Well, that could have been a real train “Crash.” David Cronenberg recently revealed he was offered the directing gig on “Flashdance.”
Cronenberg (“The Shrouds”) said during the Marrakech Film Festival that he turned down directing the 1983 feature, which starred Jennifer Beals as a welder with dreams of becoming a ballerina. “Flashdance” was directed by Adrian Lyne.
Master of body horror Cronenberg may seem like an odd pick to direct the quasi sports film-slash-love story. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer didn’t seem to think so.
“You might be amazed [that producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer] were totally convinced that I was the right one to direct,” Croneberg said via Variety. “Really, I don’t know why [they] thought I should do it, and finally I had to say no.”
He added, “I said to them, ‘I will destroy your movie if I direct it!’”
Cronenberg instead went on to direct “Videodrome” and “The Dead Zone,” which both debuted the same year as Lyne’s “Flashdance.” Cronenberg proudly deemed his own work “depraved,” saying, “[My films have been] attacked for being horrible, decadent and depraved, all of which are good things.”
He continued, “I called myself the Baron of Blood. But at least I didn’t say I was the King — I was very modest.”
The body horror genre also allowed for experimentation, according to the auteur.
“The idea of genre was a way of selling a film,” Cronenberg said. “It was a question of marketing [above all, because] if you made an art film like ‘Crash’ or ‘Dead Ringers,’ it can be very hard to figure out who the audience might be. You are in some ways protected by the genre.”
Cronenberg told IndieWire that “there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on” within the current landscape of body horror, especially with “The Substance” and “Titane” among recent picks of films that continue his legacy.
“I must say there’s a lot of, and of course, some of them are filmmakers who have said that they’ve been influenced by me,” Cronenberg said. “So that’s kind of interesting and it makes me feel good. That pleases me.”
