Peter Weller stars as Bill Lee in David Cronenberg’s 1991 feature Naked Lunch.

Strange, the elements that sometimes bond an actor and director.

I met David Cronenberg in an Irish pub on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and West 76th Street in Manhattan in 1990 during a period that, for me, was as close to a nervous breakdown as a human being ever wants to be. I was in the midst of extracting myself from a relationship that felt like meat hooks being ripped from my gut.

A year previously, while shooting a film in Houston, when things were peachy, I’d inquired of a director of photography who knew David, ‘What’s your buddy Cronenberg up to?’

‘He’s adapting some wacky ’50s novel called Naked something…’

‘Naked Lunch!? William Burroughs’ bible of my youth.’

‘Yeah. That’s it.’

So I penned a plea to play Bill Lee. But, after seeing Lunch posters all over the Cannes film festival that year, I imagined a dance with Cronenberg was cast to the wind.

And then he called. And we met.

And we discussed a modicum of Lunch, a bit more of Burroughs and much of Phil Hill, Jim Clark and Wolfgang von Trips’ apocalyptic death at Monza, Italy – his Ferrari shot airborne, upside down, into the grandstand, decapitating and shredding spectators like a mammoth razor blade. My mother and father had seen von Trips win at Nurburg Ring earlier in that year of 1961. I was too young to go. But an obsession for both us, Formula One racing, was my bond with David.

Bogart said any actor is lucky if he makes three films that outlive him; as Saul Bellow surmised, each man has his own bag of poetry.

And so, ‘midway through my life’s journey,’ I lugged my personal angst up to Toronto to make, surely, one film that will outlive me with a director who is, at least, a unique and penetrating voice in this day of homogenized hokum, and, at most, a visual poet; and a poet in more ways than that.

For, halfway through the shooting of this story about a man mired in the hell of his own mind, David remarked, ‘This all seems very accessible to you.’

Yes, sir. In my tumultuous state of soul at that time, Naked Lunch was catharsis for me. And David Cronenberg was my own personal Virgil, leading me slowly out of my own dark woods, where the right road had been oh so lost.