Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC studios in Soho. Thank you for sharing part of your day with us. I am really grateful that you are here. Coming up on the show today, we'll learn about some of the powerful images and a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about early American photography. We'll hear from Saratoga Schaefer, the author of the new thriller Serial Killer Support Group. That is our plan, so let's get this started with director David Cronenberg and actor Diane Kruger. [music]

In David Cronenberg's new film The Shrouds, a grieving man watches his wife's body decay in her grave, literally and lovingly. The movie follows Karsh, an entrepreneur whose wife, Becca, died of cancer. Driven by grief, Karsh invents GraveTech. The company wraps bodies in high-tech shrouds that allow mourners to access live stream camera feeds of their loved one's buried corpse. Karsh really just can't let go of his wife. He checks in on her regularly. He has an AI assistant named Hunny that's designed to look and sound like Becca.

He spends time with Becca's sister, Terry, who looks quite a bit like her. When vandals destroy grave text burial plots, including Becca's, everything is upended. The Shrouds was written and directed by David Cronenberg, who was inspired in part by the loss of his wife Carolyn in 2017. The movie stars Diane Kruger in three different roles as Karsh's wife Becca, as Becca's sister Terry, and Hunny, Karsh's AI assistant. The Shrouds is in New York theaters on Friday. It opens nationwide on April 25th. David and Diane are doing a series of Q&As around the city, including at Film at Lincoln Center tomorrow night and Friday night. First, they join me in studio. It is nice to have you here.

Diane Kruger: Hi.

David Cronenberg: Great to be here.

Alison Stewart: David, why did you want to make this movie?

David Cronenberg: Well, you're never really sure when you start to write a screenplay. You don't really know, in the old days, what's going to come up out of the typewriter. Certainly, I knew that I felt I had to do something to address the loss of my wife of 43 years. As soon as you start to write, it becomes fiction. Even though the incentive to do this comes from things that you've said, things that you've felt, events that you've lived through, once you start to write, you are creating fictional characters who take on a life of their own and start to push you around.

They start to tell you what they like, what they don't like, what they're going to say. They surprise you, and you want that. You want them to come alive. At that point, it's no longer a question of autobiography. It's a fictional story.

Alison Stewart: Diane, what questions did you have taking on this project?

Diane Kruger: Many. I remember reading the script and being quite taken aback by how, in a way, it felt different for a David Cronenberg film, even though all the themes that we know about his films are in there. I've been a fan of his work since I can remember, and so the opportunity to possibly get to work with him wasn't lost on me. I remember meeting in Paris, and I didn't know that this was partially based on his own experiences through the loss of his wife. We met, and he informed me of that, and so everything was different than what I thought. I remember talking and talking for quite some time, few hours, and, yes, just walking away with the sense of, wow, it's very personal. It feels very emotional and yet very uncomfortable as well, because we are uncomfortable with themes of death and bodies, and yes.

Alison Stewart: Was it emotional for you in making the film?

David Cronenberg: Once I'm making the film, it's not emotional. It's emotional in a cinematic way. In other words, you are a filmmaker. You're a craftsperson, and it's the craft of filmmaking. On the set, it's not like I'm sobbing through every scene that reminds me of scenes that happen. On the contrary, I'm thinking about lighting, about camera movement, about the actors and their dialogue. That's a good thing. You need distance. You can't be wallowing in it and make, I think, great art at the same time. You need a sense of distance. It really gets emotional first time you have a screening. When we screened it at Cannes, that was pretty emotional, because suddenly it's a movie and it touches you.

Alison Stewart: Directors always tell me that their job is to make decisions. That director's job is to make decisions repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. What was the decision that you made on this film that turned out to be really important?

David Cronenberg: Well, casting. Really, it's a part of directing that is not usually addressed in film schools and so on, but a huge part of directing is done before you're making the movie, and it's casting. When you have someone like Diane, who really is a fabulous actress, it takes a huge burden off you because it's her reaction to the characters, her reactions to the dialogue. I try not to direct very much, and I think Diane can--

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Diane's eyes just got huge.

David Cronenberg: Yes.

[laughter]

Diane Kruger: It is true. It's so funny because-- I mean funny. As an actor, before you meet a director, you have all these ideas of what they're going to be like, and especially when you know a director really well-

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Diane Kruger: -and his films have a certain style. They're all different, but they have similar things throughout them. To me, I thought, "Oh, David is going to be this cold, very precise, very demanding alien that I'm going to meet." He's like the opposite of all of that. Just that took me aback. Then he couldn't be lovelier. What's lovely about it is that he trusts you. He expects you to be prepared and ready, but it's a collaboration. He trusts that you know what you're doing, and he helps you get that done, but he steps back, like he said.

David Cronenberg: Yes.

Alison Stewart: My guests are writer and director David Cronenberg and actor Diane Kruger. We're talking about their new movie, The Shrouds. Diane, you play three different characters in this film. You play Karsh's dead wife, Becca, you play her sister, Terry, and AI named Hunny. How did you think about each of these characters as separate people, but also separate people who are connected to one another?

Diane Kruger: It took me a minute to figure it out. Thankfully, David had very clear ideas, and he told me a lot about not just the people that inspired those characters, but just in general what he expected me to do. I had a lot of fun with Terry playing a dog groomer, and just being this slightly cynical person in life was a lot of fun. Becca, she's sick, so you see her in various degrees of her illness taking over. They are scenes of great tenderness and emotion, and in a way, very lovely scenes to play because you feel a lot of stuff, and I loved her. Then Hunny was me in a suit and being silly, really. I had so much fun.

David Cronenberg: She's in a motion capture suit in a empty warehouse with 14 cameras around, so it's a different kind of acting, but it's still acting.

Diane Kruger: Yes, yes, yes, for sure.

Alison Stewart: David, in one of the first scenes in the film, a dentist tells Karsh, who's in a chair, that his teeth are rotting, and there's a darkly funny moment when he asks if he wants JPEGs of the picture. At least I laughed when I heard that. I'm like, "Did you just ask this man does he want JPEGs of his dead wife's teeth?" When you were writing the script, what was the experience like to write dark, funny lines, all while attending to a very serious subject of grief?

David Cronenberg: To me, there's no difference. The line was grief is rotting your teeth. That was the first line that I thought of, the first line of dialogue that I thought of for the movie. It actually set up the whole movie for me, I must say. All of my movies are funny. I know they're considered to be dark and horrific and this and that, but they're also very funny. It's like life. I don't know how you could get through life itself without humor. I think humans have evolved a sense of humor in order to deal with what the rest of the stuff that their brains are doing, their understanding of life and death, and all of that.

Alison Stewart: Do different audiences experience it different ways?

David Cronenberg: Definitely. Yes. You accept that as a filmmaker. You look forward to experiencing it. For example, our Cannes Film Festival screening, there were not a lot of laughs, and it's partly because the Cannes Festival audience is a odd one, because it's partly distributors, partly industry people, and some locals. I think they also thought, "Well, it's about grief and loss and death, and maybe we shouldn't laugh because there's a director in his tuxedo. How can we laugh at him?" Then a screening in Toronto, wall-to-wall laughter 'cause this is a Toronto movie. Screening in New York Film Festival, wall-to-wall laughter, which, to me, is correct. That's the right response.

Alison Stewart: Do you agree that it should be laughing in this movie as well?

Diane Kruger: Yes, there's definitely funny moments in this. I've seen it a few times, and it, to be honest, gets funnier the more I watch it, because I guess, as you said, I let go a little bit of everything else that's going on. I will definitely say that when I first watched, it had a very strong impact on me, just about the ending, and whoa, I'd never really seen a film like this. I was equally disturbed and amused. Also, I felt really bad about death and all these questions that just I got to do something. It's my time soon.

As time has passed, I was just saying to David, it has really stuck with me, and it evolves like now, when I watch it, I see so much beauty and so much love, and I see the absurdity and the AI thing. There's so much in this film that I think a lot of people can appreciate.

Alison Stewart: We're going to play a clip from The Shrouds. It's going to be when Karsh, he's just starting to enter the dating world again, and he's deciding to tell his sister in law Terry about it. You wanna set us up a little bit?

Diane Kruger: I'm sorry, say that again.

Alison Stewart: What's going on with Karsh and Terry. It's when he's first telling her about going on a date.

Diane Kruger: Oh, yes. Karsh is trying somehow to move on, find love again, or at least date, and so he goes on this date with this lady and his first date, he takes her to the graveyard where his wife's buried and is telling her about the shrouds technology. Yes, it doesn't go so great.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to this clip from the Shrouds.

Terry: Another bad date last night? Was she put off by your desperation like the last one?

Karsh: I'm out of practice. It's been decades since I had to seduce a woman. I'm never really sure whether I'm flirting or not.

Terry: That's what you get for having had a successful marriage. I don't have that problem.

Karsh: Should I give up trying to find a girlfriend, or should I just sink gracefully into terminal asexuality?

Terry: You'll never replace Becca.

Karsh: I'm not trying to.

Alison Stewart: Meanwhile, she's just grooming a dog-

Diane Kruger: Yes.

Alison Stewart: - as they're talking about this. Why does Karsh decide it's time to date?

David Cronenberg: I think it's just really the life force in general. He's a high-tech entrepreneur, and he thinks in terms of high-tech solutions to everything, including his grief. I think he comes to a point where he realizes that that can only go so far to providing a life for you. He's still a relatively young man, and it's just life force that finally says to him, "Okay, it's time. See if you can fashionable life with another woman."

Alison Stewart: Meanwhile, he develops this technology, these shrouds which you can wrap someone in. What kind of research did you do into burial practices to help you move this story along with the idea of shrouds being a big part of it?

David Cronenberg: I originally was thinking of this movie as perhaps being the beginning of a series. I thought that because burial practices vary so hugely from culture to culture, and some are quite strange and interesting, that it's always involving economics and politics and religion and all kinds of things that you could really get quite deeply into it if you were this entrepreneur and you were trying to establish these strange-- He calls it the religion of high tech.

To go to a Catholic country or a Muslim country and try to establish these strange kind of high-tech cemeteries, you'd run into a lot of interesting people and situations. I did do a lot of research because of that, and you can feel it in the movie. It's alluded to often, but we don't go to these other countries. The feeling that that will happen, that he will try to expand his empire of high-tech cemeteries, is there.

Alison Stewart: My guests are writer and director David Cronenberg and actor Diane Kruger. We're talking about their new movie, The Shrouds. It's about a grieving man who invents a way to watch his wife's corpse decay in their grave, and all kinds of things happen. It opens in New York theaters on Friday and nationwide on April 25th. Without giving too much away, Terry and Karsh, your character, Terry and Karsh, they take their relationship to a new level. We'll just say that much. What do you think is drawing them together?

Diane Kruger: The sister and his wife, and I think that's the guiding pose throughout the film, is that the ghost of Becca is very much there no matter where he turns, no matter how much he would like to move on or find love again, he can't escape her and everything and everybody has to measure up to that, I guess, to a certain extent, at least that's how I saw it. For her, it's a great loss, too. She lost her sister. There was rivalry between them, as there often are between sisters, but she loved her sister and she loved them and she loves him in a way, I think that-- The jealousy or the idea of losing him to another woman, because now he's dating in the movie, is pretty sad. It's almost like death again.

David Cronenberg: That's good. I like that interpretation. Terry, she-- That's how she can keep her sister alive, is to become her sister in this relationship.

Alison Stewart: In the film, you play Becca in these dream sequences, and sometimes they're disturbing, sometimes they're heartbreaking. We see the decay of her body. How did you approach these really charged scenes, Diane?

Diane Kruger: I got to be honest, though, all of those scenes were very difficult for me to play. I don't often do a lot of nude scenes. It's not my-- Not that I'm a prude. I just don't find them necessary often. I don't find them appealing often as a viewer. I felt very vulnerable, I have to be honest. Plus, the added losing an arm, being in the illness of it all wasn't easy. That, combined with being nude and then having to play these very emotionally charged scenes on top of it, they were very-- I felt her presence very much, and I felt David very much. I felt like I had to treat lightly with how I treated her because I loved her so much. I loved their relationship so much.

Alison Stewart: It was a heartbreaking scene when her hip cracks as her husband is cradling her. That was, oh.

Diane Kruger: Yes. I remember reading it the first time, and yes, it's just the need to be held and to be touched, no matter what's going on, how old you are, how sick you are. It just really hit me.

Alison Stewart: David, what did you want to evoke with these sequences with Becca?

David Cronenberg: I didn't really want to do the traditional flashback to happy times when you went to that spa in Norway and when you had the kids and birthday party and stuff like that. I really thought Karsh would be focusing on the end of their relationship and the pain of the relationship. Yes, he's totally body-focused. Of course, when somebody is sick like that, their body becomes the focus of an entire family, for example. Everybody's worried about the doctor, the chemotherapist, the radiologist, and what they said about the body, and so on.

I was really trying to combine all those things and the nightmare moments when the couple have to deal with her sickness, which is very physical, but involves some amputations and so on, and at the same time, deal with their continuing love and passion, physical passion for each other. That's basically was my approach to Becca's sickness.

Alison Stewart: We should also add there's a degree of paranoia in this film. People have different ideas about why certain people died. David, why did you want to add paranoia to the mix?

David Cronenberg: Because it has been my observation that that often happens when there's a Sickness like this. Because what happens to Becca is basically impossible. It's unacceptable. It's unbearable. It seems random and without meaning. We also have evolved to look for meaning everywhere. The death is a random death of someone in the family who's been hit by a car or run over, or dies of a disease very young. It's too random to accept, and so one of the ways that you can create meaning is through a conspiracy theory. The doctors did not take care of her well enough. They used the wrong chemotherapy. We should have taken her to some other clinic, or perhaps the doctors were actually experimenting on her. What if that's possible? That strangely empowers you. Instead of feeling helpless and with no meaning in your life, suddenly you can see through what's really the facade and see what's really happening. It empowers you. You feel very special. I've actually seen that happen in situations like that over the years. I don't see that too much in movies, but I have seen it in life.

Alison Stewart: It's so interesting because our next guest is-- It's called The Good Death is her book. She was a registered nurse who started a death doula institute to teach people about how to have a good death.

David Cronenberg: Yes, yes.

Alison Stewart: It's really interesting to hear you say that.

David Cronenberg: Yes. Well, a good conspiracy can--

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: Help you through death. Diane, how has this changed the way you think about death?

Diane Kruger: Oh, my gosh, I don't know. It's--

Alison Stewart: Or life. You could say that about life, too.

Diane Kruger: Yes. In a way, it's made me hopeful to be more aware of it, to say that while I am here, we should make the most of not just the spiritual idea of being in love, but also the physicality of it, to be present, to enjoy the time that is left. One of the lines that broke me the most in this film is when Karsh says, "I just wanted to be in there. It seemed so unfair that she would be alone in death." That really struck me, and so I hear that, and I try to figure out how that could be avoided if you're so lucky to find a person that you love, whatever that means.

Alison Stewart: Dave, right now on The Criterion Channel, there's your film streaming, going all the way back to 1969, Stereo. How do you hope your films resonate with people who may be discovering your work for the first time?

David Cronenberg: I have totally let go of that process.

Alison Stewart: Yes, really.

David Cronenberg: I don't care--

Alison Stewart: You care about it

David Cronenberg: I can't really care about it. I can't really control it, and I'm not really worrying about it, I have to say. It's a very French thing, for example, to say, Monsieur Cronenberg, how do you think your legacy will affect?" I say, "After I'm dead, I'm not going to worry about my legacy, frankly."

Alison Stewart: My guests have been writer and director David Cronenberg and actor Diane Kruger. We've been talking about their new movie, The Shrouds. It opens in New York theatres on Friday and nationwide on April 25th. I believe you have a Q&A happening tomorrow in the city. Thank you so much for being with us. We really appreciate it.

David Cronenberg: It's been a pleasure.

Diane Kruger: Thank you.