David Cronenberg on Filmmakers Being Inspired by Him: ‘That Pleases Me’

David Cronenberg was awarded the Norman Jewison Career Achievement Award at the Toronto International Film Festival’s sixth annual TIFF Tribute Awards on Saturday, September 8.

The award recognizes Canadians in the film industry who have made a global impact with their careers. Cronenberg’s “willingness to explore unconventional themes and his innovative storytelling continues to shape contemporary cinema worldwide,” as the festival stated.

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At the TIFF Tribute Awards, Cronenberg weighed in on the use of artificial intelligence in his own movies. “Well, I’ve actually used AI in my filmmaking for years,” he told IndieWire.

“You know, it’s just not something that people normally are aware of. But when you’re correcting the color, when you’re manipulating your film’s images, it’s a form of AI already. It’s not something surprising in a way to me,” he continued.

Speaking with Variety earlier this year, he was asked about AI’s place in filmmaking today. “You can imagine a screenwriter sitting there, writing the movie, and if that person can write it in enough detail, the movie will appear. The whole idea of actors and production will be gone. That’s the promise and the threat of artificial intelligence,” he said. “Do we welcome that? Do we fear that? Both. It’s like nuclear fission, it’s ferocious and terrifying and it’s also incredibly useful. So, what do we do? I don’t know. I have no idea.”

On the current landscaping of horror, body horror specifically, Cronenberg told us that “there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on.”

“I must say there’s a lot of, and of course, some of them are filmmakers who have said that they’ve been influenced by me,” he said to IndieWire. “So that’s kind of interesting and it makes me feel good. That pleases me.”

He shared that he has seen Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” as well as “Titane,” adding that he met the latter film’s director, Julia Ducournau, at TIFF, actually. Looking back on his entire filmography, when asked if one film stands out as the most violent, Cronenberg said, “No, not really” and left it at that.

In David Ehrlich’s Cannes review of the his latest, “The Shrouds,” he writes that it “is a grief story as only David Cronenberg would ever think to shoot one: Sardonic, unsentimental, and often so cadaverously stiff that the film itself appears to be suffering from rigor mortis, as if its images died at some point along their brief journey from the projector to the screen. And really, what else would you expect?”

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