You said interviews for the press tour of your first movie inspired this one.
When you’re traveling with a film for the first time, it’s incredibly surreal. You are building this persona and performing this version of yourself that becomes a media self that has its own weird life without you.
What’s the relationship between you right now talking to me and who you are?
An interview is an incredibly artificial and strange interaction. I don’t mind interviews, but obviously neither of us are behaving like people right now. We wouldn’t be talking like this if we met at a bar. We’re performing ourselves. On the other hand, I don’t believe that beneath the surface you can ever get to the point where you ever actually are yourself. There’s an internal performance that we all engage with in a day-to-day way and a performance for other people. Neither are real. It’s all performance.
If life is all performance, does that mean it’s less about searching for who you are than discovering the character that fits?
I think so. I think we’re constantly building ourselves, and the issue is who we are reflexively can be out of sync with our self-perception — and who we are is very much decided by our environment and outside forces.
Brandon Cronenberg Will Now Perform an Interview
The director of the provocative horror film “Possessor Uncut” argues that none of us are ever truly ourselves: “There’s an internal performance that we all engage with.”
Jason Zinoman
NYTIMES