The first-time director on getting into the family business with her debut Humane, and making conversation with movie stars.
For a long time, Caitlin Cronenberg sidestepped her family’s calling. While her father (David) and brother (Brandon) were making their peculiar horror movies, she was becoming a successful photographer. The youngest Cronenberg shot production stills, celebrity editorials, nude portraits, and, most famously, the cover of Drake’s highly memed 2016 album Views. But seasons change, and so have her creative interests.
Cronenberg’s debut film, Humane (in theaters Friday), sits just left of the genre her family has so consistently embraced. It’s a thriller about kinfolk melting down amid a global ecological depression. In an effort to curb the population, the United States government is calling for volunteers to be euthanized, lest it institute a draft. A retired TV anchor (Peter Gallagher) has summoned his four squabbly adult children (Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Sebastian Chacon, and Alanna Bale) to announce that he has enlisted in the program, after which they will inherit his wealth. When a bureaucrat (Enrico Colantoni) from the so-called Department of Citizen Strategy shows up to begin the process, an unexpected stipulation requires the kids to appoint an additional mark. Cue the catastrophe.
Humane came to Cronenberg through screenwriter Michael Sparaga, a fellow Canadian she photographed back in 2007, around the same time she showed Ryan Gosling her buttcrack piercing (more on that later). Putting the movie together involved a few COVID-19 allusions, a lot of thinking about Succession, and one unlikely Beyoncé snapshot.
In 2009, when your book Poser was coming out, you said you’d “never had an urge at all to make moving pictures.” What’s changed?
Literally every single thing in my entire life. I got married, I had two kids. I spent 10 years shooting stills on sets, and then I quit that job because it was sucking my soul out. I self-published my first book, Poser, but my second book, The Endings, which was published by Chronicle Books, was closer to the experience of directing. It was actresses, with me creating a world for them with a backstory and having them act it out. That feeling of directing was enticing. I started doing some commercial work and music videos, and I realized I loved it. I think a lot has changed about my personality in terms of how much patience I have for certain projects. In your 20s, you love going from one job to the next. And then you’re nearly 40 and you realize there’s just such a joy in going deep on a specific kind of project.
Before Humane, what kind of scripts had you been sent over the years?
Before I was signed at an actual agency, which was right after the short film I made for The Endings, some random person sent me this food porn movie, like it was a pornographic food movie somehow. I don’t think I read the whole thing, but they were like, “Do you want to direct this movie?” And I was like, “I don’t think that I do.”
Do you mean actual pornography, or are you using the term “food porn” colloquially?
Actual pornography. Not hard-core pornography, but a highly sexual movie about cooking. Then I was sent a lot more interesting scripts of all kinds of genres. People definitely send me body horror thinking that’s going to be my wheelhouse. And I’m not saying it never would be, but from my experience, finding the perfect thriller is very hard. Maybe my standards are too high because I grew up watching all the best ‘90s thrillers, like The Fugitive, and now I can’t make a movie that isn’t The Fugitive. I think that that’s why I liked Humane, because it wasn’t trying to be just a thriller.
Humane isn’t conventional horror or science fiction, although it flirts with both of those genres. In light of what people assumed you would want to make based on your last name, were you consciously trying to distance yourself from that territory?
I would say no. I mean, I’m conscious of everything, but it’s really about gut feelings. I would have made a body-horror movie knowing full well the comparisons that would have come with it if the story had grabbed me and the characters had been juicy. Forging my own path happened naturally, because this film is so different than anything my other family members had made. It could certainly look like I made the conscious decision to say, “I will never do anything like what they would do,” but honestly, it was just a project that sat with me intensely. It’s hard to find an excellent script in that genre. One of the reasons that my dad and brother write their own scripts is because they want to make the idea that they have in their head.
This is fundamentally the story of a family unraveling, which is sort of its own genre. Were there any precedents on your mind?
Hilariously, we watched a lot of Succession over the course of the five years that we were working on making this film. When Michael first wrote it, it was pre-Succession, or at least Succession hadn’t become the thing that it is. Then I remember having a conversation and being like, “Well, we can’t cast him because he’s in Succession.”
Who?
[Laughs conspiratorially] Nobody. I mean, not that those people were being offered to us anyway. But we were certainly aware of Succession being the master class in family drama at a high level of intellect. I don’t think we attempted to mimic it in any way, but you certainly feel the intensity of what a family drama can be when you’re making one, and we had been pretty amazed watching that show.
What would you do if the government showed up and said you need to choose a family member to be euthanized?
I would probably volunteer because I couldn’t stab my siblings. I hope they would make the same choice. I guess if one of them took a swing at me I would consider other options. That was part of discussing the way the violence would play out. These characters have not had combat experience. One of them is a little scrappy because he was a drug addict, but it’s meant to be awkward. It’s meant to be hard for people to take a swipe at their family member, even if they kind of hate them.
Here’s the most important question I’m going to ask you about Humane. In the scene where the Citizen Strategy guy is getting Peter Gallagher to sign the paperwork for the euthanization, he spots framed photos with celebrities in his office. One of them is with Beyoncé, and it’s a photo from the Austin Powers in Goldmember premiere. How was that chosen?
I’m going to tell you exactly how it was chosen because I’m the one who Photoshopped it. We needed a picture of Beyoncé with somebody wearing a suit who was about Peter Gallagher’s height so I could then replace his head. Frankly, it was also an affordable syndicated photograph. We did actually purchase the license to use that photograph, and then the art department found a photo of vintage Peter Gallagher and I put them together. It’s actually Michael Caine.
Oh, right, because he’s in Goldmember. I immediately clocked it because I recognized Beyoncé’s hairstyle from that brief era.
It was so funny, too, because if you look at the one with Bono, we replaced George W. Bush. It was the two of them shaking hands, and we stuck Peter Gallagher over him.
Michael sent you the script in 2019, and you talked in the movie’s press notes about it gaining resonance during COVID. What changed as a result?
There are bits of world-building that are taking place outside of the house, with people’s extreme reactions to being put in an uncomfortable and fearful situation. I would take pictures of stuff out in the world and send it to Michael, like, “I just saw a bus ad for masks for children.” That kind of stuff — like the advertisements on TV where this soft-spoken voice would say, “COVID-19 affects everybody. We have a responsibility to do this, this, and this.” We certainly absorbed that. It was sort of fun to brainstorm the fact that this story was meant to take place only about nine months after the drama with the environment. It hasn’t been years, so when you go outside, things still feel pretty much the same, right? That also felt relatable through COVID, where you walk around your neighborhood and you’re like, Everything’s normal, except then you walk into a store and it’s this crazy energy.
One thing I wondered about was the idea of “the Asian collapse” — pinpointing the blame, in this case, on three Asian countries in a pejorative way, which is similar to what happened with the Wuhan breakout.
Yes, absolutely, like “kung flu.” That is definitely something that Michael was inspired by.
What was your cultural diet like growing up? Did David Cronenberg host movie nights for his children?
No. I watched Sister Act 2 every day of my life for like two years.
Really? The second one?
Yeah. I mean, I was a very fearful child. I was very scared of gore and blood and violence. I didn’t watch movies like that until I was well into my teens. My brother once yelled at me when I came in the room and he was watching E.T. because he said it was too scary for me, so I didn’t see it until I was 17. I was very sensitive. I’m still sensitive, but I have a little bit of a thicker skin. Except that I did see M. Butterfly when I was 7. It probably fucked me up. I was also at a screening of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves when I was really little.
That’s fun.
I had a panic attack and my mom had to take me out.
Okay, not as fun.
Now I’m pretty good. I can handle things, but I think I had a healthy dose of rom-coms and teen dramas.
You were on set a lot growing up, yes?
Yeah, I was on set because my family is very close. and my mom wanted us to all be together as much as we could. If my dad had to shoot somewhere or do post somewhere, especially when we were very young, we would go for chunks of time with my mom.
So I assume you weren’t watching your dad’s movies growing up.
No, there was an unwritten rule in our house that you could watch Crash when you were about 16. I waited until I was 25.
You also say in the press notes that you had to include some blood in Humane because your family loves blood. Do you have a memory of realizing that?
I was on the set of eXistenZ, and there was a lot of gross stuff around. My mom was like, “This is moviemaking, get over yourself.” But it wasn’t really until I started working on sets that I realized blood is so much fun: Look at all these fun things that people use to squirt blood, like squibs. There was a lot about the artistry of making those kinds of things happen that also was appealing to me. If you’re going to go for it, you’ve got to really go for it. I also love when people do self-surgery in movies, like No Country for Old Men. Anytime someone has to bandage themselves up or get a bullet out of themselves, I go nuts.
I always think of Tom Hanks knocking his teeth out in Cast Away.
Yeah! 100 percent. Anything like that. I just want to watch more and more of it. I don’t like cadavers, though. That’s where I draw the line.
Have you ever had to do something like that to yourself?
Nothing that dramatic, but I had a lot of interesting piercings in my early 20s. I think caring for them and having to re-pierce ears that had closed up was where that started. This is like a therapy session because I hadn’t even thought about that. I had the top of my buttcrack pierced at one point, which was a really unusual one. As it started to migrate, I had to give it a lot of attention. I showed it to Ryan Gosling once when I was assisting on a shoot at the Toronto Film Festival.
And what did he have to say about it?
He thought it was pretty interesting. I wonder if he would remember this because I don’t think anyone ever saw a piercing like that before.
What prompted you to show it to him?
A great question. I think it might have been just in conversation. I was like, “I don’t know what to say to you, so I’m going to tell you my interesting fact.” It wasn’t a flirtation. I was just matter-of-factly like, “I’m going to share this with you.” You do weird things when you’re, like, 20.
