Brandon Cronenberg is that rare interview subject that immediately dispels the myth of his own creative genesis. Born the son of legendary and controversial filmmaker David Cronenberg, you'd think he just stumbled into movie making the way one falls unceremoniously into a gravel pit before discovering you have a god-given talent for shoveling.
Superb lineage aside, his chilling but oddly hard-hitting first feature, Antiviral, competed at Cannes in 2012 and was shown later at the Toronto International Film Festival, where edited and streamlined, it won for best Canadian first feature film.
I've got to tell you that I was surprised to find out that you went the unexpected and ultimately more difficult route by choosing body horror themed material . This is a gutsy but high stakes move considering you are slightly familiar with the master of body horror, the Baron of Blood himself. Did you ever have a moment during filming where you said to yourself, "I should have done a romantic comedy?"
Well, I didn't set out specifically to make a body horror film. I was just sort of, from the start, doing whatever I found interesting. I kind of thought that if I was going to get into filmmaking that I couldn't really worry about my father's career and what I was doing related to that, or else it would be kind of paralyzing and also it would define me squarely in opposition to him and it would define my work in terms of his career. I just kind of wrote a film that I thought was interesting and tried not to think about it too much.
This movie is a very specific bloody and withering critique on our obsession with celebrity culture. Frankly, we devour it and can't seem to get enough. In this film, it is a wanted infection. Growing up the son of a famous man who was on and around film sets filled with celebrities, do you feel you have a take on this that other filmmakers may have been lacking?
One scene in the film is the difference between celebrities as sort of these cultural constructs or media constructs and the human being behind that sort of public idea. I know it's not a novel observation to say that celebrities as they are in the media are different from the real person, but I think that when you know people and are meeting people who have that public "double," it's still somehow shocking how far that divide is. It definitely informed the script to a certain degree I think, just knowing people who live this.
