The Talks

David Cronenberg: “You are revealing many things”
Mr. Cronenberg, people often refer to body horror films as being “Cronenbergian.” How do you feel about your surname being used as an adjective?
If it's used in the right way, I love it, of course! I mean, I used to joke that the goal of a filmmaker is to be Fellini-esque, you know, when your name means something in that way? We often say something was a very Fellini-esque experience. So if you say a film is Cronenbergian… I like that. The thing that does bother me a little bit is “body horror,” because I never use that term! It was a young journalist who invented that term and it stuck, it’s out of my hands. But I would never have thought that what I did was body horror.
How come?
I mean, I'm actually talking about the beauty, the incredible beauty of the body, even inside the body!

Elizaveta Porodina: “I want to keep the idea pure”
Ms. Porodina, I noticed that you often use the term performance when describing the process of your photography. Why is that?
Yes, that’s because to me, it’s the most authentic description of what I have encountered during the shoot, because when I collaborate with a model or an actor or a dancer, it’s never about them executing a certain pose that I had in mind for them. I never give a description of what they have to do. It’s much more loose. It’s a collaboration, a very, very open idea, it’s their reaction to the narrative or story that I tell them. They interpret it in their movement, their expression, and I'm just catching them in the moment.
A model recently described her work with you as “meeting a version of herself she hadn’t met before.”
Yes, I hope that that is how all of my shoots go! Humans are always changing and evolving and transforming, they are incredibly complex in their expression of personality. It’s almost like a crystallized Rubik's cube that keeps moving and changing and switching up, and it's never a perfect shape, but an intricate one that is really imperfect. This dissonance is what interests me. I always want to take the shape and turn it to the light in a way that the model hasn't experienced before. I want them to be in this territory of unknown, and that will feel almost unreal or magic, like they've opened a new door. It’s never been interesting to me to just reflect my ideas, that’s the whole reason I came to be a photographer rather than a painter because I was tired of being alone with myself.

Kwame Onwuachi: “I take it one day at a time”

Tilda Swinton: “We need cinema now more than ever”

Walter Salles: “Create in the moment”

Lol Crawley: “You’re attuned in that moment”

Sean Baker: “Mix it up and break the rules”

Demi Moore: “I see it only as a gain”

Rachel Morrison: “Raise your own stakes”

Charlie Mitchell: “It’s a labor of love”
