live the New Flesh! — David Cronenberg

If anyone is tweeting right now, I'm not pulling a knife on David Cronenberg! — Mark Kingwell

Reality is neurology, and is not absolute. — David Cronenberg

On to some juicy French philosophical sex-killing murder-suicide cannibal thing. You?"
"Still the controversial Hungarian breast-cancer radioactive seed implant treatment thing. I adore you."
"Je t'adore aussi. Call me. Bye."
"Bye. — David Cronenberg

Arosteguy poured more sake for both of them. "I love warm sake. How brilliant to create a drink at body temperature." He shook his head. "The Japanese. Feared by the West for so long, and now fading into their beloved sunrise. Or sunset. First militarily, then economically, and now, only gastronomically. And I need to become Japanese at a time when everyone wants to become Chinese. The Chinese call the Japanese 'the little people,' I've been told. That could have to do with the miniaturization of island species. I must do a study. — David Cronenberg

I don't have a moral plan, I'm a Canadian. — David Cronenberg

We're all photojournalists now. It's no longer enough just to write. — David Cronenberg

It's interesting about diseases, how they peak and tank. — David Cronenberg

Many wonderful, creative people have won Oscars, so if you win one, you're in their company. — David Cronenberg

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult. — David Cronenberg

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. — David Cronenberg

If the audience lets that stuff wash over them, you know - almost like music, rather than dialogue - and doesn't fight it, then they'll have a much easier time rather than being sort of frustrated and confused otherwise. But if you get in the right state of mind it really does work quite well, — David Cronenberg

For one shining moment, you were the king of fear, she said. — David Cronenberg

That's rule number one for a photographer, isn't it? Fill your frame? — David Cronenberg

I like Cronenberg's early work; his '80s films had all these weird, amorphous flesh objects in them. — Autre Ne Veut

There's a book called Mummy and the people actually seem to have become addicted to mummy dust. And mummy dust was somehow made from people who've died of the most loathsome diseases. It's too bad that [David] Cronenberg didn't see this book, see I only saw it after the film was made. It might have been of interest to him. — William S. Burroughs

Actually, I can't stand watching violent scenes in films; I avoid watching horror films. I don't tend to watch action films mainly because I find them boring, but I watch the films of David Cronenberg and Martin Scorsese, usually in a state close to having a heart attack. I'm a complete coward. I make violent films as a result of my sensitivity to violence - in other words, my fear of violence. — Park Chan-wook

Nah, I've done sex scenes before, you know, like in video. — David Cronenberg

Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon. — David Cronenberg

The camera also took a moment or two to linger on Chase's athletic breasts, her erect nipples, and her pubic hair, which was dirty blond and luxuriant and not at all in the modern prepubescent shaven-porn idiom which Naomi loathed; — David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg is the most provocative, original, and consistently excellent North American director of his generation. — J. Hoberman

At a certain point the audience shouldn't worry about catching every word and understanding every twist and turn, because at a certain point that's pretty much impossible. — David Cronenberg

For me, it's just a normal artistic endeavour to explore the dark side. Certainly, I'm not alone in it. Artists generally don't like to accept the version of reality that society and culture hand them. They want to know what's really going on. So you're always looking in the ceilings, under the floorboards and behind the walls, trying to find the mechanisms, the structures, and the truth. I find that often leads you into some dark places. — David Cronenberg

The way a child discovers the world constantly replicates the way science began. You start to notice what's around you, and you get very curious about how things work. How things interrelate. It's as simple as seeing a bug that intrigues you. You want to know where it goes at night; who its friends are; what it eats. — David Cronenberg

It had occurred to her that the ultimate expression of Tom Wolfe's 'saturation reporting' was possibly at hand: the copycat murder of the journalist, with the murderer finishing the piece and filing it, complete with photographs and videos. — David Cronenberg

Listen to the crickets, she said, nodding sagely as she spoke, understanding everything. — David Cronenberg

All stereotypes turn out to be true. This is a horrifying thing about life. All those things you fought against as a youth: you begin to realize they're stereotypes because they're true. — David Cronenberg

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do; They confuse fantasy with reality. — David Cronenberg

I did the David Cronenberg film, A History of Violence, with Viggo Mortensen and I played a real sociopath. For the next seven years, I played the psycho-of-the-week. — Greg Bryk

I'm simply a nonbeliever and have been forever ... I'm interested in saying, 'Let us discuss the existential question. We are all going to die, that is the end of all consciousness. There is no afterlife. There is no God. Now what do we do.' That's the point where it starts getting interesting to me. — David Cronenberg

Of course for many years directors have had to go on the road with their movies and promote them and I've done that since the beginning. So that's not new but the forms of it are different such as with the internet. — David Cronenberg

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. — David Cronenberg

I like to laze around. I think that's a huge part of creativity. You have to let your mind relax and then another part of your brain suddenly connects with the solution you're trying to find. — David Cronenberg

If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it's obviously going to be a disaster. — David Cronenberg

I like a twisted sense of humour. On 'A History of Violence,' David Cronenberg and I would be doing the grimmest scenes and laugh a lot. — Viggo Mortensen

Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos. — David Cronenberg

Cosmopolis is the movie of my life. I didn't consider myself an actor before, even if I had 10 years of acting behind me. I always felt like a fraud, and inappropriate. I doubt a lot. David Cronenberg gave me confidence in myself. He changed my way of acting and thinking in this industry. — Robert Pattinson

David Cronenberg's 'Maps to the Stars' is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster. — Steve Erickson

But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be. — David Cronenberg

She took his hands in hers and placed them on her breasts. They ache a bit, you know. After all, they've been penetrated by two hundred and forty tiny titanium pellets. Like asteroids and a cosmic dust shower. — David Cronenberg

Consciousness is the original sin: consciousness of the inevitability of our death. — David Cronenberg

To not be photographed daily, even by oneself, to not be recorded and videoed and dispersed into the turbulent winds of the net, was to court nonexistence. — David Cronenberg

I'm not very well organized unless I'm plugged into a structure like the opera or a movie. When I'm doing that, I have to be organized. — David Cronenberg

More blood! More blood! — David Cronenberg

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? — David Cronenberg

The desire to be loved is really death when it comes to art. — David Cronenberg

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

Cronenberg's a lot of fun, and that a lot of people don't know watching his movies. He doesn't take himself seriously. He's still reinventing himself. — Vincent Cassel

Technology is us. There is no separation. It's a pure expression of human creative will. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe. I'm rather sure of that. — David Cronenberg

You need language for thought, and you need language to anticipate death. There is no abstract thought without language and no anticipation. I think the anticipation of death without language would be impossible. — David Cronenberg

As a filmmaker, I ask questions but don't have answers. Moviemaking is a philosophical exploration. I invite the audience to come on the journey and discover what they think and feel. — David Cronenberg

It's my conceit that perhaps some diseases perceived as diseases that destroy a well-functioning machine actually turn it into a new but still well-functioning machine with a different purpose. The AIDS virus: look at it from its point of view. Very vital, very excited, really having a good time. It's really a triumph if you're a virus. See the movies from the disease's point of view. You can see why they would resist all attempts to destroy them. These are all cerebral games, but they have emotional correlatives as well. — David Cronenberg

For example I don't work with William Hurt the same way that I will work with Viggo. They're different guys and they work in different ways. So a good sensitive director has his general style and technique and personality that he uses but you don't impose that on the actors. — David Cronenberg

The arrogance of the intellectual. The delusion that we have more balls in the brain to juggle than most people. — David Cronenberg

You did not get a very good review from Dr. Trinh," he wrote. "She was very quick to contact me and to let me know that I should stay away from you because you obviously wanted to do damage to the memory of our dearest Celestine. She also said that she did not feel that you were very intelligent, or maybe you were just American, she's not sure... — David Cronenberg

My understanding of life is very existential. I think that we are our bodies. There's nothing else, and when we die, that's it. No afterlife. — David Cronenberg

Working with David Cronenberg or Darren Aronofsky or even Steven Soderbergh isn't really like a typical Hollywood movie. These are true artists, and have a certain amount of freedom when they work, and they're more like independent filmmakers making their way through big studios. — Vincent Cassel

Sex is the invention of a very clever venereal disease. — David Cronenberg

Do you remember when you found out you wouldn't live forever? People don't talk about this, but everybody had to go through it because you're not born with that knowledge. — David Cronenberg

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists. — William Hurt

You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally. — David Cronenberg

I can't imagine a life without humor. Especially if you have an existential understanding of life, you must acknowledge the absurdity of it all. — David Cronenberg

You're seeing me develop, not only as a filmmaker if you've seen my earlier films, but you're seeing me kind of learn how to be a human, how my philosophy has evolved. — David Cronenberg

The artist's duty to himself is a combination of immense responsibility and immense irresponsibility. I think those two interlock. — David Cronenberg

So pathetic," he said, with a grunt. "So sad. Such a cliche. You can be so fond of cinema, of world literature, the classics, but then, when you find yourself playing out a classic scene, you don't feel ennobled, linked to that greatness. You feel...pathetic. — David Cronenberg

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. — David Cronenberg

So not only can you not imagine dying, you can't really imagine existence before you were born. — David Cronenberg

When I was preparing for the film for tree weeks, with David Cronenberg, I had a lady friend come over. — John Lone

Japanese medical people are traditionally very strange and creepily poetic. — David Cronenberg

We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things. — David Cronenberg

I think film is a director's medium and the good filmmakers that I like tell the darker stories. Therefore, I'm always inclined to follow people like David Cronenberg. — Naomi Watts

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. — David Cronenberg