David Cronenberg

Los Angeles Opera and the Theatre du Chatelet of Paris will co-produce "The Fly," a new opera based on director David Cronenberg's 1986 horror film about a scientist who mutates into a human-fly hybrid, executives of the two artistic entities are to announce today in Paris.

According to David Cronenberg, each movie dictates how much violence it needs to depict. His movies, it seems, are quite the dictators. Over the decades, the 64-year-old Toronto-based filmmaker has stretched the R rating to its maximum with such horror fests as "Rabid," "Shivers," "Scanners," "Videodrome" and "The Fly." "When I did 'The Dead Zone,' people were saying the violence is more restrained; 'It's not like his horror films,' " Cronenberg relates.

AS Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg plotted the unforgettable bathhouse knife fight in their new crime thriller, "Eastern Promises," Cronenberg told the actor he wanted realism and "body-ness." The director wanted to challenge his audience to really experience the intimacy of such violence. "Well, it's obvious," Mortensen told him, "I have to play this naked." Boy does he.

David Cronenberg has always had something to say about the grotesque transformations that result when science and technology transgress the flesh, and the ensuing social breakdown. But there was a time when he spoke about it in the language of experiments, infections, mutations, identity-altering drugs, malignant broadcast signals, genetic accidents. Lately, he's moved away from the altered body to focus on larger organisms.

David Cronenberg is what you might call a textbook auteur. Throughout his 40-year career, from his early experiments in gross-out horror ("Shivers," "Rabid") to his inspired takes on outre literature ("Naked Lunch," "Crash") to his current phase as a sly genre deconstructionist, the Canadian director has assembled a fiercely coherent body of work.

WHEN it came time for David Cronenberg to choose how much violence to depict in his bloody art-house thriller "A History of Violence," the director settled upon what he terms a "practical approach": Less is more. "It could not be balletic or slow-motion beautiful, and it could not feel choreographed," Cronenberg reasoned. "It would be nasty, brutish and short -- which is what the philosopher Hobbes said about life in general." In the film, which opens in Los Angeles Sept.

A few years ago a handwritten sign was spotted outside a theater in one of Manhattan's more dismal neighborhoods. "Now!" it proclaimed, "The First Bondage Film With a Believable Story Line!" History does not tell us whether the picture lived up to that promise, but if it did it would be a leg up on the mind-numbing "Crash." The latest film by Canadian director David Cronenberg, "Crash" is not exactly about bondage; an ice-cold, sadomasochistic linkage of sex and pain is more its game.