"But when you're writing a script - for me anyway - you have to sort of create an enforced innocence. You have to divest yourself of worrying about a lot of stuff like what movies are hot, what movies are not hot, what the budget of this movie might be"
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Cronenberg is describing a kind of self-induced amnesia: the deliberate decision to forget the marketplace so the imagination can get its hands dirty. “Enforced innocence” is a sly phrase from a filmmaker famous for body horror and philosophical dread. He’s not talking about being naive; he’s talking about manufacturing naivete as a working method, like putting blinders on a racehorse so it runs straight toward the strange thing it wants.
The intent is practical. Scripts die in utero when they’re written as responses to trends, budgets, or imagined executives. Cronenberg’s line admits how quickly a writer’s inner censor starts auditioning for approval: Is this “hot”? Is this financeable? Will an audience “go for it”? His solution is to divest - to strip away the ambient noise of the industry until the only remaining pressure is the story’s own internal logic.
The subtext is a defense of auteur risk in a system built to punish it. “For me anyway” matters: he’s not preaching a universal rule, he’s naming a survival tactic for making personal cinema inside a commercial machine. In Cronenberg’s career context - movies that hinge on uncomfortable ideas, from invasive technology to unstable identity - trend-chasing would be fatal. Those films work because they feel un-compromised, like they were dreamed up in a sealed room, then released into the world.
It’s also a quiet provocation: innocence here isn’t purity, it’s freedom from anticipatory obedience. You earn it by refusing to write with the algorithm looking over your shoulder.
The intent is practical. Scripts die in utero when they’re written as responses to trends, budgets, or imagined executives. Cronenberg’s line admits how quickly a writer’s inner censor starts auditioning for approval: Is this “hot”? Is this financeable? Will an audience “go for it”? His solution is to divest - to strip away the ambient noise of the industry until the only remaining pressure is the story’s own internal logic.
The subtext is a defense of auteur risk in a system built to punish it. “For me anyway” matters: he’s not preaching a universal rule, he’s naming a survival tactic for making personal cinema inside a commercial machine. In Cronenberg’s career context - movies that hinge on uncomfortable ideas, from invasive technology to unstable identity - trend-chasing would be fatal. Those films work because they feel un-compromised, like they were dreamed up in a sealed room, then released into the world.
It’s also a quiet provocation: innocence here isn’t purity, it’s freedom from anticipatory obedience. You earn it by refusing to write with the algorithm looking over your shoulder.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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