David Cronenberg developing series for television

Filmmaker David Cronenberg is developing a series for television and that’s very exciting.

Writer and director David Cronenberg, known for films like Scanners, A History of Violence, Crash, and Eastern Promises, recently confirmed that he is developing his first series for television.

Speaking at the Venice Film Festival, Cronenberg spoke about his first foray into episodic drama, confirming only that he’s working on a personal project for television but that he “can’t talk about it yet.”

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Cronenberg joins a number of cult film directors – particularly and outspokenly David Lynch included — in proclaiming the death of cinema as it is and seeing television as the new medium for long-form experimentation in filmmaking.

Despite the sense of doom statements like these might evoke for the future of cinema, Cronenberg clarifies that the death of cinema means simply that the form is evolving and that old cinema is dead.

In an article for The Globe and Mail last June, Cronenberg wrote an enlightening and candid article about the state of cinema and the evolution of the art form.

"“I say, the human body is the reason the cinema was invented. The face, the body, is its true subject, the most photographed object in cinema. Cinema is the body,” writes Cronenberg. “Because the human body is evolving, changing, and since the cinema is body, it makes sense that the cinema is changing, evolving as well.”"

These statements highlight exactly what makes him such a visceral and uniquely affecting filmmaker. His subject has always and foremost been the body, technology, and their evolution together. It seems fitting that he should evolve beyond his primary medium in search of further exploring that evolution.

A television series could be just what Cronenberg needs to breathe new life into his creative spirit. We’ve already seen it work with David Lynch, who hadn’t made a feature film since his poorly received Inland Empire in 2006 but surprised us all with the brilliantly original and singular Twin Peaks: The Return.

Cronenberg’s last film was Maps to the Stars in 2014, which is much more recent than Lynch’s last project, but still carried with it a sense of fatigue.

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I’ll watch whatever he puts out and I can’t deny that the long form regularity of a television series is much more appealing right now than the multi-year wait between potentially lackluster films. I can’t wait to see what he comes up with.

Sources: Variety / The Globe and Mail

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