“I have no rules. For me, it's a full, full experience to make a movie. It takes a lot of time, and I want there to be a lot of stuff in it. You're looking for every shot in the movie to have resonance and want it to be something you can see a second time, and then I'd like it to be something you can see 10 years later, and it becomes a different movie, because you're a different person. So that means I want it to be deep, not in a pretentious way, but I guess I can say I am pretentious in that I pretend. I have aspirations that the movie should trigger off a lot of complex responses.”

David Cronenberg had a journalist father and a pianist mother so naturally he showed a talent for literature and music early in life.  He graduated in literature at the University of Toronto although he began as a science student.  His film apprenticeship was in television and the Canadian independent scene, where he quickly became a master of the horror genre.  With Dead Ringers in 1988 he began to receive international critical acclaim and extended himself beyond genre filmmaking.  Since then he has become a regular presence at film festivals around the world, and has rarely made a critically poorly received film in spite of the controversy that his films often attract.