Despite his international success creeping out audiences for more than a quarter century, David Cronenberg remains fiercely independent, grossly perverse and as resolved as ever to continue shooting in Canada. Starting with 1975’s Shivers, almost every foot of film the director has shot has been locally.

‘Some parts of M. Butterfly were shot in China and Budapest, but the rest have all been in Canada,’ the eight-time Genie Award-winner says. ‘I’ve never shot anything in the U.S. Spider is the first one where I’ve actually shot a substantial amount in another country.’ Nonetheless, Cronenberg remains one of the few domestic directors who can attract American and European star power and audiences.

Canada’s master of the macabre returned from London in August and settled in at Toronto’s Cinespace Studio 1 to complete Spider, his latest feature. The U.K./Canada copro is a psychological drama starring Ralph Fiennes as a troubled man who, released from prison, is plagued by delusions at the halfway house where he is sent.

Cronenberg’s easygoing nature, a large part of what makes the 58-year-old director so distinctly Canadian, seemed to trickle down to Spider’s exceptional cast (Fiennes, Miranda Richardson, Gabriel Byrne and Lynn Redgrave), making his 14th feature a smooth experience.

‘[Filmmaking is] a very volatile business and there’s a lot of stress and instability, and anything you can do to offset that is an advantage,’ he says. ‘I don’t need to stir up that stuff or put myself in an adversarial position with people. I don’t work well that way. I’m not good at it, anyway.’

The director admits to having been more rushed than usual on the 42-day shoot of Spider, whose US$8-million budget pales in comparison to the US$18 million he had for 1993’s M. Butterfly and 1997’s eXistenZ.

‘I hadn’t done an eight-week shoot for a long time,’ he says. ‘It’s usually been 12-plus weeks. But you settle into the reality of it. We were all very excited about what we were doing. There’s freedom in that, too, because we didn’t have a studio looking over our shoulders.’

Spider is a film built on small details and nuances, such as how a cigarette is rolled or what people do with their hands. Cronenberg calls it ‘au naturel’ filmmaking. From a director whose gauge of popular taste was dead-on with The Fly but way off with M. Butterfly, he admits it’s a style that might not be in vogue.

‘Whether people can watch a movie like this anymore – or ever could – I have no idea,’ he says. ‘But it does require something from the audience. They have to be prepared for the textures and the pace. It’s not a fast-paced thrill ride.’

Cronenberg points the blame for narrower audience expectations squarely at Tinseltown.

‘Hollywood has so pounded everybody to death with explosions that [viewers are] completely numb to subtlety,’ he says. ‘If someone engages with the universe of a movie, you adjust yourself to the scale. In a movie where everything is car crashes [this from the director of Crash] and explosions, you’re not worried about the subtlety of a line of dialogue or a hand gesture, but here, so we hope, that hasn’t been lost.’

Although the director wears the fact that he has never made a big-budget Hollywood film as a badge of honor, he came perilously close with Basic Instinct 2. He was in development on the US$70-million sequel to the Paul Verhoeven/Joe Eszterhas blockbuster with Sharon Stone and C-2 Pictures before the project fell apart. Although the film would have been distributed by MGM, Cronenberg insists it would not have been a ‘studio picture.’ Many people are curious as to what would draw the director of Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch to such a commercial venture in the first place.

‘The perverseness of me doing that project, I suppose,’ he jokes. ‘It was two things – first of all because I think Sharon is an interesting phenomenon and I like her. And then there was the script [by New York couple Henry Bean and Leora Barish], which was really quite good. It could have been an intelligent, perverse, sexual noir, and I thought it would be fun to surprise people, to have them admit it was pretty good.’

Cronenberg maintains the dissolution of the project had nothing to do with tensions with his leading lady.

‘That was something I read about,’ he says. ‘Somebody totally made that up. We were allies. We were trying to get the movie made the way we thought it would be good.’

All in all, the director is happy to have shot again in Toronto, where he has achieved a great level of trust with his crew, many of whom have collaborated with him since the early 1980s, and who exemplify Canadian technicians’ ‘can do, will do’ attitude.

‘I’ll never forget when I was doing The Dead Zone [1983], Martin Sheen said to me, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to be working here – these guys are fantastic,’ ‘ the director recalls. ‘At the time, all my experience had been in Canada, but of course he’d had a lot of experience everywhere, especially in L.A., and he said, ‘You don’t want to go down there. You don’t want to shoot there.’ ‘

If there is one area where Toronto is deficient for production, Cronenberg believes it is in its studios, many of which are converted warehouses, not purpose-built.

‘[Cinespace] is the best studio we’ve shot in since The Fly in 1986 at Kleinburg Studios, which was a real studio but a bit of a trek out of Toronto,’ he says. ‘At Cinespace we had air conditioning and relatively good height. eXistenZ was shot in a place where we had to design the sets around these huge pillars. A real studio doesn’t have pillars – it has open space. It’s just the simple things. It would be great to have some more real studios here. It makes a huge difference.’

When it’s suggested that Montreal and Vancouver offer purpose-built studios, it becomes evident that Cronenberg’s passion for shooting in his hometown rivals Woody Allen’s for shooting in Manhattan.

‘It would take more than that to get me out of Toronto,’ he says. ‘There’s a lot of stability and we have a fantastic crew here. What I might lose in the studio I would gain with the people I’ve worked with many times.’

Spider, in post-production, is slated for a fall release in Canada through Odeon Films. Helkon SK is distributing in the U.K.