JL: Okay. The Frankenstein Monster and the Wolf Man—I always find them sympathetic because they’re victims.
DC: Yeah, there is a wonderful layering of those characters that makes them much more interesting. The same with vampires—there’s just endless vampire films happening right now! But the more vampires are humanized, and even made beautiful, like in the Twilightmovies, there comes a point where you treat them like… the disabled or something. They’re humans but they have this disease problem. In other words, I guess you can go too far with the empathy. There has to be that sense of danger for a monster to really be a serious monster.
JL: What about the new craze for zombies? The flesh-eating, walking dead. What’s that about?
DC: I think that’s about video games, frankly. But once again they are deformations of normal humans and not only in the way they look, but also in their craving for human flesh.
JL: What do you mean by video games?
DC: In the early days of video games, the way that you could get around parental fear of having children enjoying killing people, was to have them not be people exactly. If they’re anonymous creatures, it’s okay to kill them. And really part of the fun of those movies and TV series is just the many different ways that you can kill a zombie. You don’t have empathy with them, they’re not sympathetic… everything shifts to sort of, like, “slaughter fun.” It’s actually quite different from the vampire thing.
JL: What are your thoughts on the Devil or demons or satanic possession?
DC: I have big problems with demons and the devil, since I don’t believe in them. So, I’ve never dealt with anything like that in any of my films.
JL: A movie is supposed to create suspension of disbelief. I am an atheist; I am a Jew; I do not believe in Christ or the devil but, when I saw The Exorcist[William Friedkin,1973] in the theater, it scared the shit out of me.
DC: The Exorcistwas scary. It was very effective.
JL: Because it…
DC: Because it created a world that seemed real to you and they had a couple of priests in it who were characters you could identify with. The audience wants to be in the film, you know. If you haven’t been able to make use of that desire as a filmmaker then you’ve failed. Because audiences come to the movies wanting that and if you shut them out of your movie, well, it’s your fault. If you bring them into it, then, yes, you can absolutely create an ambience that is convincing. For the time of the movie the audience is living in that universe. And in that universe anything is possible. The Exorcistfelt absolutely real and it drew you in slowly, slowly, before it started to hit you over the head. So, it was a very interesting example of suspension of disbelief.
JL: What drew you to The Fly[1986]? It’s really about a mad scientist.
DC: I studied organic chemistry at the University of Toronto and I thought that I might be able to be like Isaac Asimov, a scientist and a writer. The fact that The Flywas based on some interesting and then-current hard science was what appealed to me. It wasn’t magic. It wasn’t supernatural. It was very physical. It was very body-oriented. And as an atheist, existentialist Jew myself, I really do think that the body is what we are, and that religion is a flight from that, fear of that…
JL: A lot of your movies deal with the human body…
DC: That’s right.
JL: I thought that what happens to Jeff in The Flywas like a form of cancer. In fact, in a lot of your pictures, there are projections of cancer and aging…
DC: Yes, but isn’t that intriguing? I mean, as you and I grow older, you can see what happens when someone, someone perhaps close to you, becomes monstrous. Monstrous in the sense that their body transforms as they age. And their mind, perhaps, starts to go in unpleasant ways. That’s close-to-home monstrousness. The more fantastical a movie is, and I include demons and stuff, the further away it is from your body, from human reality.
JL: I saw The Exorcistwith George Folsey, Jr. and Jim O’Rourke, who had been altar boys, both lapsed Catholics. It scared me, but when it was over I went home and went to sleep. Jim and George had nightmares for weeks!
DC: So, with The Fly, although you’re not a scientist and you didn’t go through the telepod, you are human and you have seen people become diseased or heard about people aging too rapidly or dying too soon. Any human in any culture can relate to what happens to the Jeff Goldblum character Seth Brundle in The Fly…
JL: So you don’t consider him a mad scientist?
DC: No, not at all. Not at all mad. I have read fairly deeply into scientists and their life stories… They are a strange breed, but they’re very human, and they’re not mad at all. They’re risk takers. I think most filmmakers can relate to scientists because we work with technology to create things that didn’t exist before, to explore the world as we find it. Directing a movie is similar, in some ways, to a science experiment.
JL: It seems to me that all of the mad scientists and mad doctors in movies tend to illustrate the falsehood, “There are things Man is not meant to know.” And you don’t fuck with God’s work. These films tend to be very conservative and reactionary and, although I hardly think of you as conservative or reactionary, all of the scientists in your films do end badly.
DC: Well, there’s a reason for that. As George Bernard Shaw said: “Conflict is the essence of drama.” It’s dramatic compulsion that makes me do it. It wasn’t God who made me do it!
JL: But the protagonists in your films do follow in the tradition of the scientist messing with “things he should not know.”
DC: But you see it is the things that he mustknow. That’s quite different…
JL: But in your films the “things he must know” end in violence and death.
DC: Yeah. Because it would not be very interesting if it didn’t. That’s what I mean by dramatic compulsion. It’s to make it interesting and compelling for the audience.
JL: I don’t think…
DC: Yes, there’s a kind of an arrogance involved, but there’s also a real desire to get to grips with the essence of human existence and the physical existence of Man and how that relates to the human spirit and to the human mind. My approach is more like William Burroughs’, that is to say, “Art is dangerous.” Creation is a dangerous thing, but we must do it. We are compelled to do it. It is in the nature of Man to be creative. We transformed the planet as we evolved as human creatures. You don’t stay out in the rain, you find shelter; you don’t accept cold, you build a fire. Immediately you are not accepting the world as it is. To me that’s just basic human activity. When you put this in a dramatic, scary but interesting context, you often end up with the scientist in a bad place because, in fact, a lot of scientists do end up in a bad place. Like the astronauts killed in the Space Shuttle explosion. Scientists are aware of the potential danger of exploring the things that they explore, but they feel an incredible compulsion to do so—a creative compulsion and a desire for knowledge to understand the world. My movies often examine the price that is paid for that. But they’re not really cautionary tales.
JL: Yes they are, David! Regardless of your intent, they are cautionary tales because they always end badly.
DC: Every medical discovery in the world has killed somebody, often a researcher or scientist…
JL: What’s interesting about your version of The Flyis how attractive and funny and intelligent Goldblum’s character is.
DC: There are many scientists who have suffered some disease by making themselves their own subject. And a way of distancing yourself from this terrible affliction that’s hit you is to examine it like a scientist. To examine yourself as though you’re your own patient or your own specimen.