--- title: David Cronenberg Tries Opera description: Over the last 30 years, David Cronenberg, director of such films as Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988) and A History of Violence (2005), has been... canonical: https://time.com/archive/6909195/david-cronenberg-tries-opera/ author: TIME article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2008-09-04T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-22T07:21:23.616Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: David Cronenberg Tries Opera og:description: Over the last 30 years, David Cronenberg, director of such films as Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988) and A History of Violence (2005), has been... og:url: https://time.com/archive/6909195/david-cronenberg-tries-opera/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9c017754a59d39d1/698a4ae647ca3809b13bc4dd/360_cronenberg_0904.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 360 og:image:height: 203 og:image:alt: 360_cronenberg_0904.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: David Cronenberg Tries Opera twitter:description: Over the last 30 years, David Cronenberg, director of such films as Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988) and A History of Violence (2005), has been... twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9c017754a59d39d1/698a4ae647ca3809b13bc4dd/360_cronenberg_0904.jpg?branch=production&width=360&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # David Cronenberg Tries Opera > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Jeffrey T. Iverson](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-t-iverson/) Sep 4, 2008 4:00 AM UTC  David Cronenberg, director of The Fly at the L.A. Opera David Cronenberg, director of The Fly at the L.A. Opera Rune Hellestad / Corbis by [Jeffrey T. Iverson](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-t-iverson/) Sep 4, 2008 4:00 AM UTC Over the last 30 years, David Cronenberg, director of such films as _Scanners_ (1981), _Dead Ringers_ (1988) and _A History of Violence_ (2005), has been called the “King of Venereal Horror” and the “Baron of Blood.” But more and more, he’s being recognized as something else: a thinking man’s filmmaker. A diehard existentialist, Cronenberg has infused philosophy into his films over the years; some critics even called his 1986 blockbuster _The Fly_ an inspired allegory for the AIDS epidemic. And if anyone still doubted his high-culture credibility, now Cronenberg is tackling the medium of Mozart. From Sept. 7 to 27, the Los Angeles Opera will present the U.S. premiere of _The Fly_, a stage mutation of Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror tale of a renegade scientist whose teleportation experiment goes horribly awry when a fly enters his telepod — composed by Oscar-winner Howard Shore, conducted by celebrated tenor Plácido Domingo, and directed by Cronenberg. The director sat down with TIME’s Jeffrey T. Iverson on the eve of _The Fly_‘s world premiere in Paris this summer to talk about the hidden complexities of the horror genre, the challenges facing modern opera, his turbulent relationship with Hollywood and the Cronenberg philosophy of life. **TIME: Not many people would have pegged your film** **_The Fly_** **as opera material. Back in 1986, did you and Howard Shore imagine one day taking it to the stage?** **David Cronenberg:** When I was making the movie and talking about the music with Howard, I said, “You know, this could be a play” — it’s basically three people in one room, a triangle love story. And underneath all the technology and the sci-fi stuff there’s a very powerful, scary story of loss, disintegration and decay. Later it became a kind of iconic AIDS story to a lot of people, but when we were thinking of it, it was just about something that happens to everybody, which is aging and ultimately death. So it has this universal potency underneath the sci-fi trappings. I always felt that the horror genre was one in which you could do extreme, intense things that maybe would be a little hard to take if it weren’t for the genre protecting you — like a viral coating, but the DNA inside is very potent. \[_The Fly_\] was a story that if you did it straight, would never get made. Because it’s basically: two eccentric but beautiful people meet each other, fall in love, one of them gets a hideous wasting disease, the other watches and eventually helps him commit suicide — end of story. It’s like, hey, high concept? No. But given the telepods and the monstrosity it suddenly becomes acceptable. **You’ve often contrasted your more reflective, subversive type of cinema with Hollywood-style “cinema of comfort.” Given opera’s tragic tradition, does it seem like a medium where you’re less expected to comfort audiences?** Well, that’s a very interesting point, I mean, the expectations are different. But on the other hand, there is the Mozartian opera which people love — and rightly so — but for its delightfulness. That isn’t threatening really, even in the Madame Butterfly way. **Did you look to any great tragic operas to draw inspiration for** **_The Fly_** **?** I’m not a huge opera buff, but my exposure to classic opera has suggested that the sensibility of that is quite different from what I’m doing. That’s not arrogance; it’s just a statement of fact. And I think there’s a desire in the world of opera to modernize. There’s such an appearance these days of modern operas done often by directors who are not versed in classic opera, often film directors. If the art form is to survive and to have new audiences, than there have to be new operas. And they can’t have the same sensibility as _Don Giovanni_ — the music is glorious, but the psychology, the supernatural elements, and the narrative are not convincing to a modern audience. I think those are the things we can do — not better, but our contemporary version of. **It’s been more than 22 years since you directed** **_The Fly_** **. Do the existential themes you treated in the film sit differently with you today?** Just more intense, you know? I mean, the older you get… So many people that I know have died, I know more dead people now than living people. So it is only more intense. It really is just confirmation of what I thought as a young person: an existential approach to human life, that’s my approach. Existentialism isn’t as in vogue in Paris as it used to be, but I still go to Café de Flore and sit there and think of Sartre. That still informs my philosophy of life. What I was feeling when I was making _The Fly_ has only been confirmed by life as it goes on. Which is another reason why I’m able to take it up in another form, I suppose. **You’re a fan of the late philosopher Norman O. Brown. In** **_Life Against Death_** **, he writes, “The entry into Freud cannot avoid being a plunge into a strange world… But this strange world is the world we all of us actually live in.” Could one say the same thing about your films?** Yes. I think people do live a veiled life, \[a life\] of illusions. Culture delivers it, politics deliver it, some art delivers it, technology delivers it — it’s very easy to lose contact with life as it really is. And that’s why I keep returning to the human body. It’s not ghoulishness. I believe that it is the central fact of human existence. And yet it’s very obvious how art and religion and many other cultural things try to take us away from the body reality — for obvious reasons. Because if you accept the body, you accept mortality, and that is a hugely difficult thing for people to accept. **You had aspirations to become a writer when you were young. Who inspired you?** My ambition was to be a great obscure writer. I found novels by people like Djuna Barnes, whose work never became as mainstream as novels can become — I was a bit of a snob, I suppose, but that was my ambition, the obscurity was important. I used to read _Evergreen Review_ and the _Paris Review_, Edward Albee’s first plays, \[William S.\] Burroughs and \[Vladimir\] Nabokov and so on, many of whom did accidentally become relatively mainstream, like Nabokov with _Lolita_, and Albee with _Zoo Story_. **One might say you accidentally went mainstream in 1986 with** **_The Fly_** **, a huge box-office success following many obscure, often controversial films. Was that an artistic turning point in your career?** Well, the rule of thumb, or really the mythology, at the time was: you do a movie that’s a big success, and then you can do your art film. To me, _The Fly_ was as much an art film as anything I was going to do — but there was _Dead Ringers_ that I’d been trying to get made. Yet even after I did _The Fly_, it still was a huge struggle. Then I realized something that I had intuited already, which is: those people in Hollywood are very down to earth, they’re very practical. You walk in with _The Fly_, they can see it. You walk in with two gynecologists who end up dead, they don’t want to make that movie, they want you to make _The Fly_ again. They’re not stupid. So it’s not as if you’ve hypnotized them with your success and they’ll therefore do anything you want, that absolutely doesn’t happen. **So no big change then?** It didn’t really change my life at all, other than I had the experience of having the number one movie in North America for three weeks running, and agents and studio heads would suddenly talk to me who wouldn’t before. But then after I made _Dead Ringers_ in 1988 I was weird again, you know, persona non grata. **Do you think you’re still perceived that way today?** My last two movies, _History of Violence_ and _Eastern Promises_, were relatively successful — great critical reviews, did respectable business, were understood by Hollywood — and so my stock in Hollywood right now is pretty good. But then if I make another movie like _Dead Ringers_ or _Videodrome_ or _Naked Lunch_ for the next one, my stock will go down. And I accept that. That’s part of the game, I don’t have any illusions about it. **How do you choose your next project?** The most important thing for me is that I make movies that I am passionate about. It’s very hard to make a movie, so if you’re not loving it, halfway through you’re going to be suicidal. My rule of thumb is: when I’m halfway through this movie am I going to be really exhilarated and excited, or am I going to be suicidal? If it’s the latter, then I absolutely don’t do that project. **Well, are you going to make it through this opera in one piece?** I’ve had moments, but so far it’s been very good. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6909195/david-cronenberg-tries-opera/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6909195/david-cronenberg-tries-opera/"},"headline":"David Cronenberg Tries Opera","datePublished":"2008-09-04T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-22T07:21:23.616Z","description":"Over the last 30 years, David Cronenberg, director of such films as Scanners (1981), Dead Ringers (1988) and A History of Violence (2005), has been...","url":"https://time.com/archive/6909195/david-cronenberg-tries-opera/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt9c017754a59d39d1/698a4ae647ca3809b13bc4dd/360_cronenberg_0904.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jeffrey T. 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