Daily Inspiration Quote by David Cronenberg

Cronenberg, patron saint of bodily dread and cool-headed transgression, is talking shop here in a way that quietly demystifies auteur culture. The line is almost aggressively practical: directors have always had to sell the work, and he’s been doing the unglamorous circuit since day one. That matter-of-fact tone is the point. It punctures the fantasy that serious cinema floats above commerce, untouched by publicity, while also refusing the knee-jerk panic that every new platform is an existential rupture.

The subtext is a veteran’s impatience with tech moralizing. He draws a clean distinction between the underlying labor (promotion as a career-long obligation) and the changing apparatus (internet-era formats). “So that’s not new” is a small act of resistance against the narrative that the digital age uniquely humiliates artists. Cronenberg implies that what’s really changing isn’t the need to perform accessibility, but the speed, intimacy, and relentlessness of that performance: the roadshow becomes the perpetual feed, where presence is measured in updates rather than miles.

There’s also a shrewd self-positioning at work. By framing himself as someone who has always participated, he avoids sounding like an older artist dragged into modernity. Yet he doesn’t celebrate the internet, either; he treats it as a new skin over an old body, another medium that reorganizes attention and control. Coming from a filmmaker obsessed with how technology rewires the human, that understatement lands as its own kind of critique: the mutation is real, even if the DNA isn’t new.