By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The fear of death, and what David Cronenberg once called “the awareness of death,” has long been a focal point of the Canadian auteur’s cinema; now he has made a film dealing with what happens afterward. RUE MORGUE got the chance to speak with Cronenberg about his latest chilling vision, THE SHROUDS.
Opening in New York and Los Angeles this Friday, April 18 and nationwide April 25 from Sideshow and Janus Films, and hitting Canadian theaters on the 25th from Sphere Films, THE SHROUDS stars Vincent Cassel as technological entrepreneur Karsh. He has created a burial system called GraveTech, in which the deceased are interred in black, leathery shrouds while their living loved ones can view them through hi-tech markers. Karsh has personal reasons for coming up with this invention: He wants to observe his late wife Becca (Diane Kruger), who has succumbed to cancer. When a number of those markers are vandalized, Karsh becomes obsessed with finding out who was responsible, assisted by Maury (Guy Pearce), the ex-husband of Becca’s sister Terry (also Kruger). As always in Cronenberg’s oeuvre, the writer/director uses a science fiction/thriller framework to explore complex human emotions, digging deep into themes of mortality and grief. (You can see more of this interview in RUE MORGUE issue #224, which goes on sale May 1.)
This is clearly a very personal film for you, so how did you come to tell this story?
I’m not sure there’s a rational series of connections that would lead to that. Actually, when my wife died in 2017, I really thought I wouldn’t make any more films at all. I thought I was pretty much finished. And then I was talked into making CRIMES OF THE FUTURE, which was an old script that I had written, by my producer, Robert Lantos. And then I saw that I did enjoy making a film and realized that I wasn’t finished, so what was I going to do next? And of course, the thing that was most on my mind was still the loss of my wife, so it seemed like an obvious thing for me to address that in some way.
But totally realistic fiction is not my forte. Obviously, when you’re dealing with humans who are recognizable in a way, you are making realistic fiction. But as I’ve said before, as soon as you start to write, it all becomes fiction. At that point, you’re inventing everything, and your characters are fictional people, which is what you want. This is not like Salman Rushdie writing KNIFE, which is an account of his latest catastrophe, in which getting all the details exactly as they happened is part of the point. In my case, that’s not what I was doing.
Karsh is kind of styled to look like you, and he’s sort of a metaphor for yourself in the sense that he’s giving people a window into death, in a sense, as your films often have. Can you talk about that side of it?
Well, people tend to not believe me when I say that I didn’t cast Vincent because of his hair. Somehow they think that he looks exactly like me [in THE SHROUDS], and really, we don’t look anything alike. Before I cast Vincent, I was considering many other actors, so there wasn’t really a question of trying to find somebody who resembled me. To me, that was not an issue. So it really is kind of, I guess, a happy accident. I know people may not believe it, but it’s true.
Vincent, though, really liked the idea that he was playing me. It was a good thing for him creatively, artistically, as an actor. So he did model himself after me. Even more than the hair, it was his desire to–you know, he often plays tough guys, gangsters, lowlifes. He tends in general to talk very quickly and precisely, and we discussed that with this character, he needed to chill; he needed to slow down his speech, be more relaxed, less aggressive than his normal instinct would be. And even the way I moved and walked and stuff was something he tried to model himself after, to put himself into this other character. He didn’t want to play Vincent Cassel, he wanted to play Karsh, and to base that on somebody who was not him.
So I believe the combination of those things is what makes it seem as though he’s standing in for me, and it’s true up to a point. But, you know, I’m not an entrepreneur. I don’t own a cemetery, I don’t own a restaurant, and those are big things that Karsh does. He’s very adventurous and innovative; he’s a tech entrepreneur, and that’s something I am not. And to me, that’s what part of the joy of making a movie is, that you’re creating people who didn’t exist until you wrote them. What happened to me in my life was sort of the jumping-off point for the story of THE SHROUDS, but after that, once I started to write it, it was fiction. It was no longer autobiographical.
How closely did you work with the actors in terms of dealing with all the special effects involved in THE SHROUDS?
Obviously, they had all read the script and had a pretty strong idea of what was going to happen. And then there was a discussion, and some actors are good physically with some things and not so good with other things, and you have to just adjust, as a director, to the capabilities of your cast. These days, it’s interesting. To show an amputated arm is pretty easy, really. It used to be very tricky, and before digital stuff, it was a big problem. But now you don’t even need a sort of greenscreen sleeve. The tracking of parts of the body, of the eyes, for example, is fantastically sophisticated now, and to change eye color–which is not something we did in this movie–but it’s not a big deal anymore. You can now track the eyes of an actor with incredible accuracy and then change them any way you want. It has become much easier to do that stuff.
At the same time, for example, Diane Kruger also had physical effects to deal with. She had staples put in her arm, sort of surgical staples, in addition to the full body scan for the opening scenes, where she’s kind of a dream image floating in some sort of cavern. So she had a lot of stuff to do in that sense. And because she also plays Hunny, this cartoon avatar version of Becca, to do that, she had to wear a full-body motion-capture suit, and acted in a warehouse with a dozen cameras around her reading every move she made. She needed to be physical for that, and I think her past as a dancer certainly helped with it. That’s where the physical capabilities of the actors really come into play.
Can you talk some more about Kruger’s triple role, and how each character means something different to Karsh?
Well, we don’t really get a feel for Becca, his dead wife, and her life as she lived it before she was sick. We only see her in dream sequences, of a sort. They’re not really flashbacks; I didn’t want to do the traditional scenes of when they met or when they went to that great hotel in Switzerland or whatever–you know, those happy moments. We only see her in not very happy moments, when she’s being treated, having surgery and chemo and all of that sort of thing. And it’s in a dreamlike fashion, rather than something realistic.
And then, I believe Diane particularly enjoyed playing Terry, Becca’s sister, who is quite a strong, funny, mischievous character. Quite a different personality from her big sister, you know? And then, of course, the avatar has a whole other function completely. So it was a good workout for Diane to play all of those roles.
When you first conceived those parts, did you always intend for the same actress to play all three of them?
No, actually not. It’s funny, because I actually didn’t think of Becca and Terry as twins. I think they’re perceived as twins by a lot of people because of course, they look very much alike. But I thought of them as sisters who resemble each other in many ways, as sometimes sisters do. And then at one point, I forget who it was who said it–it might have been my casting agent, Deirdre Bowen, who I’ve worked with for many, many years–but they said, “I assume you want the same actress to play both roles.” I said, “Oh, yeah!” [laughs] but I actually hadn’t thought of it.
In terms of the avatar, yes, that was always going to be a kind of cartoon version of Becca, so it made sense that the same actress should play that. But once again, that depended on the technology available, which was, as you can see, quite good. I didn’t want Hunny to be an uncanny, spooky, realistic avatar, the kind you can make that looks very much like a person, especially with AI now. You could make an avatar that really looks like your dead spouse, if you wanted to. But I felt that Karsh would not want to; it would be too emotionally poignant for him to have an avatar who looks almost exactly like his dead wife. He wants that distance of it being a bit of a cartoon kind of avatar instead.
Karsh and Maury are both dealing with loss, and do so in very different ways, so can you talk about that?
Yeah, as Maury says, they’re “brothers in sorrow,” because they were lovers of the two sisters, and one of them lost Becca to death and the other lost Terry to her desire to split up with him, because he’s so obnoxious. So it’s an interesting contrast, because they’re very different people. Of course, Maury can still harbor hopes that he could get back with Terry, while Karsh is not religious, and doesn’t believe in an afterlife, and therefore cannot allow himself to think that he’ll somehow get back together with Becca eventually.
I really like Christopher Hitchens’ three-word description of this relationship: He said, “Death causes religion,” and I think it’s completely true. All religions give you a way to evade the reality of oblivion, your own personal oblivion. But Karsh doesn’t give himself that sort of comfort, the feeling that there could be an afterlife and so on. Maury, on the other hand, can imagine a life here, not an afterlife, where maybe he and Terry are back together. And that’s why their reactions to this sense of loss are different. But in each case, there’s a kind of tech element, because Maury is a hacker, basically, and Karsh is a tech entrepreneur, and that’s their creative strength. So they naturally enfold their sense of loss within their tech capabilities.
