David Cronenberg Doesn’t Regret Turning Down ‘Flashdance’ Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson: ‘I Told Them, I Will Destroy Your Movie If I Direct It’
Reflecting on his trailblazing career, Canadian icon David Cronenberg felt particular pride for the one project that got away – or, more to the point, that he pushed away with full force: “Flashdance.”
“You might be amazed [that producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer] were totally convinced that I was the right one to direct,” Croneberg said at the Marrakech Film Festival on Sunday. “Really, I don’t know why [they] thought I should do it, and finally I had to say no – I said to them, ‘I will destroy your movie if I direct it!’”
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While “Flashdance” honors eventually went to Adrian Lyne – resulting in 1983’s third top grossing film – Cronenberg instead delivered the one-two punch of “The Dead Zone” and “Videodrome” that same year. In doing so, he cemented a new genre that studied bodily horrors with a cerebral chill while giving the film lexicon a brand-new adjective: Cronenbergian.
“[My work has been] attacked for being horrible, decadent and depraved,” he grinned. “All of which are good things.”
“I called myself the Baron of Blood,” he added. “But at least I didn’t say I was the King – I was very modest.”
Whatever the noble title, Cronenberg wore the moniker with the same winking irony that suffuses so much of his work – using genre as a kind of Trojan horse to get his unique vision to travel.
“The idea of genre was a way of selling a film,” he said. “It was a question of marketing [above all, because] if you made an art film like ‘Crash’ or ‘Dead Ringers,’ it can be very hard to figure out who the audience might be.”
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