Controversial Canadian auteur David Cronenberg has given us biological horror (Shivers), sex and wrecks (Crash), and mental disintegration (Spider). His latest film, A History Of Violence, is an adaptation of a graphic novel. But whereas Sin City had little to say about the world we live in, Cronenberg's film intelligently explores, among other things, the effects of violence in our media saturated culture. Below, he talks about violence, the media and why A History Of Violence is not anti-American.

Is A History Of Violence specifically about America?

I don't think so. You know, there's a saying in art that in order to be universal you must be specific. So I think every artist feels that he is dealing with specific things but that it also has significance universally. I don't think of this film as an attack on America. Having said that it is specifically about a mythology of America, which is a western mythology, which is also a cinema mythology, of a man standing alone, defending his family with a gun against other men with guns. And that's very, very American. And one could say that the Bush administration has adopted that mythology as its foreign policy. You know, we were attacked and so anything we do to defend ourselves is justified. So to that extent it is a criticism of America now. But at the same time violence is a universal human fact, and a very complex one.

Tell me about your take on the media's fascination with violence in the film.

Well it was done very simply but I think a lot of the paranoia that you find, particularly in America but I think in other countries as well, about violence in the street comes from the media. Every moment of violence is amplified to the point where people who have never experienced violence still feel threatened all the time. So I think our awareness of violence and our feeling that it's right around the corner is so much from the media, not from our own experience. If you really analyse why you're feeling paranoid, it almost always has to do with CNN [laughs].

Do you think everybody has the capacity for violence?

Maybe not everybody but most people, I think, under the right circumstances could do something like this.

How easy is it to get the films that you want to make financed? There does seem to be fewer producers around who are willing to take risks.

That is really true. That's another reason why I was interested to do a studio movie where I didn't have to worry about financing, and that was part of the attraction of this project. If you put yourself in a group of people you cannot work with it's obviously going to be a disaster. But I knew that New Line had a very good reputation amongst directors and that they had money because of Lord Of The Rings, so I didn't have to worry about the financing. But with my last film, Spider it was agony. The money was always disappearing, nobody got paid, it was very difficult - and it's very distracting from the process of making the movie, of course. So I think things have been getting harder and harder. The more unique your film is and unusual it is and difficult it is, the harder it is to get it financed. That's why a lot of good filmmakers are doing television. They do HBO movies. It's hard because you don't have much money and you don't have a lot of time but they are willing to make things feature film producers are not willing to make.

Can you tell me something about your next project Painkillers? You were going to do it before A History Of Violence, weren't you?

I was. In fact I could have done it before this because Robert Lantos [producer] wanted to do it, and I think I wasn't ready. I wasn't happy with the script myself, I still don't think it's ready, I think there's more re-writing I have to do, and as a writer I'm always looking for ways to avoid writing. So if somebody can give me a script and say I can do this instead, then I don't have to write. Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

So is the Painkillers script proving particularly difficult?

Yeah, it seems to be fighting me somehow.

Why?

I have no idea.

Presumably if you did you'd have finished it to your satisfaction.

As I've often said, you make the movie to find out why you wanted to make the movie. You really don't know at the beginning everything about it: what attracts you to it, why you wanted to make it. Part of the compulsion to finish it through all the difficulties that are there is that you want to find out what it was that you were doing, why it was that you were doing this in the first place.

A History Of Violence is released in UK cinemas on Friday 30th September 2005.