David Cronenberg: "Artists are criminals and art is a crime"

• Official section The wound of sex, according to the most beautiful and disturbing fable by Fernando Franco

• Official section Pilar Palomero floods San Sebastián with emotion despite her self-satisfied oversights

• Controversy The director of the series 'Fácil' attacks Cristina Morales: "You can only comment on the money you have received"

says

that a good part of the ideology of his cinema is already embedded in his own body.

That dream of meat transformed by technology is already, now that he is 79 years old, a fact.

And so it is, that the start of his appearance before the press had to be delayed because the hearing aid that helps him hear what the ears cannot reach by themselves does not allow the use of headphones added for that of the translation.

"Also, I just had a cataract operation, so my vision is also new.

he commented from the dais shortly before starting an erratic journey of his own.

On Wednesday, the director receives the second Donostia Award at the San Sebastián Festival that concerns us and he does so while presenting

his return to the screen after almost eight years of silence.

Cronenberg says that somehow the filmmaker's job involves teaching what, perhaps out of education, we should not see.

"As I stated some time ago in a conference, I am convinced that art is a crime.

I share Freud's idea that civilization exists to sublimate the wild and primitive desires that drive us to murder and rape.

There are people who still do it, but they are the least.

Art is an activity that allows us to explore those dark territories to somehow exocize them.

Everything repressed needs to be understood.

For this reason, the original attraction of cinema is always for the forbidden", he affirms, taking a second and concluding solicitously:" I hope to continue committing crimes in the future with more films ".

The director says that he never thought of making movies, that his father was a writer and that, in some way, led him to edit his first novel at the age of 20.

"Then," he says, "it would take almost 50 years to publish another one. In between,

but, deep down, I still feel that I am a novelist."

Let's say that the kidnapping not only determined his life but, hurrying, changed his own history, that of many spectators, that of independent cinema and even that of meat that went from normal meat to "new meat".

And all because, as he says, back in the 1960s he heard that in a place a little further south of his native Toronto, movies were made without the intervention of big studios.

"The New York

changed everything. Suddenly, you could take a camera and make a movie with a little money," he recalls.

In 1970 he already had two tapes signed with his name: '

' and the production that now sees a new version

And from there, everything else: the new terror, the new mutations, the totemic adaptation of '

' according to the novel by JG Ballard, the success of '

', the romance with

since '

onwards... And so on until witnessing the death of Cronenberg himself (he made a short that he also starred in with his latex corpse) and his complete self-cannibalization, albeit metaphorical, that his latest work proposes.

Cronenberg eats Cronenberg.

And always attentive to see the future from afar.

All of his films, in fact, have something prophetic about them.

There is something of an omen (a dirty omen, one of its characters is heard saying).

The protagonists of

for example, move across the screen like ghosts with no past or future.

They expect nothing because they seek nothing.

Their only concern is to attend to that mechanical libido that makes them jiggle softly and obscenely between the folds of upholstery in a junkyard car.

There, perhaps the last vestige of humanity resides.

When years later, in 2012, the director returned to lock up an entire film inside a vehicle, these characters, tortured and rocked by the soft idle of a four-stroke engine, would finally acquire the consciousness of all the vertigo of a time harassed by all the crises (in addition to the economic, environmental and migratory ones).

There is only one possible shelter and that shelter is an illusion, only weather.

That's what '

' was talking about.

In

he places the human species before the possibility of its salvation.

The film recounts the life of Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), an artist known for his revolutionary and subversive performances and for his ability to '

' to an audience lit up like trapeze artists do somersaults.

With the help of Caprice (Léa Seydoux), a former surgeon, he stages the removal and metamorphosis of his viscera.

Timlin (Kristen Stewart), a researcher at the Office of the National Organ Registry, closely follows her practices.

And so on until a mysterious group appears to make Saul the prophet

"Can the human body evolve to solve the problems we have created? Can it generate a system that allows it to digest plastic and synthetic materials, not only with the aim of providing a solution to the issue of climate change, but to grow, prosper and survive?" asks Cronenberg, who has become his own messiah.

"I am very concerned about what is happening: the war... I don't know if we will be able to turn back this time.

I am not particularly optimistic," he adds.

"In any case," he points out, "it's not my job to be a prophet. I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm not a politician either.

.

He comments that it was never his intention to push the audience anywhere, that the obsession with the limit that is blamed so much on him is more a matter of others than his ideology.

"I am not, as Hitchcock said, a puppet master who directs the audience's reaction so that they laugh, cry or get scared when I say. No, I just show what I have experienced and then invite others to be them what they experience not the same as me, but whatever it is that my work motivates them," he says.

Cronenberg refuses to be called a prophet.

He claims to be an atheist, not believing in religions.

But, like a reflex action, he can't help but resist himself and even contradict his every word.

to disturb, to perhaps see what you don't want to see", speaks the messiah.

He speaks the last Donostia Award.

Amen.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more