SOURCE: “The Film Director as Philosopher,” in Cineaste, Vol. 24, No. 4, 1999, pp. 4–9.

In the following interview, Porton talks with Cronenberg about the censorship Crash faced in the U.S. and also about the film eXistenZ—including the movie's exploration of technology and the body and the self-reflexive humor that serves as a commentary on Hollywood films.

Ever since David Cronenberg began directing films over thirty years ago, his career has been distinguished by a string of intriguing paradoxes. A brilliant student and the son of book-loving parents who scorned movies, Cronenberg soon abandoned the avant-gardist aspirations of his early films, Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), for gory, low-budget horror films—a genre not usually identified with intellectual audacity. Nevertheless, Cronenberg’s early horror films, particularly Shivers (1975), The Brood (1979), and Scanners (1980), confounded critics who maintained that supposedly schlocky genre concerns were incompatible with the kind of intellectual rigor identified...