Few recent films, and even fewer by major directors, are so death-haunted as David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds. Since well before its premiere has there been much acknowledgment of personal parallels for the director, though an even larger sense of loss, while actually watching, comes from the suspicion this elegiac and self-reflective work (possibly some kind of masterpiece) could be his final statement. During the recent press run––which has included our own interview––he spoke to the LA Times in a manner that both more clearly and less romantically gets at the issue, Cronenberg (who turned 82 last month) suggesting that another project would amount to arrogance: “The world does not need my next movie.”
Agree to disagree, though he seems at least a bit aware of what significance is borne from The Shrouds, a film about time’s ruthless passage, being the cessation of a life in cinema. Cronenberg was nevertheless clear that his ideas aren’t cinema-exclusive, implying that the eight years between Maps to the Stars and Crimes of the Future found him imagining a deeper career in literature he’d begun with 2014’s Consumed. As recently as December did he reveal that a producer implored him to adapt that novel into a feature for which he “might try to write a script” which, quality depending, “could be [his] next movie.”
Whether anything’s creatively transpired in the last four months to decide Consumed‘s fate, the body, in true Cronenbergian fashion, remains a concern. While citing Manoel de Oliveira as “something to aspire to,” filmmaking’s physical toll is not to be tempted: “You could certainly imagine a moment where you’re halfway through a movie and you say, ‘I actually can’t do this anymore. I’m not focused enough to be good at it. I don’t even know if I can survive today.’” The glimmer of hope, then, is his current status as one who would “seem to be healthy enough.”
One shouldn’t choose to be greedy about any artist who’s given so much over so many decades, but they can certainly direct hopes towards the healthy, fruitful creation of at least one final feature.
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