The idea that violence has a sort of viral or epidemiological existence, and that once it's in a population it tends to spread -- that's a David Cronenberg theme if I've ever heard one.

This comes out in specific ways. You have the story of the son who avenges himself against a bully. I tend not to do high school scenes; the sooner I forget high school the better! When we first meet him, the boy seems to be a pretty good politician. He can talk his way out of a violent confrontation. He uses his wits, he uses his humor, and he uses his lack of macho bravado to pull the rug out from under the bully. Therefore he avoids violence -- ever having it inflicted on him or committing it himself. Then he sees the celebrity his father attains after his acts of violence, and he's intrigued by that.

So you have to say: Are we talking about a genetic propensity to violence, or is it a cultural one? He feels that he wouldn't mind having some of that celebrity on his own level. Therefore, the next opportunity he has, he ends up committing violence. He's unrepentant afterwards and does connect it to his father. Genetically, I have to say yes, it's obvious that people have a propensity for violence. It comes from our animal past, our need to survive. But we also have that other thing, that imagination, that ability to abstract and say, "Well, we can imagine a world in which we don't do these things that we find abhorrent -- by negotiation, by diplomacy, by compassion, by empathy."

Then the only violence in the world would be the kind we have recently seen, natural disasters and other things we can't control. But we never seem to be able to attain that, and the devil part of it is, it's because we don't really want to. Is it because somewhere we feel that violence is a good thing, that we need it, that it's necessary, even given the evolved species that we are?

You've said that Viggo Mortensen was essentially a collaborator in making this film. How did that work?

He did some set decorating, and I've never met an actor who did that before. He went to the Midwest to hang out and hear the accent, see the body language of people and feel the rhythm of speech. But he also bought things: the little thing in front of the cash register that's for tips. It says "Fishin' money" and it's in the shape of a fish. He put that stuff around the house and around the diner, feeling that these were things this character would have around him and that they could be touchstones for him. Wherever he looked, there was Tom reflected back at him through these artifacts. He could find the tone of his character that way.

I really bought the body language of his performance. It'd be easy to play the rural Midwestern guy as shtick. A lot of actors probably would, especially since Tom is already a guy playing a part. But just standing in front of his pickup truck, cleaning the spark plugs, he feels real. There aren't any quotation marks.

Not at all. When we talked about it, we said, "No irony." This movie is not postmodernist. There's no irony involved, because that would have sucked it of all its power. I don't tend to do that anyway, but I thought that any quotations about the genre or about the Midwest would be a big mistake. Play it as real as you can, because the structure itself gives you enough unreality.

I can't help thinking about Lars von Trier, who is making films about America without ever even coming here. That's quite different, isn't it? The effect you're talking about is a lot subtler.

I would say so. I've only seen a little of "Dogville," and I haven't seen "Manderlay." But you don't have to see much of "Dogville" to get the picture, literally and figuratively. He's never been to America and I have. I've been to America a lot. I have relatives in Baltimore -- my father was born there. It's not a theoretical approach; it's visceral and physical. That's not to say his stuff is invalid, but it's miles and miles away from what I'm trying to do in this movie.

Your career divides pretty evenly between the films you made as a writer-director, up to the early '80s, and the films you've made since then, by adapting someone else's material. With the exception of "eXistenZ" (1999), every film you've made since 1983 has been adapted from some other source.

First of all, it's laziness. Writing an original script is very, very difficult. Second of all, it's momentum. Brian De Palma used to write a lot of his own scripts, and now he doesn't. It's very difficult to say, I'm going to take two years off and sit down and write an original script -- which I might not like myself, or I might like but nobody else likes, and then it doesn't get made. In the meantime, people approach you with scripts and novels that are already written, that have producers who are excited and will pay you to do the adaptation.

I used to see the same pattern in other directors, and now I can see it in myself. There was a time when I was very arrogant about that -- you're not really an auteur if you don't do your own stuff. Then I realized with "The Dead Zone" that fusing your sensibility with someone else's -- in that case, Stephen King's -- can be quite interesting. You wind up making something that neither one of you would have come up with separately. It's like a marriage. It's like mating.

The other thing is that you can bore yourself. Working alone, you can keep going back to the same routine, your own set of rails that might have been liberating initially and have now become a rut. All it takes is someone else to come at you sideways and you find yourself exhilarated and energized. If it feels that good, it can't be bad.

I felt an influence in this movie that I've never felt before in your work, and that's David Lynch. Those two guys in the beginning, the killers on a road trip, these forces of destruction with their aimless, pissed-off dialogue -- those guys come right out of a Lynch movie.

I knew you were going to say that. Well, I don't think David can be an influence on me, because as Nabokov said about Joyce, I was already who I was before I encountered him. But I can see where that comes from. Those guys, plus when you're talking about exploring the violent underside of an American small town, well, that's "Blue Velvet" territory. It's a legitimate comparison.

When I look at your writer-director films of the '70s and then at your more recent films -- "Naked Lunch" or "Crash" or "Spider" -- it's hard to avoid feeling that you've changed. The later films are sadder, subtler, maybe not as grotesque, not quite as angry.

Well, I've gotten older. I was just discussing that with Brian De Palma, who I saw the other day. We were wondering if it was possible to make your best films when you're older, and we both agreed that we certainly hope so.

We seem to have all these young filmmakers who made one or two exciting films and are now in danger of burning out or becoming hacks: P.T. Anderson, Darren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, David O. Russell. As a critic and fan, this concerns me; artists aren't being given time to become who they really are.

Hollywood can be seductive, and it's like what James Joyce said about Ireland: Hollywood eats its young. I had that happen. That happened to me: People would see that I had something interesting and different, and they came calling. But they want you to divest yourself of the things that made you unique and different and interesting. They want you to be Cronenberg without any Cronenberg-ness.

"The History of Violence" opens Sept. 23 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, and Sept. 30 nationwide.

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