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!
“I never have been into trends. Not now or then! I was born like that, in fact, if I see too much of something, I change it. I like independence. I love the eccentrics. Find your style and stick to it.”
“The more experience you have, the more time you’ve spent on this earth, the more regrets you accumulate. It’s normal. You can’t do everything right, nobody’s perfect. But if you think too much about that, you’re not here. You have to make some efforts to stay open-minded.”
“I think the key to having a successful career is to find the thing you do well and do it again and again for the rest of your life. But I’m interested in expanding my language as an artist and as a composer. And I try to expand it with every project.”
“I like the accidents, the things that happen by chance. I let the life come to the picture and the creativity flow.”
“I don’t think I’m ever going to stop wanting to see and experience things. I think the day that you don’t long for that anymore is the day you have kind of given up.”
“When I was training as a ballet dancer, I know that I was often tired or in pain, but you just work through it. You go home crying and your parents almost want you to quit but then you just do it. And I use that stamina now as an actress because it’s normally quite uncomfortable to make films.”
“You’re always looking for a second chance. You’re always looking to do a little bit better than you did the last time. And you hope that the readers will stay with you.”
“Right now we are 40 people working in Osteria Francescana, for 28 or 30 covers a night. So, it’s totally the opposite of a business. You cannot survive with that. But we believe in those kinds of dreams and so I keep investing, and reinvesting, and reinvesting.”
“Any kind of quest for achievement has some kind of a personal drive behind it. I'm sure some people would say that it's obviously about the ego, but on the other hand, it's not as if I'm competing against anybody. It's not as if I'm trying to outdo anybody. It's just me trying to do something to see if I can.”
“I don’t want to be pigeonholed — it’s important to keep evolving, experimenting and reinventing yourself, otherwise it’s like hitting a drum, the same note over and over again. I think you should want to change, to try different things.”
“I try not to look back. I’m looking forward. I’m worried more about what I’m going to do next week than I am what I did last week. There are too many things to do. Looking back is for everybody else.”
“It’s a huge peace to allow yourself to be vulnerable. You gain a sense of freedom and understanding and forgiveness for being human. Instead of trying to control things and make it the way you want them, you have to be more open.”
“Being creative and keeping your brain occupied is very sensible because if you don’t you die, slowly. Sometimes I feel tired and think I ought to give it up, I don’t want to just retire. I enjoy it all.”
“I just keep imagining myself thirty years from now thinking, ‘Why didn’t you take advantage of all the opportunities you had? Look at all the people you could have worked with, the roles you could have done. Go for it.’ And that’s what I am thinking.”
“It's just so boring listening to false modesty. I've worked for many, many years so I'm really enjoying that my hard work has paid off… I think you should know your worth!”
“For me it’s a lot about physicality, about how I feel. When you have these hardships or when you see someone you love in pain or you struggle, all the petty shit goes away. You are like, “I can’t believe I was worried about this other thing,” when you see what really matters.”
“I always say ideas drive the boat. Ideas are a huge, huge blessing. That’s the thing you try to catch – an idea that you fall in love with. The whole thing doesn’t come at once, but fragments of things come and these fragments form themselves into a script. It’s a process.”
“I have a moral standard of my own. I know the difference between right and wrong, I know what I feel comfortable with. And if you live up to your own moral standard, you’re going to have a more comfortable life.”
“In your life there’s a moment when the door opens and you need to walk through the door then. You can’t say then, “Well, I’ll go through it two years from now. I’ll do it, I’ll save up some money...” Because by then the door will be closed.”
“When you’re young so many things happen and it’s really hard, but you have to fight. Sometimes to get what you want you need to have a really strong past to make sure that you become a warrior and you are not scared about anything and you fight through the night.”
“Follow the things you love! Follow the things that you are intensely passionate about. Follow the things that you like to do, which often to others might seem unimportant.”
“If you have to defend something that you like, it makes you to like it even more. My parents hated the comic strips, they hated rock ‘n’ roll, and when they found out what movies I was going to they also were against that. So everything I loved I had to defend.”
“I am tireless, I’m relatively fearless. It’s hard to hear “no” all the time. It can be tough; you have to have the stomach for it.”
“To be an artist, you must start with a considerable drive; in my case it was a fierce madness, a wildness. I think that’s the mark of an artist, actually, that they are rebellious, unruly… And I was one of them myself.”
“I learned by doing. The rest is doing experiments and testing and not giving up. If something is not satisfying start again, turn everything upside down and find a new formula for printing. Everything is learning by doing.”
“I think my photographic career has been one of growing, learning, experimenting and trying different things. That was a big journey for me! It’s always a progression, it’s about challenging the idea of what photography is.”
“We're not having to run from predatory animals like we did for hundreds of thousands of years before. So now we have to make up new activities to fulfill those emotional needs. There is a certain something about the ever-present danger of death that makes living so great.”
“I think you always have to have risk when you’re creating a piece of art. Without that, I don’t understand really what the drive is to succeed. It’s the risk factor that, weirdly, keeps you feeling safe. It keeps you on your toes.”
“It’s been a lot harder than I thought it was going to be to make the films I really dream of making. It’s heartbreaking when that happens, but it’s all okay. It requires patience.”
“If you are ambitious, you are running in a tunnel that never ends. You will always find something new to go after.”
“Writing itself should be so extreme, so wild, and so much fun that it doesn’t matter whether or not you ever sell the book.”
“I act on intuition. I just let my intuition go in situations of fear. I live from my heart. I will continue doing things the way I have done them my whole life. And it gave me mostly a great time.”
“Life is struggle. Life is about struggle. You’re not supposed to be happy all the time. It’s about challenging yourself and pushing yourself, you know? You become content. That’s not happiness.”
“I’m doing things more personally than ever before because that’s what my project is based on, that’s who I am and I have never been this happy my whole life — but it was a long road to get here.”
“Failure is just something you have to go through on your own. Nothing can prepare you for it, just like a broken heart. I thought about folding, but I’m not a quitter. I’m not going to quit.”
“It’s hard to watch the misses, it’s hard to be criticized. But you’re always trying to hit it into the rafters, and damn the consequences if you don’t make it.”
“I think that when you’re a creator, you set out to create the perfect thing, but the idea of reaching that kind of creative nirvana — that’s something that you should never quite reach.”
“I think you know when you’re playing it safe, when you’re stagnating, and when you’re growing. It’s probably an ongoing thing for all of us — and a tricky balance. I try to learn at least one thing on every album, to reach out. I become my own teacher.”
“Life is confounding and who knows what’s around the next corner. But in many ways uncertainty can be exhilarating—there’s a lot of freedom in it. It would be a shame to waste our snippet of time on this planet being afraid.”
“I am less anxious to have a successful career. There were times when I was anxious — even in the past, people said, ‘You make successful films.’ But my films were never successful. Even The Godfather got a terrible review. My films did better over time.”
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”
