Top 20 David Cronenberg Quotes

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.

I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I’ve been sometimes compared to those other guys. We’re after different game.

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.

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.

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.

Even Hitchcock liked to think of himself as a puppeteer who was manipulating the strings of his audience and making them jump. He liked to think he had that kind of control.

Well I don’t think sex and violence have ever stopped a movie from being mainstream.

The process of making a movie has expanded in terms of effort and time for the director, doing commentaries for the DVD for example, finishing deleted scenes so they could be on the DVD, and doing things like a web blog.

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.

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.

Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.

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.

The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That’s why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies.

The filmmaking process is a very personal one to me, I mean it really is a personal kind of communication. It’s not as though its a study of fear or any of that stuff.

For me, the first fact of human existence is the human body. But if you embrace the reality of the human body, you embrace mortality, and that is a very difficult thing for anything to do because the self-conscious mind cannot imagine non-existence. It’s impossible to do.

Nah, I’ve done sex scenes before, you know, like in video.

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.

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.

I don’t mind writing so I didn’t find that difficult, it’s just a question of finding the time to do it. I kind of like the direct connection with the fans actually, it’s pretty neat.

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.