Piers Handling is the director and CEO of the Toronto International Film Festival Group and one of David Cronenberg’s earliest fans. He is also the editor of the book The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg.

I saw my first David Cronenberg film in 1970 when I was a 20-year-old student at Queen’s University in Kingston. It made an impression, and I did remember the film when I saw it years later.

Stereo was David’s first feature-length film (he had made two shorts prior to that) and it was touring the university circuit. Its eye-catching title was a smart move for the student audience; who could resist that title? There was a also delicious irony in watching a film set against the concrete jungle of what constituted modern university architecture in the sixties – the film was shot at the new Scarborough College in Toronto – in a similarly anonymous duplicate of that alienating architecture in Kingston.

But, of course, Cronenberg was simply a young filmmaker in 1970, unknown. I saw my second Cronenberg film about four years later at a ‘retrospective’ of his work at the National Film Theatre in Ottawa. The program consisted of two films, both slightly longer than an hour: the already-viewed Stereo, and Crimes of the Future. I did not make the connection that I had already seen Stereo until the film began, but it became instantly recognizable within a few minutes. David was in attendance; I recall him musing that his next film would likely be quite different than his first two experimental efforts.

Never were truer words spoken! The Parasite Murders aka Shivers aka They Came From Within, was a full-blown horror film, similar in many respects to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Gone was most of the experimentation of the early work. Instead, the film was much more conventional and narrative in design and conception. But, despite the form, the content was still classic Cronenberg. Mad scientists, unsuspecting victims, a utopian belief in science which goes deliriously wrong and results in viral chaos, all added up to a delicious cocktail topped off with a wicked sense of ironic humor.

Completely immersed in Canadian cinema at this point in my career, I kept an excited eye on David’s subsequent career. Trying to come to grips conceptually with the Canadian cinema, I was intrigued by those filmmakers who challenged the overwhelming realist tradition that underpinned so many of our films. Cronenberg became even more interesting to me when Rabid was released. Shot in Montreal (as was Parasite Murders), I saw a smart, intelligent parable of the October Crisis in its depiction of a young woman whose body suddenly spirals out of control and results in a society hunting her down to destroy her. The political was invariably absent from the English-Canadian movie, but here was a smart metaphor for the 1970 crisis.

David continued to explore genre, morphing between horror and science fiction, honing his skills gradually. The real breakthrough, which pointed to greater things – a desire to go deeper, to probe further, and to examine a darker palette – was Videodrome. It convinced me that Cronenberg was destined to be one of our major filmmakers, that he would go beyond genre into the intensely personal and map out a voyage that would be as unpredictable as it would be exciting.

Nevertheless, Cronenberg was also massively under-appreciated in his own country at this point in his career – the early 80s – and was viewed as an aberration. I had just joined the then-named Festival of Festivals, and suggested to the director, Wayne Clarkson, that we program a major retrospective of Canadian cinema. We decided to spread this massive undertaking over two years, the first of which in 1983 would be devoted to Canadian documentaries and the first-ever retrospective of Cronenberg’s films – in Canada at least. David had by then made eight features. We also asked him to curate a personal selection of science fiction films. Finally, this was distilled into 32 separate programs – a major show by any standard. We also published the first book on David’s films in English: The Shape of Rage.

Working on these projects brought me into personal contact with David for the first time. Along with Bill Beard, one of the major contributors to the book, I spent many hours interviewing him for our project, shaping his retrospective, and working on the selection of his sci-fi retro. It was clear that David was meticulous about every aspect of the project, especially when it came to the presentation of his own work. I was hoping to include his early short films and some of his television films in his retrospective, but he discarded this idea. He wanted to present himself as a professional filmmaker – and in his eyes that meant all of his work that had been shot in 35mm. Anything shot on 16mm was excluded from the show!

He was shooting The Dead Zone during this period, so it was a scramble to hit all the deadlines and get time from him when it was needed, but he was invariably gracious and generous and considerate. We also discovered that we had another common interest: Formula One car racing – and to this day we spend as much time talking about the most recent F1 race as we do about the cinema.

The retrospective was a success and I think went a considerable way towards legitimizing his reputation in this country. Five years later we opened the festival with Dead Ringers. It is still one of the moments that I remember with pride. Helga Stephenson and I had taken the helm of the festival the year before, she as director and I as artistic director. We were aware that opening with this film was a risk but I don’t think either of us was quite prepared for the post-screening reaction. The film clearly divided our audience – the graphic gynecological instruments that David designed proving particularly controversial. But the critics loved the film. It was tough, but it was also a masterpiece, to this day one of his supreme achievements.

Dead Ringers was important for another reason. It was the first of his films to play a major film festival and be positioned in such a prominent position. It took another 10 years for him to receive an invitation to Cannes with Crash, but his subsequent work has been a regular fixture there, and eXistenZ played Berlin in competition. From the vantage point of 2005, it is all too easy to forget that David has only been connected to the major film festivals for a relatively short period of his career.

His ascension to the position of major auteur has gone hand-in-hand with this further legitimization of his career. It has also coincided with what I perceive as a post-Fly shift into increasingly personal terrain and damn the commercial consequences. As David has matured, the work has become more interior, less flamboyant, and certainly the palette has darkened and become more somber. I see far less compromise in the work as well. You are either along for the ride or not, and there are no concessions designed to flatter and win over an audience.

Having said that, I think that A History of Violence is unquestionably his most accessible film in years. Not filmed from one of his own scripts, he has nevertheless completely inhabited the material and made it entirely his own. It marks another pinnacle in his already illustrious career, and we are delighted to continue the long relationship between our festival and one of our supreme artists.