David Cronenberg creates visceral films in which technology and the body become extensions of our inner lives. It’s a vision of humanity that—however fantastical it may look or sound—always has a core of emotional truth, and THE SHROUDS is no different. In Cronenberg’s latest film, a tech entrepreneur, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), invents a device called GraveTech that allows one to watch a deceased loved one in their grave—a macabre prospect, perhaps, but also an expression of profound attachment.
THE SHROUDS comes straight from the heart: Cronenberg’s wife of over four decades passed away in 2017. I talked with him about designing GraveTech, his conception of the afterlife, and his feelings about AI—all of which, in characteristic Cronenberg fashion, had a tendency to blend together.
Nicolas Rapold: The GraveTech apparatus is so vividly imagined that I began to wonder whether some version might exist. But so far as I can tell, there are only webcams for gravestones.
David Cronenberg: It doesn't exist. I made it up.
NR: How did the concept of the GraveTech camera come to be?
DC: It's very straightforward and it's in Karsh’s dialogue. When his wife is being buried, he wants to be in the box with her. He cannot bear that she shall be underground and inaccessible to him from that moment on. And I had that same feeling. It's absolutely how I felt. Obviously, it's not very practical for you to get into this box, which is normally built for one person. So what do you do? Well, if you're a sort of a tech entrepreneur, you go to tech for your solution to that, which I am not, so at that point he and I part ways. I'm not an entrepreneur and, you know, I don't own a restaurant in a graveyard. Although I probably should. I mean, the way independent film is going, it might be a better career choice at this point.
And it's interesting because at one point I think people thought that somehow you could be in contact with this person who was dead, after death. And I did see it in an early description of the movie from a journalist who had not seen the movie. And the estate of Philip K. Dick came after me. They were very polite. I had met the Dick sisters, you know? Because at one point I wanted to do UBIK [a novel by Philip K. Dick]. And in UBIK there's the idea that the brain somehow still has memories and can still be accessed. And they thought that maybe I had really kind of pilfered this from UBIK. But I told my producers, ‘Just send her the script, you know. She's very bright there. She'll see that it's not the same.’ And that was the case.
But it's interesting because in this case it's a little stranger than that, which is: you are accepting that this person is dead. You still don't want to let go. And because your relationship was so physical, it makes some bizarre emotional sense to follow what happens to their physical body. And so that’s basically it. And I had that feeling, but what I did about it was to make a movie.
NR: So there are no secret cameras in a grave.
DC: No. Although I do have a piece of sidewalk in Canada's Walk of Fame, and I really said, when I die, you should put me under that stone and use some Lucite or something that you can see through, so that people can watch me decay as they walk over me.
NR: They said yes, of course?
DC: Well, they haven't said no.
NR: I also wanted to ask about how religious belief, Jewish belief, fits into this. There’s a line at one point in THE SHROUDS about going to heaven.
DC: The idea was that the soul goes to heaven—the soul which does look like a cicada in my view. You see that at the beginning. The soul does not want to leave the body because the soul has lived in the body and so is reluctant to leave it. So it waits and waits and waits till the body disintegrates and therefore is forced to leave. And so where does the soul go? We guess it goes to heaven. This is not my belief, but it is one variation of Jewish belief. I'm no expert in Judaism, trust me. I was raised in a very secular family. But that is one of the interpretations.
NR: What is your belief about what happens to the body after death?
DC: Exactly what's in the film. I mean, it decays almost from the instant of death. There’s incredible chemistry going on in the body at that point. You get bloated, it's not pretty—and you see some of it. And I wanted to say, hey, look, this is what he's suggesting is a reasonable thing to do after that. That might strike you as rather weird, and maybe you're not going to get many clients, but you only need a couple who are very rich.
NR: The movie also definitely allows for a comic understanding of the challenges to moving on—like when Karsh goes on an awkward date after his wife’s death, at the same restaurant that’s next to the GraveTech graveyard.
DC: Yes, well, I can tell you from my own experience that suddenly you're in what has been called the bereavement dating pool. So, it's you and the widows of all your friends suddenly deciding, seeing, checking each other out to see if maybe you could get together. I mean, everybody has heard horror stories of Tinder and bad dates and blind dates and God knows what. But to experience that when you're that age, and after you've been, in my case, with the same woman for 43 years, this is kind of a shock. So a lot of the things that Karsh says, like, ‘I don't even know how to seduce a woman anymore, I don't know if I'm flirting,’ I can tell you that that's accurate and I'm not the only one who's felt that. And that's comic, you know? It's tragic when it's you, but it's comic when it's somebody else, you know?
NR: Besides GraveTech, the movie also explores the idea of artificial intelligence in the form of Karsh’s digital assistant. Have you ever experimented as a writer with AI?
DC: No, and it's funny because Vincent Cassel has played with it, and he was shocked that I hadn't, because he knows I'm a bit of a bit of a nerd anyway. I've been playing with computers since 1984 actually. But I'm fascinated by [AI] and it opens up all kinds of things in terms of art and movies. I'm not afraid of it at all. I mean technically I've been using AI for years in postproduction. For example, if you have a pimple on your face—this happened with Jennifer Jason Leigh in eXistenz, she had a cold sore at a certain point. We didn't stop, but then we had to track that cold sore in every scene that she shot and eradicate it. And that's a sort of AI, analyzing the frame and stuff. So it's been there in one form or another. It's just getting very interesting now. But here I'm not talking about when you have AI controlling the nuclear storage or anything like that. That's a whole other worry about AI. But I find it very fascinating and I'm sure I'll play with it at some point. I just haven't gotten around to it.
NR: What about the burial shrouds in the film, what was the design process for those? Saint Laurent is in the credits...
DC: Well, it really comes primarily from my costume designer, Anne Dixon, who is Canadian. It's not Saint Laurent, but she was in touch with people at Saint Laurent for materials and sewing. The basic design came from her, in consultation with me. I describe it in the script, but what came out of it was quite different from the way I described it.
NR: How did you describe the shrouds?
DC: You know that sort of metallic stuff that they give you when you're in shock?
NR: Or when you run a marathon?
DC: Yeah, and you're hyperthermic or something. If you're a novelist, you have to describe it because that's the end of it. But you don't spend a lot of time as a screenwriter describing it, because it's just the beginning. It's a suggestion and then it became much more mysterious and evocative and priest-like or ninja-like. So, it's a lovely process. Chrysalises of various butterflies were very much involved. Because you sort of go into it and emerge as a different creature. Me being a junior entomologist in my life...
NR: Did you used to collect insects?
DC: Absolutely, I used to collect insects and butterflies. It's interesting that they recently discerned that the butterfly has no memory of the caterpillar. They did brain scans. So the butterfly would emerge as though it was just born and has no awareness of its life as a caterpillar.
NR: Perhaps they’d be haunted by their former life.
DC: Well, the thing is, the butterfly has no evolutionary advantage in remembering its life as a caterpillar. None. And vice versa. The caterpillar doesn't need to know that it's going to be a butterfly.
NR: In the end, for all the macabre material, I felt this movie was a love story. Do you think of it as a love story?
DC: Absolutely, yeah.
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