David Cronenberg's History of Violence

(Above: David Cronenberg)

David Cronenberg is an amiable guy. He’ll politely discuss the weather (it was especially humid in his hometown of Toronto when he spoke with Paste) and he happily extols the virtues of his latest film’s star, Viggo Mortensen (“If you’re a Viggo fan, you’re going to love this movie”). It’s hard to imagine such a mild-mannered gentleman ever having a violent thought. In fact, during the filming of his first feature, Shivers, he was horri?ed when forced to repeatedly slap an actress (at her request) to illicit a hysterical on-camera reaction. He had never slapped a person in the face before. But he managed to get, you know, used to it.

Of course, anyone familiar with Cronenberg’s film catalog (16 features over 30 years, including Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and eXistenZ) knows he doesn’t just think about violence, he often revels in it. That schism—the angry heart beating beneath the well-socialized skin of an idyllic family man—is at the core of A History of Violence.

“It’s not that I have an overall approach to violence in my filmmaking,” he says. “I’m very much against forcing abstract concepts I have onto the films I’m making. The approach to violence in A History of Violence comes from the characters. It’s very street-oriented, crude and intimate.” The director is quick to point out that, while there are subtle statements made in the film, it’s not an overt indictment of violence in the media. “There’s something that happens in this town. It’s sensational; it seems to have resonances. It’s natural that [the media] are going to want to be there,” he says. The film’s true focus is on the effect of violence on character Tom Stall and his family. This violence bleeds into the small-town community of Millbrook, Ind., a sort of mythical landscape of American virtue. Of course, the brutality has always been there. “Somewhere there is violence being done under the surface that allows that Millbrook peace to exist,” he says.

Cronenberg has mentioned parallels between A History of Violence and the American Western, but for the record, he doesn’t think violence is the exclusive province of American culture. “I had a discussion with Michael Moore about how he portrayed Canadians in [Bowling for Columbine],” he says. “He was trying to suggest there’s some unknowable reason Canadians don’t kill each other as much as Americans. I said, ‘I think the fact that you’re not legally allowed to own a pistol in Canada has a lot to do with it.’”

To read Paste's review of A History of Violence click here