David Cronenberg Confirms Netflix Passed On Series Version Of His Novel ‘Consumed’ Which He’s Turning Into A Film

Kristen Stewart is sharing an update about her directorial debut movie, Chronology of Water.

It’s a Cannes Film Festival legend. Supposedly, at the 1999 festival, when David Cronenberg headed the competition jury, he swayed his jury cohorts to award the Palme d’Or to the Dardennes’ “Rosetta” over Pedro Almodóvar‘s festival favorite, “All About My Mother.” Now, at this year’s festival, “Crimes Of The Future” star Viggo Mortensen put the myth to bed, stating that it’s a “bullshit” rumor and that the jury’s choice for “Rosetta” was unanimous.

David Cronenberg’s latest deep dive into body horror, “Crimes Of The Future,” had its world premiere in competition at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this week (read our review here). And it looks like the Canadian auteur’s first film since 2014’s “Maps To The Stars” is another extreme offering.

As women in the United States are seeing their rights to safe abortions, access to reproductive health services, and contraceptives slowly being stripped away by red state governors, a recent leak revealed the conservative majority Supreme Court may strike down Roe vs. Wade, ending legal abortion.

Cannes debut yesterday (May 23), during which a number of viewers reportedly walked out – some of them within the first five minutes.The film stars Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux as performance artists who grow and remove organs onstage before a live audience, and contains a number of gory scenes.According to IGN, the film’s opening scene, in which a young boy is killed by his mother, prompted the majority of walkouts, with another scene involving Seydoux and an open wound leading to many others.Despite this, however, Deadline reports that the film still received a six minute standing ovation after credits rolled.“I’m speechless, really — this is the first time I’ve seen this movie on a screen this big,” Cronenberg said in a brief speech, “I’m very touched by your response. I hope you’re not kidding, I hope you mean it.

At a press conference for his new film “Crimes of the Future” at the Cannes Film Festival, Canadian director David Cronenberg was asked about the film’s politics and the abortion debate in America.

In David Cronenberg’s latest genre twister, Crimes of the Future, Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux plays partners who are performance artists, engrossed in performing surgery (largely on the former) for public nightclub spectacle. They’re enthralled with the freedom they can take on each other’s bodies. All of this in a governing society that’s not too fond of it.

Matt Donnelly Senior Film WriterDavid Cronenberg attended the Cannes press conference for his film “Crimes of the Future” and called the United States “completely insane” for potentially overturning Roe v. Wade, which has kept basic abortion rights legal since its 1973 ruling. The director’s new film, which is a return to his body horror roots, addresses “who owns who’s body,” Cronenberg said.“I did write [the script] 20 years ago but you could feel, even then, that this was coming,” Cronenberg said.

David Cronenberg has unfinished business with the future, which is tricky, seeing as it already constitutes a significant slice of his past. His new film — titled “Crimes of the Future,” as in committed by rather than during that span of time — finds the master on the other side of his extended sojourn in high-minded literary adaptation, biopic quasi-prestige, and Tinseltown satire, back to playing the body-horror hits on which he made his name.

Just when his fans may have figured that David Cronenberg had called it a career (he’s now 79 and hadn’t made a feature since the misfired Maps to the Stars in 2014), along comes a film that only the Canadian maestro of the perverse could have created.

There’s a lot of weird fetishes in this world, which we won’t go into, but for David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future, the new sex is surgery.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film CriticMost filmmakers who want to unsettle you in a horror movie will reach for a familiar set of tools: slashers, demons, shock cuts, soundtracks that go boom! in the night. But in “Crimes of the Future,” the writer-director David Cronenberg is out to provoke and disturb us with something far more traumatic than mere monsters.Am I talking about the fact that in the distant future where the film is set, human beings grow mysterious new organs in their bodies? Or that having those organs removed through surgery has become, for a creepy rebel aesthete named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen), a species of performance art? Or that people no longer experience physical pain, and will therefore stand in the street late at night cutting each other for cheap thrills, as if they were shooting heroin in a back alley? Or that surgery itself, as someone puts it, has become “the new sex”? If you see “Crimes of the Future,” you’ll witness all of these outrages, and a few more besides.

Body horror king David Cronenberg is back with his erotic sci-fi thriller “Crimes of The Future.” The next screens at the Cannes Film Festival soon and NEON releases it domestically on June 8. And while Cronenberg gets a lot of credit for his own work that made it on the big screen, there are a handful of popular sci-fi projects that Cronenberg seemingly had a direct/indirect hand in helping develop–especially their body horror elements.

There’s nothing like a bit of controversy to kick off this year’s Cannes Film Festival. And this year, it comes from the mouth of Viggo Mortensen, star of David Cronenberg‘s “Crimes Of The Future,” which has its world premiere in competition next week for the Palme d’Or.

Nobody does body horror better than David Cronenberg. And in his first movie since 2014’s “Maps To The Stars,” it looks like Cronenberg returns to what he does best: a visceral, extreme take on humanity as we careen into the future.

Ron Howard’s first animated feature, The Shrinking Of Treehorn, has been acquired by Netflix, Deadline can confirm.

This month will see the return of beloved genre auteur David Cronenberg (“Crash,” “Naked Lunch”) to the Cannes Film Festival with his anticipated body horror pic “Crimes of The Future,” which boasts an impressive cast that includes Viggo Mortensen, Lea Seydoux, and Kristen Stewart. During a lengthy interview with Variety, the Canadian filmmaker talked about the studio offers he passed on during the 1980s that included a story about an unnamed Lucasfilm executive/representative hanging upon him when they reached out to him about directing “Star Wars: Return of The Jedi” after Cronenberg mentioned he only directs his own material.

Actress Lea Seydoux is heading to the Cannes Film Festival this month with both David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of The Future” and Mia Hansen-Love‘s “One Fine Morning.” The festival isn’t the only thing going on as the Cannes Market has led to the actress starring in “Emmanuelle,” a revival of the film based on French novelist Emmanuelle Arsan‘s iconic sex-positive autobiography, in an English-language reboot.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentEight years after “Maps to the Stars,” David Cronenberg is coming back to the Cannes Film Festival with what looks to be a big bang. Weaving together equal parts body horror and dystopian panache, “Crimes of the Future” instantly became one of the most buzzed-about competition films after Neon dropped the trailer on April 14, the day of Cannes’ press conference. The lushly-lensed film, which reunites Cronenberg with his muse Viggo Mortensen (“A History of Violence,” “Eastern Promises”) along with Kristen Stewart and Lea Seydoux, could prove as divisive as the Canadian master’s 1996 cult film “Crash” which went on to scoop Cannes’ very first Special Jury Prize for “its audacity, daring and originality.” Ahead of the start of the festival, Cronenberg sat down with Variety in Paris to talk about the long-gestating “Crimes of the Future,” the making of the picture, its underlying themes, while speaking candidly about the difficulty of financing challenging films, as well as his stance on streamers and  U.S.

Palme d’Or winning actress Léa Seydoux will star in Happening filmmaker Audrey Diwan’s English-language directorial debut, Emmanuelle, inspired by Emmanuelle Arsan’s novel and based on a script co-developed by Diwan and Rebecca Zlotowski.

Brent Lang Executive Editor of Film and MediaLéa Seydoux and Audrey Diwan are teaming up for “Emmanuelle.” The film will mark the English-language directorial debut of Diwan, who has received critical raves and won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for “Happening,” the story of a woman obtaining an illegal abortion in the 1960s. Seydoux will play the title role in the film.