Cronenberg's Cannes Comeback

The director’s stomach-turning new movie has him in the festival’s good graces for once.

- By Rachel Handler

THE FIRST THING I ASK David Cronenberg about is the abdomens. The Canadian writer-director, who has been described as the “Godfather of Body Horror” by some and “beyond the bounds of depravity” by others, has made nearly two dozen movies since 1975. Almost half of them feature somebody reaching into their own stomach cavity to pull out an object, shoving items into their stomach, reacting in abject shock as something explodes forth from their stomach, or having their stomach torn open and emptied by a malevolent entity. In his latest film, Crimes of the Future, which premiered at Cannes, the stomachs are the whole point: The movie takes place in a dystopia in which everyone is doing surgery on one another for fun, sensually slicing into torsos to gaze at, lick, and sometimes yank out the organs therein.

When I meet the 79-year-old director on the terrace of a French hotel room the day before the film’s festival premiere, I want to know, What happened to his own body to make him so obsessed with stomachs?

“I’ve had a couple of hernia operations,” he says from behind a pair of sunglasses that match his head-to-toe black outfit, topped off with a baseball hat for his 1999 film