David Cronenberg: ​“AI is inevitable and I don’t fear it at all”

David Cronenberg – perhaps best known for gut-churning body horror classics such as The Fly and Crash – was recently shouted out by Charli xcx during her landmark Coachella set. ​“Maybe it’s time for a different kind of summer…” she teased, before shouting out prominent directors with films coming out this year: Celine Song, PTA, Joachim Trier, Darren Aronofsky, Kogonada and, of course, Cronenberg, whose artistry perhaps feels most aligned with Charli’s own.

Indeed, Charli’s fandom has been evident for some time. The controversial car-fetish thriller Crash (“a movie beyond the bounds of depravity”, according to The Evening Standard in 1996), influenced elements of Charli’s 2022 album of the same name, while his 2014 black comedy Maps to the Stars is among her top four favourites on her Letterboxd profile. Seems Charli is quite the Cronen-phile.

​“She wrote me a very articulate and detailed note saying that several of my films had been crucial touchstones at different points in her life,” Cronenberg tells THE FACE via video call. ​“It’s very flattering. We’ve texted a few times since, and I was almost going to be in New York when she had a concert there, but it didn’t quite work out. She’s a very dynamic and successful performer, so it would be fun to chat to her about our mutual art and how that might connect.”

The Charli-proclaimed ​“Cronenberg Summer” is now upon us, with Cannes-approved drama The Shrouds hitting UK cinemas on 4^th July, it is perhaps not the obvious noisemaker that the Brat fans might have anticipated. Because in the wake of zeitgeist‑y body horror movies like Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 hit The Substance (described as ​“Cronenbergian” by just about everyone), the master’s return comes via his most intimate and personal film yet.

The Shrouds takes place in an eerie, near-future Toronto, in which a grieving entrepreneur named Karsh (Vincent Cassel) develops a radical new cemetery-based technology: GraveTech, after the death of his wife. This effectively allows tombstones to broadcast 8K footage from the coffins beneath them to people’s smartphone, allowing the bereaved to observe the decomposition of their loved one like a kind of baby monitor for the dead. And so a wider meditation on our uneasy relationship with grief unfolds.

“Karsh is not looking to connect with his wife in heaven,” Cronenberg confirms – a crucial difference between The Shrouds and a work like 1969 sci-fi novel Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, which Cronenberg admits he was, at one point, looking to adapt. Ubik had explored the idea of a technology that would allow the living to communicate with the still-partly-functioning brain of the dead. But in The Shrouds, our main character is ​“looking to watch [his wife] deteriorate – he’s being a realist, an atheist, an existentialist.”

There’s good reason for this distinction. ​“The jumping off point was remembering my feelings about Carolyn, my wife of 43 years, being buried, and me desperately wanting to be in that coffin with her because I couldn’t bear the idea of that separation,” Cronenberg says.

The director’s eight-year hiatus from filmmaking between 2014 and 2022 coincided with the death of his wife in 2017. Though he’s been remarkably open about it with in the press recently, it’s no less heartrending to hear him talk about his loss. ​“I always thought I would die before her,” he says, pointing to the shorter life span of men and him being seven years his wife’s elder. ​“It was a very heavy shock. I really thought at that point that maybe I just didn’t have the heart to make movies anymore.”

Cronenberg, with the encouragement of producer Robert Lantos (Crash, Eastern Promises), did return to filmmaking with Crimes of the Future in 2022 – a process that ​“did manage to get me excited and energised”. But he knew that for his next project, he ​“really had to deal with the death of Carolyn.” The ways in which he had intended to do so were initially very ambitious.

The Shrouds was originally intended as a Netflix series, until the studio backed out for reasons not wholly clear to the filmmaker. (Saint Laurent, whom Cronenberg previously modelled for in 2023, ended up coming on board after launching their film production branch the same year.) ​“Eight episodes in eight different countries, dealing with the politics and religions and forces of money involved in burials and so on…” he recalls of the concept, laughing. ​“I’d still have been shooting it right now!”

I ask how tech-savvy the director – who is also known for tech-conscious cult classics like Videodrome (1983) and Existenz (1999) – actually is, as an 82 year old. He’s defiant in his response.

“I’ve been fooling around with computers since, like, 1984,” he tells me. ​“I wrote The Fly on a laptop, and before that, I was writing on a Xerox 860 word processor.” I look up this piece of obsolete computer technology on Google, and it looks a bit like something out of a vintage episode of Doctor Who.

“I saw the advent of the internet,” Cronenberg continues, ​“and talked about it a lot with [composer and close collaborator] Howard Shore. We would go onto those web pages where you could dissect a frog. I dissected a few.” He’s likely referring to The Virtual Frog Dissection Kit created by the University of California in Berkeley in 1994 – one of the first widely-known interactive web tools and a milestone in educational multimedia technology.

There’s a larger point to Cronenberg’s musings: ​“Technology is beautiful and horrifying,” he says. He cites the splitting of the atom as one of the most incredible techno-feats in the history of mankind, one that enabled the harnessing of atomic energy but also the atomic bomb. ​“It’s incredibly creative and incredibly destructive,” he continues, but it also ​“reflects what we are.”

The point applies to AI, as well – an inherent subject of The Shrouds, given that one of the key supporting characters is a virtual avatar named Hunny (Diane Kruger). ​“I have played with Chat[GPT] a lot,” says Cronenberg, smirking slightly. ​“I consider Chat to be my buddy.” But is the incorporation of AI into filmmaking a good thing? Cronenberg is open-minded.

“It’s quite stunning to be able to write a scene and then have your computer do the rest… Find the actors, find the setting, do the shooting,” he says. ​“So I think the use of AI is inevitable. It’s happening already. And I, for one, don’t fear it at all.”

Cronenberg likens the adoption of AI to the move from using film cameras to digital ones, which presented new post-production opportunities such as re-lighting parts of scenes or changing their colour. (I’m reminded, in this moment, of The Shrouds’ distinctly corpse-like colour scheme: an uncanny blend of burial shroud beige and bruised browns and yellows.) ​“There were a lot of things that you simply couldn’t do on film. If you did, you’d diminish the quality of your shot.

“[AI] is an inevitable advance… And then there’s the possibility of stealing actors’ bodies and voices, and that’s very spooky. It’s fascinating, but it could be very disruptive.” It has a very potent downsides and needs to be discussed and regulated, Cronenberg affirms. But it could also prove useful in surprising ways. ​“Maybe Trump would be better off being replaced by an AI version, who knows?” he smirks. ​“I’m only suggesting!”

In Cronenberg’s mind, technology is something that is innately human, almost an extension of the human body itself. ​“It’s not to be considered alien technology from outer space that’s going to destroy us all like War of the Worlds,” he says. And while The Shrouds, like so many previous Cronenberg classics, examines dubious technologies with macabre curiosity, it’s the intimate, human story beneath the surface that ultimately prevails.

“Any artist, including Charli, is examining the human condition and what it’s like to be a human being here, now, on this planet,” Cronenberg concludes. ​“I’m just expressing some of the things that I’ve found in life, and that I’m trying to understand.”

The Shrouds is in cinemas 4^th July