You've never made a thriller for a Hollywood studio before, although I guess "The Dead Zone" in 1983 came pretty close. But I was thinking about the thing you said once about your themes -- "disintegration, aging, death, separation, the meaning of life. All that stuff." Well, that's all here.

For me, it's just business as usual. I was aware that this budget was higher than on my other movies. This was with a studio, and the expectations are different. But all of that wouldn't have mattered if I hadn't been hooked into this story and hadn't felt there were things that were relevant and interesting to me.

I don't really have a checklist of things, though, like decay and loss of love and body portals. [Laughs.] It's all intuition. I just let the script wash over me and imagine the movie and feel that, yes, there's a lot here and it's going to keep me awake for the two years that it takes to make and release it. I ask: In the middle of the winter when I'm editing it, will I be suicidal or will I be excited? If the answer is I'll be excited, then I think seriously about doing it. I only get analytical about it when I talk to you. That's the truth.

You've also made very few films that are ostensibly set in the United States.

That's true. "The Dead Zone" was the last one. Besides that only "Fast Company" (1979), my drag racing movie, was set in the States. That's it.

You described "Spider" (2003), your last film, as expressionist, in that you weren't aiming for a totally naturalistic reproduction of 1950s London. This portrayal of an American small town feels like that to me. It's like the people are real, but the backdrop is a little odd.

I would say that the backdrop is pretty naturalistic. I talked to somebody recently, an American, who was shocked to learn that I hadn't shot this in the States. He bought it -- so I got one guy! Even Carrie Rickey of the Philadelphia Inquirer thought that those shots on the roads leading into Philly were second-unit shots of Philly, and they weren't. They're all in Toronto and we changed the signs.

But it does please me, in a theoretical way, that not a foot of this film was shot in the U.S. Because it really is about America's mythology of itself rather than attempting to be a slice of life as it's lived in America now, which is quite a different thing.

I almost felt like there wasn't quite enough sunshine in Millbrook. It's an ominous place from the get-go.

It's a moody little town. I didn't want to go overboard with the sunniness of it all. The scene in the kitchen, in the beginning, is not flooded with yellow light and so on. It's warmish, but not warm. I'm constantly treading the line between realism and impressionism. And of course the opening scene of the movie [in which the two roaming killers commit several gruesome murders] contaminates, in a sense, all the scenes that follow. That tells you in no uncertain terms to be a little nervous, however nice and stable things seem to be. There are things that are not so nice and not so stable, lurking under the surface.

How did you come to this? Were you familiar with the graphic novel?

I was not, and I'm still not. I didn't know this script was based on a graphic novel for a long time, because nobody told me. When I found out, Josh and I had already done a couple of rewrites. I said, "What do you mean, graphic novel?" and he said, "Oh, didn't anybody tell you?" They found me a copy and I looked at it, and I thought, well, we've gone so far in a different direction that this is actually irrelevant. In fact, if someone had brought me the graphic novel and said, "Are you interested in adapting this?" I'm not sure I would have said yes. I was interested in Josh's take on it, and he had already changed a lot. The novel is very much involved with the mob dynamics and very little with the family. Josh was much more interested in the relationship between the wife and husband, and I was too.

Did his screenplay include the two intensely physical erotic scenes we see in the film?

It did not. I added those scenes.

I thought so. There's a lot of sexuality in your movies, but in this case it's especially crucial. Those sex scenes are really memorable, and they're also the pivot points of that relationship, between Tom and Edie.

I don't ever feel that I need to put sex in, or violence in, because I've done it before. That would be the wrong reason. I really listen to what the movie wants; I give it what it needs. If you're going to examine a couple who've been married for 20 years and have two kids, and not explore their sexuality at all -- I can't understand why you would do that. I would feel like I was not fulfilling my obligation to this couple. You could call this movie "Scenes From a Marriage," and we were very aware of that. I needed to know what their sexuality was, so I would know how it changed.

Inevitably people will look at this movie and see it as David Cronenberg's political statement about America. Is that fair?

Certainly when I talked to Viggo, trying to seduce him into doing the movie, he wanted to know who he was working with. I flew to L.A. and talked to him, and we talked a lot about politics. We talked about America and the current administration.

I know where he stands on that stuff.

Yeah, well, we stand pretty much in the same place, even though I'm a Canadian. Not that we were making an overtly political film, but I think the political undertones are very obvious for those of a certain sensibility. They're invisible for others who are just looking for a good action movie. You could say, here we have the iconography of a western movie, in which an individual with a gun takes the law into his own hands. When violence is visited upon him, any retribution becomes justified.

OK, so is this the Bush administration's foreign policy, based on a western? Well, it's hard to avoid the obvious. When Bush talks about Osama bin Laden "wanted dead or alive," he's referring to an old TV series and countless other westerns. You take this language, this rhetoric, from old Hollywood westerns, and they're applied in a situation which you would think, you would hope, would require sophisticated diplomacy and cultural sensitivity, among other things. We're alluding to that, and not necessarily in a positive way. But it's a bit of a stretch, to go that far. As you can see, I have to work fairly hard to get that argument in shape. But in examining the reality of America and its ambivalence towards violence -- and you get that in the audience reaction to the film -- it's certainly discussing those things. Whether it's coming up with an answer or an agenda -- I don't know that that's really the purpose of art.

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