Balance is not a word typically used to describe horror master David Cronenberg. But Eastern Promises producer Robert Lantos says Cronenberg can balance a budget like a mathematician.

‘It’s a treat,’ says Lantos, whose Toronto boutique Serendipity Point Films coproduced the US$27-million crime thriller with Britain’s Kudos Pictures in association with BBC Films.

‘Working with David is an opportunity to go on vacation,’ explains Lantos. ‘Because once shooting begins, David doesn’t need his hands held. He’s in complete control of the production, both creatively and financially. He shoots exactly what he says he’ll shoot. And he delivers ahead of schedule and under budget.’

Lantos and Cronenberg have walked up European red carpets as a producer/director team for the world premieres of Crash (Cannes, 1996) and eXistenZ (Berlin, 1999), but the world premiere of Eastern Promises at TIFF marks a first on their home turf.

Another first for Cronenberg was switching genres. In 2005, he jumped from gory horror flicks to slick thrillers with the Oscar-nominated A History of Violence, a change that made his films more accessible to a wider audience and garnered US$32 million at the North American box office and another US$50 million on home video. Yet Cronenberg says the motivation was creative.

‘I wish my movies were more commercial,’ Cronenberg says. ‘If you’re making a movie that costs US$32million, which is what History cost, or US$27 million, which Promises cost, well, that’s a lot of money. So being the resolute Canadian that I am, I take that seriously.’

Cronenberg says the ultimate factor in deciding which project to make next will be the script.

‘I’ve never dived into my projects because of their genre or their budget or their commerciality. I just don’t want to bore myself. I literally get scripts where I write back to my agent and say, ‘I did this movie 35 years ago and I did it better, and when I did it, it was the first one.”

Cronenberg received Steve Knight’s Eastern Promises script from BBC Films, where it had ‘languished for a while.’

‘When you get a script with something unique about it, for example Eastern Promises, written by [Oscar nominee] Steve Knight [Dirty Pretty Things], it’s exciting. It’s fresh. Steve has a very good insight into immigrant subcultures in England, and he has a good sort of lefty political edge to him, and I responded to all of that.’

Then U.S. firm Focus Features came on board as distributor and financier (Odeon Films distributes in Canada) and Cronenberg started working with Knight. ‘We just clicked,’ says Cronenberg. ‘It’s rare, but when it happens, it’s great.’

Knight has the only writing credit on the film, and the director wraps by saying: ‘As it should be.’