Quirky Cronenberg

This summer, the world lost two of its greatest directors — Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni — on the same day. David Cronenberg, in the District to promote his new film “Eastern Promises,” says both men certainly influenced his work.

“They were part of that late ‘50s, early ‘60s wave when there was a genre called the Art Film with a capital A,” Mr. Cronenberg says. “That was very important to me.”

There are plenty of good directors still working, and promising newcomers pop up all the time. Yet, says Mr. Cronenberg, “what seems to be very difficult is for someone to have consistency, to make film after film after film that really is unique, that has a voice that’s recognizable.”

The director is too modest — too Canadian, perhaps — to point out that he himself is one of the best examples of a singular filmmaker whose clear vision is all over every film he’s made.

Mr. Cronenberg, 64, quickly established himself as the director of thoughtful horror and sci-fi films, such as 1983’s “Videodrome” and 1986’s “The Fly,” that explored what it means to be human. His masterpiece might be 1988’s “Dead Ringers,” in which Jeremy Irons gave two tour-de-force performances as twin gynecologists whose close but warped relationship is derailed by a woman. The director also made headlines with his controversial 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s controversial 1973 novel, “Crash.”

However, he achieved perhaps his biggest mainstream success with 2005’s “A History of Violence.”

He reunites with that film’s leading man, Viggo Mortensen, for the Russian mafia thriller “Eastern Promises,” due in theaters today.

Yet Mr. Cronenberg — whose pale, striking blue eyes belie his twisted visions — didn’t write “Eastern Promises.” “Dirty Pretty Things” screenwriter Steve Knight did. Mr. Cronenberg, in fact, hasn’t scripted any of his films since 1999’s “eXistenZ.”

“I’m just very lazy and screenwriting is very hard,” he laughs. “You’ll notice there are a lot of directors — Brian De Palma, Coppola — who started off writing their own screenplays because often it was the only way they could get to direct and that was certainly true in my case. It was the screenplay that was the attraction, not me as a director.”

A screenplay can take a year or two to write, and there’s no guarantee you’ll get financing to make it. So “when your career as a director has some momentum,” it’s “very tempting” to agree to direct a script you like, he says.

“Eastern Promises” is still unmistakably Cronenbergian. In fact, when asked about recurring themes that appear in this film — alienation, violence as a force for good and for evil, the importance and changing nature of the physical — he often responds by noting an aspect either wasn’t in the original script or wasn’t there in much detail. It’s clear that he worked with Mr. Knight a great deal in revisions.

The violence, for example, is really only hinted at in the screenplay, the director explains. In the finished film, though, it’s intensely realistic.

“In a movie like the Bourne movies, the violence is all kind of impressionistic with lots of little quick cuts and you don’t really see anything,” Mr. Cronenberg notes. “That has its own effect and there’s nothing wrong with it as a technique. But for me, I think people go to movies because they want to live somebody else’s life, in a way… I want that to be, even when it’s the scary parts, as real as possible.”

In “Violence” and “Promises,” the main characters are conflicted about the violence that can both harm and save.

“It’s an innate thing,” Mr. Cronenberg says. “The instant something’s born, there are a thousand things that want to kill it. That’s part of the protein exchange, the competition of the genetic struggle, and we are part of it. You can’t really say violence is never justified or violence is bad … Unfortunately, things are not that simple.”

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