‘It’s a matter of economics. We’re small. In order to survive, we have to give people something they can’t get anywhere else.’

-Max Renn, from Videodrome (1983)

The line is uttered by a sleazy cable TV exec in one of David Cronenberg’s most famous films, but it also explains how the director himself has managed to flourish in the Canadian film industry for the past 30 years.

The elements most characteristic of the Toronto filmmaker’s oeuvre are likely graphic depictions of violence, gore and sex – and he has done all he can to promote that image, even proclaiming himself the ‘Baron of Blood.’ (He does, however, object to the nickname Dave ‘Deprave’ Cronenberg.)

These qualities run rampant in his very first commercial feature, 1975’s Shivers, produced by a young Canadian producer named Ivan Reitman for Montreal’s Cinepix. Made for a paltry $180,000, the horror film, also known as They Came from Within and The Parasite Murders, tells the story of sexually oriented parasites attacking the inhabitants of an apartment complex.

Originally, Cronenberg had set out as an experimental filmmaker with a couple of student shorts while at the University of Toronto, following up with the long-form works Stereo and Crimes of the Future in the late 1960s. His influences at the time were less akin to Hollywood horror-meister Roger Corman than to the New York underground and mavericks such as Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger and David Secter, a fellow U of T student who had made the groundbreaking feature Winter Kept Us Warm (1965).

Making Shivers, as personal as the film is, was a conscious step in a commercial direction for the young director. He had his first taste of the biz when, while travelling through Europe in the early 1970s, he attended the Cannes Film Festival, crashing on a couch in the office of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada).

‘I felt [experimental filmmaking] was a dead end for me. I couldn’t keep doing that. I would have to either do something else – I still had ambitions to be a novelist – or become a professional filmmaker, which meant I had to make movies in such a way that I would be paid and that would be my life’s work.’ Cronenberg offered this insight during an exclusive interview at an uptown Toronto diner while anticipating a barrage of press dates for his latest feature, A History of Violence.

The director proved right off the bat that there was an audience for his extreme brand of horror and gore when Shivers quickly turned a profit. It also helped forge Canada’s international reputation for producing disturbing movies with twisted sex and violence, and launched a career-spanning relationship between Cronenberg and controversy.

Most famously, Saturday Night magazine’s Robert Fulford, a previous champion of Stereo, wrote a cover story proclaiming Shivers ‘the most repulsive movie I’ve ever seen’ and remarking that if that’s the kind of production the CFDC was backing, then our nation was better off without a film industry. The topic was even debated in the House of Commons.

Times and sentiments have changed, however, and today Telefilm Canada, under direction from Heritage, is pushing for more English-Canadian genre films, such as horror flicks, that have a decent chance of succeeding at the box office.

The furor over Shivers is the kind of publicity Cronenberg has hardly shunned over the course of four decades. His second feature, a bigger success for Cinepix, was Rabid (1977), about a woman who develops a taste for blood after experimental surgery, starring porn queen Marilyn Chambers. Dark thrillers Scanners (1981) and Videodrome found new cinematic ways to abuse the human body, and when Hollywood funny-man Mel Brooks approached Cronenberg to reinterpret the classic 1958 horror film The Fly, the resulting film sat atop the North American box office chart for three weeks in 1986, eventually taking in more than US$40 million and introducing a wide U.S. audience to the director’s gross-out fascinations. It also received an Academy Award for makeup for Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis. Cronenberg cites the film as the beginning of his work being taken seriously by critics.

And from there the kudos have snowballed. Cronenberg’s films have raked in a total of 27 Genie Awards, including 10 for Dead Ringers, eight for Naked Lunch, six for Crash, and best director nods for Videodrome and Spider. In 1999, he was presented with a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for lifetime achievement in film. He is also highly revered abroad, especially in Europe, where France awarded him the National Order of Arts and Letters in 2002. And he’s set to receive a lifetime achievement award at the Stockholm International Film Festival this November.

No Cronenberg film has polarized audiences to the extent of 1996’s Crash. An adaptation of a novel by JG Ballard, Crash follows a group of men and women who get their sexual kicks from combining car accidents and coupling. Calls to ban the film were particularly prevalent in the U.K., where the Daily Mail wrote, ‘The film is sick. It should not be shown.’ Nonetheless, a divided Cannes jury saw fit to award the film a special prize for ‘daring, originality and audacity.’

For his part, Cronenberg does not see the film as depraved. ‘Everybody is redeemed in Crash, as far as I’m concerned,’ he explains. ‘There’s the Christian version of redemption, then there’s the existentialist version of redemption and, for me, it’s got to be existentialist, because the Christian one doesn’t cut it.’

The recurring theme of the mutation – or mutilation – of the human body is more than just cheap sensationalism to the director. A former science student, he is genuinely fascinated by how things work, whether they be a bizarre set of gynecological tools in Dead Ringers, cars – in the surprisingly conventional drag-racing flick Fast Company – or the body, as in most of his films, including A History of Violence. And he feels compelled to visually deconstruct these objects for the viewer.

‘[Humans] constantly are trying to figure out the way things work. Sometimes that leads us to philosophy and religion, and sometimes it really leads us to interesting technology,’ Cronenberg explains. ‘Bunny rabbits don’t really do that. They accept things the way they are and they kind of roll with it. We’ve never done that. We want to know how things work. We want to take things apart, including human bodies. Filmmakers are just exaggerated versions of that [propensity].’

History, written by Josh Olson from a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, is slated for its North American premiere as a gala at the Toronto International Film Festival, followed by release in major Canadian and U.S. centers on Sept. 23. The thriller, backed by Hollywood’s New Line Cinema, boasts Cronenberg’s biggest budget to date and stars Viggo Mortensen (Hidalgo and the Lord of the Rings trilogy), Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt. The director likes to describe the twist-heavy film, which plays like a modern western, as the story of ‘the noble homesteader [Mortensen] protecting his ranch from the bad guys.’

The movie launched at Cannes, where it drew perhaps the most enthusiastic reviews of the 62-year-old director’s career. ‘It should delight mainstream audiences who prefer their action pictures to have some depth of character, several twists in the plot and a satisfying conclusion,’ wrote The Hollywood Reporter.

History is also Cronenberg’s most accessible film to date, even more so than The Dead Zone, his popular 1983 Stephen King adaptation. It focuses on a seemingly normal small-town Indiana family, but harsh events unfold and difficult moral questions are raised.

New Line execs, keeping their U.S. audience in mind, expressed some concerns when they finally saw Cronenberg’s cut. But that had less to do with the film’s violence, which is infrequent though impactful, than with the sex. Apparently, the film is the first Hollywood studio picture to graphically depict an act of ‘soixante-neuf,’ to use the director’s terminology. But the positive response at Cannes and the fact that the Motion Picture Association of America has allowed the film an R rating means it will not have to undergo any cuts. Domestically, where the film is being released through Alliance Atlantis, it has so far received an 18A label in Ontario and the Maritimes and a 16-plus in Quebec.

History is the director’s first true Hollywood studio picture, and he says the experience has been overwhelmingly positive. He made The Dead Zone for international producer Dino De Laurentiis and The Fly for Brooks, so even though those films were distributed by Paramount and Fox, respectively, there was an independent producer between him and the studios, whereas New Line took a more hands-on approach.

Nonetheless, like all his other films, History was shot in Canada, primarily in Millbrook, ON and at Toronto Film Studios. (M. Butterfly was shot in Toronto, China, Hungary and France.) That arrangement worked out well for all concerned. New Line wanted the financial benefits and quality crews that come with shooting north of the 49th, while Cronenberg would rarely have to leave his hometown.

‘I like to go home at night,’ he says. ‘I’m not somebody like [German director] Werner Herzog, who has to be shooting in a jungle with his life threatened, to feel like I’m really making a movie. That’s not where the excitement is [for me].’

With History, Cronenberg has seemingly succeeded on Hollywood’s terms and reached another milestone in his storied career. So what’s left to do – ride off into the sunset?

‘Retirement’s not even in my mind,’ he says. ‘Every once in awhile, you can get depressed about the biz and say, ‘maybe I should do something else.’ But I suppose everybody in every business must have a moment [like that]. But as long as I can keep making movies… I can’t see me not wanting to.’