If the dream of any new artist is to make a name for themselves, some must start by making a name for themselves. This is all the more the case when your name is Brandon Cronenberg, and you are the son of a certain “David”, famous Canadian filmmaker, author, among others, of Fly (1986) and False pretenses (1988), certified master of horrors for his outstanding work on changing bodies.
While Possessor, his second feature film, awarded the Grand Prix at the Gérardmer Festival in February, is released in France directly on the video market, we feel the young director reluctant to evoke this illustrious ancestry, as to see himself too systematically brought back to it. Since the revelation ofAntiviral in 2012 at the Cannes Film Festival, however, the son’s imagination emerges not so far from the paternal shores, between cerebral dystopia and somatic malaise, but tinged with its own singularity, as if any difference could only be conquered by proximity.
If the “name of the father” will remain the blind spot of the discussion until the end, Brandon Cronenberg, 41, more readily evokes his formative years, including an eminently lonely childhood. “I didn’t really like the 1980s and 1990s, he confides. My influences relate more to the 1970s – their musical production, the hippie movement – than to the pop culture of my time. As a child, it was especially science that fascinated me: I had my little chemist’s kit, I studied insects, animals, biology. “
For the studious and shy boy, books are a perfect refuge, a world apart. “I started to read like crazy, a lot of fantasy and science fiction. Philip K. Dick is the author who meant the most to me: I devoured almost all of his work. I even tried to become a writer, but it didn’t work. No doubt I still had too much of a tendency to lock myself in my bubble, to cut myself off from the world. Making films had this beneficial effect on me as they forced me to integrate a collective process, to convert a solitary imagination into a group practice. We work with others, we expose ourselves. “
Cinema late
The young man searches for himself for a while, dives into drawing, plays the bass guitar in a few short-lived groups, makes a quick visit to the university to glean some “humanities” (“A little philosophy, a little letters, a little languages”). “I only considered cinema late, he admits, once you’re in your twenties. “ As if he had really had to come to terms with this fatality.
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