David Cronenberg

“So one very particular and interesting film for me was this film: Federico Fellini’s La strada. And the reason that it had a special meaning for me was that in Toronto – we’re talking about the 1940s, 1950s – every Saturday there would be a… like a swarm of lemmings, there were children who would come to a particular cinema called the Pylon. And one day I came out of that cinema, having seen the traditional kind of what for us were kids’ movies, and across the street from the Pylon was a new theater, a very small one called the Studio, and it only showed Italian films in Italian, there were people coming out of a screening that had happened at the Studio, and it was adults only, no children, and they were coming out onto the street and there were weeping, men and women sobbing, crying. Across the street to see what the film was that had that effect on these people and it was La strada. And so, of course, many years later I saw La strada and then I was crying on the street myself and I thought that was the moment that I realized that film had that kind of power. It made a difference to me and my entire film career. So, La strada.”

“English films were a big influence, too, and they had their own particular tone. They were very theatrical in some ways, but they had a really special power. And one in particular for me was this one: Odd Man Out, with an actor I absolutely adore, James Mason. I would have loved to work with him. He had the most wonderful voice and presence. Directed by Carol Reed. And it was an incredibly powerful, melancholy, surprising film that was… as I say, had a particular English feel that you would not find in the rest of Europe or certainly not in Hollywood also. So, Odd Man Out. Fantastic to have this film in my hand.”

“But, as we said, there were two poles. And there was a European pole, but there was also the American pole. Now, American filmmaking, of course, was not just Hollywood, and a film that I could relate to more in terms of my own filmmaking was… David Lynch’s film Eraserhead. Very American and saying some really interesting kind of sublime things about American culture and the American ethos and zeitgeist that you wouldn’t see in a Hollywood film, but you also wouldn’t see it in a European film. This is a really special film that had a big impact on me. I can’t say that it was an influence because I had already been making films by this time, but it was… it was significant for me. And I met David and we got along very well. I went with him to Bob’s Big Boy, where we would eat hamburgers for lunch. And we got along very well. And it’s a really… of course, it’s a tragedy that he died so young. Eraserhead.”

“This immense collection. Quite fantastic and really heavy. And you could use it in your workout. Bergman also was one of the greats for anybody who felt that film was art. And, in particular, Hour of the Wolf, a very, very dark, depressing film, which was great, had a special meaning for me because, when I was making my film The Fly, there was a moment when the Jeff Goldblum character, who has now sort of fused with the fly DNA and has strange physical capabilities, could climb up onto a wall and hang from a ceiling. And I remembered that Bergman had done that in Hour of the Wolf, a scene with a man who is experiencing such anguish that his anguish allows him to walk up a wall and onto a ceiling. And I was wondering, “How did he do that physically?” because now I was going to do the same thing in a science-fiction movie with quite a different tone. And so I watched Hour of the Wolf again. And so I felt a kinship with Bergman and I think John Landis told me when he went to Bergman’s house on his island, his special Swedish island, that amongst his collection of DVDs there was a DVD of The Fly. So I thought, “Okay, Bergman and I, we are… we are blood brothers. We are connected.” So this huge, immense collection will go into this quite small bag.”