David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds recently debuted at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, and in a follow-up press conference to that screening the director revealed that his latest film came very close to being made as a series at Netflix.
According to a new report at The Hollywood Reporter, Cronenberg explained that he’d flown to Los Angeles to meet with a pair of Netflix execs about the project, and they were enthused enough with the director’s pitch to greenlight the writing of a first episode. That script was received warmly by Netflix’s execs, enough so that they encouraged him to write another episode … and that, apparently, is where the whole thing fell apart.
Said Cronenberg:
“They said – and this is a very Hollywood thing to say – ‘It’s not what we fell in love with in the room.’ Later, I felt that what they fell in love with in the room was me, which was very flattering, but not the script. I felt I can’t let this die, let’s see if we can turn it into a movie … It could be a series, but it doesn’t have to be.”
It’s hard to imagine any streamer passing on the opportunity to have their very own Cronenberg series, but then again, it’s hard to understand many of the decisions made by streaming execs these days.
As previously reported, The Shrouds stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, “a prominent businessman and widower who, inconsolable since the death of his wife (Diane Kruger) invents a revolutionary and controversial technology that enables the living to monitor the decomposition of deceased loved ones in their graves.” In addition to Cassel and Kruger, the film also stars Guy Pierce, Sandrine Holt and Elizabeth Saunders.
The film represents a very personal project for Cronenberg, who made the film in the wake of the tragic death of his wife. At the same press conference, he elaborated on the role conspiracy plays in the film (and had some harsh words for critics who failed to recognize its importance to the story):
“If you’re an atheist like I am and you don’t believe in an afterlife then the death of someone is meaningless… It’s very difficult for people to live with no meaning. One way that you can create meaning when perhaps there isn’t any, is to come up with a theory, a conspiracy, that explains why a person died … Whatever the conspiracy is, it gives you a sense of knowledge and power that you know something that other people don’t know. It empowers you. These very stupid journalists who did not see this, there was a purpose to it. You might think it doesn’t work is one thing, but to not notice it to me is a problem as a filmmaker.”
The Shrouds will hit theaters in France on September 25th. We’re still waiting to hear when it might drop Stateside. Stay tuned for further updates on Cronenberg’s latest as they roll in!
