The Canadian filmmaker was speaking at a London Soundtrack Festival Talk with career-long collaborator, composer Howard Shore.
The vet Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg was at a London Soundtrack Festival talk with frequent collaborator Howard Shore to discuss some of the films they’ve partnered on over the past 40 years.
The two artists discussed M. Butterfly, Cronenberg’s 1993 film about a French diplomat (Jeremy Irons) who becomes infatuated with Chinese opera performer, Song Liling (John Lone). Their affair lasts for 20 years, and they subsequently marry, but Irons’ character is unaware or willfully ignorant that Liling is a man.
“There was a scandal with The Brutalist,” the director said. “There was a discussion about Adrien Brody, they used artificial intelligence to improve his accent. I think it was a campaign against The Brutalist by other Oscar nominees.
“We mess with actors’ voices all the time,” Cronenberg said. “When John (Lone) was being this singer, I raised the pitch of his voice to sound more feminine, and when he’s revealed as man, I lowered to his natural voice. This is just a part of moviemaking.”
Cronenberg and Shore have collaborated on all of the former’s films, bar one, since 1979.
At Saturday’s discussion, they discussed movies such as The Fly (1986), Dead Ringers (1988), M. Butterfly (1993), Crash (1996) and most recently, The Shrouds (2024).
While the two stayed clear of any political talk, Shore did open up on incorporating a myriad of sounds into Cronenberg’s films, such as jazz in Naked Lunch or electric guitar in Crash. “What we tried to do is work around the frame,” the Canadian composer said. “It wasn’t going into the center of the image. The music was always the exterior. That’s where I was looking at, and I would do things to broaden and create more depth in the story.”
“After The Fly, I was getting used to the opera sound,” Shore said. “And from Dead Ringers, it inherited the horns of Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring. So there’s a connection between David’s film and Jackson, and really, all through the late ’80s and ’90s, all the films I was doing, I was building up from David’s original concept. The films have been like a spine. You can see my work from beginning to end all through David’s films.”
Cronenberg discussed the controversy around his daring 1996 project Crash, which was about a man aroused by car crashes. “The film caused a huge sensation at the Cannes Fest in 1996,” he said. “Alexander Walker the film critic said this was a film ‘beyond the bounds of depravity,’ which of course I loved. We actually used in some our ads.”
The filmmaker said it “suits him” to not have received an Oscar nomination throughout his colorful career.
