David Cronenberg Says Cannes Audiences “Didn’t Get” ‘The Shrouds’ Because They Were Too Afraid To Laugh While Watching A Film About Grief

David Cronenberg certainly has enough experience to know when an audience is not connecting with a film.

Case in point: last May’s world premiere in Cannes of The Shrouds, the 81-year-old Cronenberg’s latest outing as writer-director. “They didn’t get the movie, partly because of the language and cultural things and the fact that maybe people felt if they laughed it was being disrespectful or something,” he said. “It’s the pressure of the Cannes Film Festival. We didn’t get the kind of laughs that I knew we would get, let’s say, at the Toronto Film Festival or that we would get here”

Cronenberg shared his thoughts after The Shrouds had its U.S. premiere Saturday night at the New York Film Festival (after a September bow in his native Toronto). “I wasn’t here while the movie was playing, but I hope you laughed a little bit,” he told the crowd at Alice Tully Hall. “Life without humor is not something I could bear.”

Moderator Dennis Lim, the fest’s artistic director, assured him that laughter had come freely and often during the film, which is hardly a comedy but displays Cronenberg’s laconic sensibility in many scenes. It tells the story of a tech entrepreneur who invents a way for the deceased to be connected with their loved ones, who view the deterioration of their bodies via a video-enabled burial shroud.

“To me, movies are children playing in a sandbox,” Cronenberg said. “you can get so serious about it because of the money, because of the time pressure.” The atmosphere on a production, similarly, should also be kept light, Cronenberg said. “I heard that an Ingmar Bergman set was actually hilarious and a lot of laughs. … That makes sense to me because the seriousness goes into the filmmaking.”

In a related effort to keep the energy and mood up on his films, Cronenberg said, he refuses to conduct rehearsals. He decided on that practice after rehearsals bogged down the production of The Fly, which went on to become an early-career commercial breakthrough in 1986.

Lim asked Cronenberg to reflect on how his real-life experience with grief informed the creation of The Shrouds. His wife of 43 years, Carolyn Cronenberg, died in 2017. Vincent Cassel, who plays the main character, Karsh, also resembles Cronenberg on screen, especially his swept-back silver hairdo – though the director insisted, “I did not cast him because of his hair.”

While there is a measure of relief from being creative while experiencing grief, “art is absolutely not therapy,” Cronenberg declared. “It is not therapeutic. It’s something else, but it’s not that.”

Once a screenplay draft is under way, he continued, “it’s the craft of screenwriting that preoccupies you, not your grief or your sadness. Then when you’re making the movie, it’s the same thing. The you as a craftsperson takes over. … And that’s the distance that you have and I think you have to have.”

Sideshow and Janus Films last month acquired all U.S. rights to The Shrouds, and plan to release it theatrically next spring.