Warm and fuzzy isn’t Cronenberg

David Cronenberg’s newest movie, “Spider,” is about a schizophrenic who is deinstitutionalized, enters a halfway house near his boyhood home and begins a downward delusional spiral that concludes with him confronting his demons.

“I do identify with having one suitcase with everything in it,” Cronenberg says. “I live a pretty simple life.” He is referring to his nicknamed title character’s threadbare existence, but it’s clear the director also relates to his outsider status. And, like Spider, who is played by Ralph Fiennes, he clings to it (though neither seems to have much choice).

Instead of spending his adult life in a straitjacket, however, Cronenberg, a Toronto native, has turned heads and stomachs for 25 years by directing a wide variety of offbeat movies. In the process he’s gone from cult favorite to critical and occasionally commercial success to somewhere in between. In fact, “Spider” is being hailed as a return to form after the mixed receptions accorded his last four pictures.

Early in his career, Cronenberg’s stock in trade was grotesquely imaginative, often metaphorical depictions of the ills that the flesh is heir to. Recently he’s operated in more psychological, less graphic territory, especially in “Spider,” though this hasn’t made his movies any more warm and fuzzy. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, he comes across in conversation as the sanest, most reasonable man in the room.

“He’s kind of Zen,” Fiennes says. “I love his lucidity. I love the way he listens. He’s alert to what is coming off of you. Particularly when you’re in character, but as a man he’s very acutely alert, he’s very observant, he notices everything and remembers everything.”

Memory, and its elusive nature, is the real subject of “Spider,” which was adapted by Patrick McGrath from his novel. (It opens a one-week Oscar-qualifying run Dec. 20.) Spider wanders London’s East End, revisiting his childhood in the company of himself as a boy (Bradley Hall), his father (Gabriel Byrne) and his mother (Miranda Richardson). As the flashbacks unfold, his father takes up with a tart (also played by Richardson) who eventually assumes his mother’s role at home. It’s not clear if any of this really happened, especially because in some scenes set in the past both Spiders are present; if only one is there, it’s safe to say the event is a hallucination.

“It’s an examination of how memory works or doesn’t work and how an identity is created from memories but the memories themselves are a created thing,” Cronenberg says. “They’re toyed [with], they’re revamped, they’re reorganized. Everybody’s memories are like that. Later in your life you’re reminiscing about something and your sister says, ‘No, you were too little to realize that, blah, blah, blah.’ And suddenly that memory is completely changed. Or we think we remember something but we can’t remember whether it was told to us so many times by family members that we think we remember it but we don’t, we remember being told about it. When you then think that a lot of what we feel that we are is based on our memories, that means our identity is up for grabs. It’s something that it is constantly under construction.”

The price of creativity

It’s hard to imagine another major filmmaker tackling such existential issues. And, of course, Cronenberg had trouble getting the film made.

It was originally budgeted at $10 million, but the filmmakers could come up with only $8 million, so Cronenberg, Fiennes, Richardson, McGrath and the producers all deferred their salaries. They didn’t have the money to pay their English crew in a timely fashion (the film was shot in England and then Canada) so, according to Cronenberg, producer Catherine Bailey was left behind in England as a kind of hostage until the crew got paid.Such difficulties are nothing new for Cronenberg, even when he’s attached to more commercial projects. He worked for a year on “Total Recall” and wrote a dozen drafts before moving on (it was eventually directed by Paul Verhoeven and released in 1990). More recently, he tried to get “Basic Instinct 2” off the ground but abandoned it when the threatened writers strike in 2001 prevented him from prepping the movie properly. One reason pre-production on the film dragged on was that Cronenberg and star Sharon Stone -- who, despite reports to the contrary, stood “shoulder to shoulder” on the project, according to Cronenberg -- couldn’t find the right leading man. More to the point, the studio (C-2 Pictures) insisted on who was hot rather than who was right.

One of the actors they were interested in, Cronenberg says, “was Heath Ledger. Now, he was 19 at the time. And this character was supposed to be a forensic psychiatrist who ends up having a love affair with Sharon, who, as everybody knows, is over 40. So they were a little sheepish when we said, ‘Will you explain to us how this 19-year-old went through medical school and became a psychiatrist and had a well-documented career and he’s also going to have scenes of nude lovemaking with Sharon Stone?’ ”

Cronenberg says that creativity involves a lot of waste -- wasted time, wasted energy. (“Nature does it too,” he says in a typical analogy. “A spider will lay a thousand eggs and only two of them will end up being mature spiders.”) He was also well aware of what he signed up for, by which he means that a studio film involves studio meddling.

His contempt for Hollywood knows no bounds. He complains that young filmmakers -- and the studios that bankroll them -- are interested only in other movies, not life, and that when as a young man he wanted to be Bergman or Fellini, that didn’t mean he wanted to make a Bergman or Fellini movie. (It’s safe to say the people he’s talking about aren’t aiming so high.) In a way, he’s succeeded. Cronenberg, 59, has created an oeuvre every bit as distinctive as his heroes’. And he’s still as resourceful and opportunistic as those pathogens he’s so lovingly created.

“I assume that if I don’t have anything more to say, then I’ll know it,” he says. “I don’t have a pension the way I work, so I might have economic reasons for continuing past the point of no return, but I think I’ll know when I’ve really lost it. But at the moment I’m still excited. I haven’t finished yet.”

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Call of the wild

A sampling of David Cronenberg’s movies reveals a thread of troubled characters in sometimes macabre circumstances.

“They Came From Within” (1975) Gore-fest involves parasites that turn people into sex-crazed zombies.

“Scanners” (1981) Super-minds read lesser ones, causing heads to explode.

“The Dead Zone” (1983) Demonstrated he could be creepy without being gory.

“The Fly” (1986) His first genuine hit effectively mixed horror, humor and romance.

“Dead Ringers” (1988) Harrowing examination of troubled twin gynecologists.

“Naked Lunch” (1991) Fascinating, but like William S. Burroughs’ novel, not for the squeamish.

“M. Butterfly” (1993) Bizarre story of a diplomat involved with a spy who is not the woman she seems.

“Crash” (1996) People with violently kinky notions about sex.

“Spider” (2002) Schizophrenic returns to scene of his unraveling, with ultimately unexpected result.