David Cronenberg’s Spellbinding Double Vision : Director Refines His Mind-Bending Images

Finishing a TV interview the other morning, director David Cronenberg eyed a nearby glass of water. “Is it actually OK to drink the tap water here?” he wondered cautiously, having just flown in from Toronto to plug his new film, “Dead Ringers.”

The TV reporter gave good grades to the water, but advised against eating the fish that swim in it. “Fair enough,” Cronenberg replied with a grin. “If any fish come out of the tap, I definitely won’t eat them.”

Fans of Cronenberg’s guts ‘n’ gore classics will relish the irony of the 45-year-old Canadian being vaguely nervous about drinking tap water.

His new film, which stars Jeremy Irons as a strange pair of identical-twin gynecologists, is a disturbing psychological thriller. However, his previous films, which include “The Brood,” “Videodrome,” “Scanners” and “The Fly,” have reveled in the sweet smell of excess.

Teeming with ghastly images of eroticism and horror, Cronenberg’s tales have featured a woman who gives birth to a brood of slimy, murderous demons; rival mental giants who use lethal ESP powers to blow each other’s heads off; and the saga of a soft-porn entrepreneur, obsessed with hallucinogenic TV mind control, who rules a video empire teeming with torture, sex and murder.

No one would accuse Cronenberg of inspiring neutrality. Critics have celebrated and savaged him. His films have been shouted down in the Canadian House of Parliament. His makeup technicians have won Oscars. Director John Carpenter once pronounced, “Cronenberg is better than all the rest of us combined.”

Until now, Cronenberg has been cast as the headmaster of the Film School of Shock. But “Dead Ringers,” with its chilling assault on identity and madness, presents him as a true cinematic soul-brother to “Blue Velvet” director David Lynch. As if relaying signals from some faraway video galaxy, both film makers offer eerie, unsettling visions abuzz with images that owe as much to the artistic avant-garde as to traditional horror motifs.

Poking at a bowl of oatmeal as he puttered around his West Hollywood hotel room, Cronenberg hardly seemed like the sort of guy whose films are so gory that his actors once made him a T-shirt emblazoned with his favorite on-set exhortation: “More Blood! More Blood!”

An inquisitive, keen-witted man, he wears thick glasses and Cordovan loafers. He has such an earnest, orderly air that director Martin Scorsese once likened him to “a gynecologist from Beverly Hills.”

Yet contradictions lurk beneath that tranquil surface, as if Cronenberg perhaps had dual--or twin--personalities. A director who developed his own formula for screen blood (a cornstarch base with cherry flavoring), Cronenberg was once thrown out of his apartment when his landlady discovered he was making a horror film with porn star Marilyn Chambers. Yet this is the same erudite fellow who studied briefly under Marshall (“the medium is the message”) McLuhan, idolizes writer Vladimir (“Lolita”) Nabokov, quotes Freud and insists on brushing his teeth before his interview.

“I’ve never felt any trouble relating with my audience,” he said, taking a seat by his hotel-room window. “I always assume my own responses--what I find funny, what I find sad--will be in line with theirs. Some film makers, like Hitchcock, felt they could manipulate their audiences. They wanted to control them, like a puppeteer.

“But I see the relationship as more participatory. I feel like I’ve just woken from a dream and say, ‘Geez, I’ve got to share this with somebody.’ ”

But aren’t his dreams inordinately hideous and alarming?

Cronenberg shrugged. “Those are usually the ones you want to tell people about.”

Nearly a decade ago independent producer Carol Baum gave Cronenberg a novel called “Twins,” which chronicled the descent of identical twin gynecologists into madness. Cronenberg, Baum and producer Joe Roth optioned the book, which Cronenberg and writer Norman Snider turned into a screenplay.

“Dead Ringers” also owes a debt to the real-life Marcus twins, noted New York gynecologists who were found dead in 1975 in one brother’s garbage-strewn Upper East Side apartment. Like Cronenberg’s fictional twins, Elliot and Beverly Mantle, the Marcus brothers had been inseparable from childhood, treated infertile women, often passed for each other during examinations and fell victim to drug addiction and schizophrenia.

From the “Twins” novel, Cronenberg borrowed a key plot device--a famous actress, played by Genevieve Bujold, who has an unwitting affair with both men.

The project made the rounds at various studios, attracting little enthusiasm. “We pitched it everywhere,” said Cronenberg, fixing himself a cappuccino. “They were fascinated by it, but no one wanted anything to do with it. They all hated the idea of gynecologists. I think gynecology--as a concept as much as a profession--makes both men and women very uneasy. The notion of a clinical intimacy with strangers makes people uncomfortable.”

He grinned. “The studio people all wanted us to change the twins to lawyers. Everywhere we’d go, they’d each say, independently, ‘How about making them lawyers?’ ”

Cronenberg refused. Instead, he took the project to ABC-TV’s film wing, which promptly went out of business, and Dino De Laurentiis, who gave the project a green light and then succumbed to financial woes of his own.

By then, Cronenberg’s production team--which now included producers Marc Boyman and James Robinson--had already built sets in Toronto. After months of what Cronenberg dubbed “fancy dancing,” they’d raised enough money to keep the film alive until Roth came back on board, armed with a distribution deal at 20th Century Fox.

Then came Cronenberg’s biggest challenge--wooing Jeremy Irons, who’d initially agreed to do the film but had lost interest as delays mounted. “Jeremy’s agent sent me a telegram saying he didn’t want to do the picture anymore,” Cronenberg recalled. “So I had to frantically call him and remind him why he’d wanted to do the film in the first place.”

Cronenberg had originally tried to find a North American actor to play the part, but came up empty. “The role had two strikes against it. It was about gynecology and schizophrenia. The sexual undertones and the strangeness of the relationship made it a very scary part.”

Cronenberg then turned to England, where he immediately sought out Irons. “I’d seen him in ‘Moonlighting,’ which is almost a silent film. Jeremy showed such warmth and striking body language--he has the agility of a dancer--that I thought he’d be perfect to play somebody who had to inhabit two bodies.”

Still, Irons had reservations. “I think he was both attracted and scared by the part,” Cronenberg recalled. Was Irons perhaps a bit intimidated by Cronenberg’s own “no guts, no glory” reputation? “Well, he hadn’t seen ‘Videodrome,’ if that’s what you mean,” he replied with a chuckle. “But he was still enthusiastic even after he saw it.”

Cronenberg searched for the right word. “Jeremy has a taste for the bizarre. You could say he’s exotic, without being weird.” He flashed a wry grin. “I mean, you couldn’t have a real straight, middle-class actor play this part.”

Very straight. Very middle-class. Sooner or later, every profile of Cronenberg veers back to that unlikely combo. How odd for someone from such a placid environment--his father wrote a stamp column while his mother played piano for the National Ballet of Canada--to emerge as the cinema’s disquieting poet of horror?

How could a childhood fan of lepidopterology--a Cronenberg interview would not be complete without a cheery digression about angel-wing butterflies--become so obsessed by the bizarre terrors of disease, disfigurement and death?

Cronenberg offered few clues, insisting that he’d enjoyed a sedate childhood. He has acknowledged being especially close to his father, who also wrote paperback detective stories under an assumed name. And as a youth, Cronenberg was an avid reader of fantasy and science fiction, studying biochemistry in college before turning to writing and film.

His sister, Denise, the film’s costume designer, noted recently that the heroes of both Cronenberg’s “The Fly” and “Dead Ringers” suffer marked physical disintegrations, a fate she said was shared by their parents, who both died slow, painful deaths.

Cronenberg steers clear of family matters. But he freely admits to a fascination with death. “It’s certainly a constant subject of all my films,” he said, almost eagerly. “If you accept death as the end of life--and love--then every life’s a Greek tragedy. Look around. So much of our culture--our art, our religion--is an attempt to come to terms with death.

“For me, it’s a magnificent subject. You have love, sex and then death.”

Cronenberg is also fascinated by technical challenges. In “Dead Ringers,” many scenes--nearly 40% of the film--were filmed with Irons appearing as both brothers. Most scenes had to be shot twice, with identical lighting, camera angles and acting performances.

But Cronenberg grew more animated discussing the strange nature of twins. “It’s truly fascinating,” he said. “Imagine if everywhere you went, you always had someone with you who looked just like you, thought very much like you and who people always confused with you.

“There’s a strange self-consciousness to being a twin--it’s as if wherever you look, you see yourself. And that’s what this film’s about--how unbearable that intense self-awareness can become.”

The fact that Cronenberg takes pleasure in grappling with these provocative anxieties makes him particularly sensitive toward critics who dismiss horror films as escapist trash.

“My films don’t escape reality--they confront it. I dive right in. To me, ‘Terms of Endearment’ is a total escapist, push-button fantasy.”

Inside a darkened movie theater, with Cronenberg at the controls, the world sometimes spins out of control. “I think one reason why people go to the movies is to live an alternate reality, if only for a couple of hours. We all see things differently.”

He pointed out his window. “Let’s say we’re making a movie about a man on the sidewalk. You might take a shot of him walking down the street or talking to someone he meets. But I might take a shot of what’s going on inside his head.”

He tapped his skull. “Inside his head--that’s where the really interesting stuff comes from.”