Wealth & Money Quote by David Cronenberg

Agony is an unusually blunt word from a director whose films often treat pain as an idea you can dissect. Cronenberg isn’t romanticizing artistic suffering here; he’s describing a mundane, corrosive kind: financial chaos that invades the set like a virus. The sentence structure does the work. He starts with a single, personal verdict ("it was agony"), then immediately moves to the unglamorous mechanics of why: money "disappearing", people unpaid, the production machine sputtering. It’s body horror, but for budgets.

The subtext is quiet fury mixed with fatigue. "Nobody got paid" isn’t just a complaint about inefficiency; it’s an ethical line. Cronenberg has long been framed as the cool auteur anatomizing society’s weirdness. This moment flips the image: he’s forced into the role of manager, negotiator, maybe even apologizer, watching collaboration curdle when wages don’t arrive. That’s what he means by "distracting from the process" - not the precious distraction of critics, but the basic breakdown of trust that makes filmmaking possible.

Context matters: Spider (2002) sits in the era when mid-budget adult films were starting to get squeezed, especially outside the studio system. Cronenberg’s final line, "harder and harder", reads like more than one bad shoot. It’s a diagnosis of an industry where daring, psychologically thorny movies still get made - but under conditions that punish everyone involved, and threaten to turn art into a series of anxious compromises.