Cronenberg’s trajectory as a Canadian filmmaker was unorthodox, but set a concrete foundation for off-centre longevity. Whereas most of his contemporaries toiled in the institutional confines of the CBC or National Film Board, or simply hightailed it for Hollywood, Cronenberg produced homegrown commercial genre movies like Shivers, Rabid, and The Brood. These early works, at the time largely dismissed – in Canada, especially – as disreputable grindhouse trash, are now recognized as stealth auteurist exercises. They might have looked like horror movies on the messy surface of things, but under the skin there was a pulsating, subversive imagination at work, a sensibility that understood genre as a sturdy vessel for the investigation of the human condition in all its mutant vainglory.

You could say this is the elementary stuff of many horror and science-fiction movies, but it would be more accurate to note it is also the arterial lifeblood of some of the late 20th century’s most adventurous literary mavericks: Vladimir Nabokov, William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, J.G. Ballard, Don DeLillo, even Stephen King. The reader in Cronenberg consistently proved far hungrier and more curious than the cinephile, which may explain the increasingly conspicuous fact of his singular style: he has always seemed more influenced by writers than other filmmakers.

“When I came to film I was pretty bereft of influence,” he says. “I watched cowboy films as a kid and, in the 1960s, there were the great art films of the period with Fellini and Truffaut and all that, but my influences when I was much younger were deeply, deeply literary.”

He now thinks that one of the reasons he closed the book on his writing ambitions for so long was so that he could find his own voice. As a young man writing fiction, he was too beholden to the voices of others. Movies compelled him to learn a creative language of his own. “It’s true that some of the early writing I was doing was just a Nabokov imitation, for example, but I felt quite free of that by the time I started to write Consumed,” he says.“I felt I had absorbed but also digested those literary influences and that there was no danger of just sort of mimicking.”

Cronenberg has worked collaboratively with writers in the most intricate, intimate sense. In adapting a novel for the screen, he creates a script that preserves the source’s tone and intent, but also strives to become an independent entity.

Little wonder, then, that he developed such close affinities with writers: that the legendarily misanthropic Burroughs (Naked Lunch) treated Cronenberg with almost paternal affection, or that the late Ballard (Crash) became one of the director’s closest friends. (“Just a lovely, lovely guy,” Cronenberg tells me sadly. “I miss him a lot.”) Or that he turned to King (The Dead Zone) for confirmation that his anxieties and insecurities during the years he was writing Consumed were, you know, normal for writers. “He said, ‘Absolutely,’” Cronenberg laughs. “Told me: ‘Just bang through it, David. Just get through it any way you can.’”

Excellent practical advice perhaps – especially if you share King’s legendary graphomaniacal tendencies – but not quite so easy if you’re David Cronenberg. For one thing, Cronenberg doesn’t “bang through” anything. He contemplates each detail with clinical precision, and doesn’t proceed until it has been meticulously calculated, strategized, and considered.

“It’s interesting,” Cronenberg says, “I might once have had the illusion that if you did a big movie with a studio then you didn’t have to worry about financing, that it would all happen fast. And I realize it’s absolutely not the case. None of these things happens fast, so why should a novel?”