While legendary director David Cronenberg has dabbled in the small screen early in his career (he also helmed an episode of “Friday the 13th: The Series”), he’s now in development on his own creation, reports Variety.
The director of cult films such as Shiver, Rabid, The Boord, Crash, The Fly, Scanners, Videodrone and Naked Lunch, who is being honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Venice Film Festival, revealed that he is working on a long-form personal TV project during a panel on the future of cinema at the fest. But he declined to add any specifics, because he “can’t talk about it yet.”
Cronenberg has directed single TV episodes before. In 2015 he turned down an offer to helm the second season of “True Detective” because, he said at the time, he did not like the script.
The site explains that, during the panel, Cronenberg reiterated trenchant statements he’s made recently about the collective moviegoing experience in theaters being destined to die and how “he does not care.” But the venerated film director also clarified that he does not think movie-making itself is dying but rather “just evolving.”
“Today TV screens are getting bigger and bigger and therefore the difference between theatre and domestic viewing has become really flimsy,” he said. Cronenberg noted that this is reflected in the visual language directors are now using.
“The rule used to be that closeup shots were only done for TV, and not for movies. But today that’s no longer the case.”
With his genre background, we can only hope he returns to body horror, but it’s more than likely it would be in line with something like A History of Violence or Eastern Promises.
