there seems to be an element of Paul Verhoeven, in terms of the very dark satire. Who are some of the filmmakers you admire? I’m really bad at answering that. I have to get good at answering those questions but I suck at it because I like a lot of different film- makers but I don’t have that group of five that I’m really obsessed with, that I can list. I mean, I like Kubrick but I’m not obsessed with Kubrick, and actually I didn’t realize – until people pointed it out to me – that there were obvious Kubrick references. I think that sort of came more indirectly just because he’s obviously had such an influ- ence on film and I think I just absorbed that. So I don’t know... I like [Ingmar] Bergman a fair bit. Hour of the Wolf is pretty great.
Your dad’s so known for body horror that you must be con- scious of picking up the torch in some way. Does that come naturally, and how did you feel about putting yourself out there in that way? Obviously, I get asked about that a fair bit and I find some of the com- parisons are completely legitimate. I also think they get overstated to a certain degree because people are really looking for that. I’ve noticed that reviews of the film by people who like it tend to just mention it, but then you read reviews by people who hate it and they tend to latch onto that and use it as a way to kind of dismiss me as a filmmaker. But I think, ultimately, I just share some interests with my father; I grew up with him, we share genes so there’s a certain amount of honest overlap in our interests, aesthetics and abilities. At a certain point I was thinking, is this going to be a problem? Should I deliberately avoid getting into stuff that people associate with his career? But then I thought, first of all, that would be defining myself completely just in opposition to his career, and so in that sense I would be more defined by what he did than if I just ran with it. And also, the film represents my interests. So, regardless of how that re- lates to his work, I guess I just decided not to think about his career, and anytime I caught myself worrying about whether or not people would see it as too related, I tried to ignore that because it seemed like a bad reason not to do something that I felt was important to the story and was interesting to me.
What I took away from it is that there’s a bedrock of that “Cro- nenbergian” content but then there are these new, more mod- ern ideas being incorporated about body modification, the cult of celebrity, shady corporate dealings and reality programming. Well, I really just spent a lot of time looking at what’s already there and then exaggerating. You know, things I saw in the world, especially how it relates to celebrity culture. I think everything in the film is al- ready so close to what’s already going on now, it seems to some people horrific and absurd, and it is meant to be satirical rather than predictive. But I guess everything is sort of a caricature of something I’ve already seen, a half-mix of that media that drives people to do crazy things when they are obsessed with celebrities and that need for intimacy, and celebrities as deities and commodities. It’s all stuff that’s visible in our culture, so I just exaggerated, but in a way that I thought would counteract our habituation a little bit to stuff that’s around us all the time.
How did you come to be so interested in these themes? It’s definitely an aspect of our culture that I think is pretty fascinating and extremely grotesque, but the idea initially had to do with the dis- ease and the intimacy of disease, actu- ally. I was sick and sort of obsessing over the physicality of illness. I had something in my body that came from someone else’s body and there was an intimacy to that connection