Parenting & Family Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg is talking about children the way he talks about bodies: not as ideals to be perfected, but as realities you have to negotiate. The line rejects the comforting fantasy that directing is a portable “method” you can impose anywhere, like a plug-in preset. With kids, he implies, technique turns into tyranny fast. “Abstract technique” is code for a director’s ego - the desire to control performances through a system rather than through attention.

The intent is practical, but the subtext is moral. Child actors aren’t raw material; they’re people with wildly uneven life experience, verbal skills, and emotional access. Cronenberg’s phrasing (“go with what they are”) suggests a documentary ethic smuggled into fiction filmmaking: you shape the scene around the performer’s capacities instead of forcing the performer into the scene. That’s not softness; it’s craftsmanship. It’s also how you avoid the uncanny falseness that happens when a child is coached into adult-style psychological acting.

Context matters because Cronenberg’s reputation is “cold” and cerebral, the surgeon of human weirdness. Hearing him advocate responsiveness over doctrine is a quiet rebuke to auteur mythology. The director famous for control admits that control has limits - and that the best kind is adaptive. In a culture that loves one-size-fits-all optimization (acting “systems,” parenting “strategies,” education “frameworks”), his point lands as a small act of resistance: technique is useful until it becomes a substitute for actually looking at the person in front of you.