David Cronenberg Doesn’t Regret Turning Down ‘Flashdance’

Reflecting on his trailblazing career, Canadian icon David Cronenberg felt particular pride for the one project that got away – or, more to the point, that he pushed away with full force: “Flashdance.”

“You might be amazed [that producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer] were totally convinced that I was the right one to direct,” Croneberg said at the Marrakech Film Festival on Sunday. “Really, I don’t know why [they] thought I should do it, and finally I had to say no – I said to them, ‘I will destroy your movie if I direct it!’”

While “Flashdance” honors eventually went to Adrian Lyne – resulting in 1983’s third top grossing film – Cronenberg instead delivered the one-two punch of “The Dead Zone” and “Videodrome” that same year. In doing so, he cemented a new genre that studied bodily horrors with a cerebral chill while giving the film lexicon a brand-new adjective: Cronenbergian.

“[My work has been] attacked for being horrible, decadent and depraved,” he grinned. “All of which are good things.”

“I called myself the Baron of Blood,” he added. “But at least I didn’t say I was the King – I was very modest.”

Whatever the noble title, Cronenberg wore the moniker with the same winking irony that suffuses so much of his work – using genre as a kind of Trojan horse to get his unique vision to travel.

“The idea of genre was a way of selling a film,” he said. “It was a question of marketing [above all, because] if you made an art film like ‘Crash’ or ‘Dead Ringers,’ it can be very hard to figure out who the audience might be.”

“You are in some ways protected by the genre,” he said, pointing towards his 1986 title “The Fly,” a film he described as “three people in a room with a baboon.”

“It’s really the story of a beautiful — and very tall — couple [that] meet and fall in love, and then he contracts a horrible wasting disease and he slowly dies,” Cronenberg continued.”It’s not a very uplifting if you say it just that way, but when it becomes a sci-fi movie, a horror movie in which there’s a telepod that transports people through the air, that suddenly becomes bearable. It’s still a romance and still a tragic story, but not as heartbreaking in a way.”

The filmmaker felt much the same about his own heartbreak, encouraging viewers to downplay the autobiographical elements of his latest film, “The Shrouds.”

“I made the movie maybe five or six years after [the death of his wife in 2017], partly in response to her death and out my own grief,” he said. “But, really, the fact that it is based on some true things in my life does not automatically make it a good movie, or even a passionate movie, or even an interesting movie. You shouldn’t need to know the biography of the director.”

And once “The Shrouds” hits theaters early next year, Cronenberg would encourage audiences to go in for a laugh.

“It’s really quite a funny movie,” he said. “Maybe not a comedy, but I don’t I don’t see how you can live life without a sense of humor. I mean, there has to be humor — I don’t know how you would get through life without.”