David Cronenberg draws a map to his Maps to the Stars

Over his nearly five-decade career, Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg has given us surreal worlds populated by dangerous people, from the telepaths of Scanners to the drug-addled psychic landscape of William S. Burroughs in Naked Lunch.

With his latest film, Maps to the Stars, Cronenberg, who turns 72 next month, explores his most bizarre world yet: contemporary Los Angeles. The weirdness starts with this: Though he has made several films set in the United States, Maps to the Stars marks the first time that the director has shot any footage in this country.

The movie explores the lives of a dysfunctional family trying to deal with the return of a troublesome daughter. Julianne Moore took home the Best Actress prize at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for her portrayal of an actress desperate to make a comeback by playing her own tragic mother. (She also won a Best Actress Oscar February 22 for Still Alice.]

The Pitch called Cronenberg in his native Toronto, and he admitted that Tinseltown was, in its own way, as odd a subject as, say, people getting sexual fulfillment from car wrecks in Crash, species unnaturally merging in The Fly, or a future-seeing Stephen King creation in The Dead Zone.

The Pitch: The world in Maps to the Stars strikes me as a lot like the one in Naked Lunch in that the surroundings seem surreal and everyone seems to be in a heightened state.

Cronenberg: Actually, I think not. (Laughs.) I’ll tell you why: A lot of people have tried to tag Maps as a satire, and Bruce Wagner [Wild Palms], the writer, and I kind of resist that because we say, technically, satire is a literary term that usually involves some extreme exaggeration and grotesqueness perhaps. I’m thinking of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and so on, which is done to make a point about what is more mundane and normal and to show hypocrisy or whatever.

But for Maps, Bruce and I think it’s more of a kind of docudrama. It’s a lot more realistic. Yes, it’s compressed, but Bruce swears that every line of dialogue in the script he’s heard someone say in his years in Hollywood. Everybody there lives in a kind of bubble. There’s a kind of common currency of things, which is the desire to be a screenwriter, an actor, a director, to be in the business, to be seen, to get to the red carpet, to get yourself on the big screen, if not the small screen, and so on.

Hollywood is kind of like this dense, dense planet with this immense gravitational pull. People are drawn to it from all over the world. Once they’re there, it’s hard to escape that gravitational pull. It’s so powerful that it can deform you and your relationships and your aspirations and everything else. That’s what you’re feeling, I think.

From looking at the experiences of Agatha [Mia Wasikowska], her child-star brother Benjie [Evan Bird] and Havana [Moore], it seems like Mr. Wagner must think that Los Angeles would be a terrible place to raise kids.

I believe it is. [Laughs.] In fact, John Cusack, who plays Benjie’s father, said to me, “I was Benjie.” He was a child star, and that’s why he lives in Chicago. He has that formation of a childhood that comes with celebrity or even just the desire for celebrity. Whether you achieve it or not, it’s still there to push you out of shape and to shape the course of your life.

You’ve been making movies from Toronto for decades, but your own children [including second-unit director Cassandra Cronenberg, writer-director Brandon Cronenberg of Antiviral, and photographer Caitlin Cronenberg] have grown into functional adults.

Yes, I hope you’re right about that. They seem to be. But don’t forget that I don’t live in Hollywood. I live in Toronto. Toronto, like New York, is a multicultural, very diverse city. It’s not a sort of one-business town the way Hollywood is, the way L.A. tends to be.

The presence of my career has not been all-enfolding or sort of all-encompassing for my children. They’ve just lived a kind of normal kid life. Over the years, as I became more and more well-known, it was an issue. It was a factor in their lives but not an overriding one for them the way it would be in Hollywood if their father was a famous movie star.

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In Maps, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, you’ve found a way to re-sensitize viewers to onscreen violence. In your films, it looks as if the characters really could get hurt or killed.

That’s always been something that’s very close to me. I remember seeing a movie called Shane. It was with Alan Ladd. It was directed by George Stevens. I remember seeing the scene where the bad guy, Jack Palance, shoots somebody. And the force of the bullet jerks him back and lands him on his back in the mud. I’d never seen that before. In all the movies I had seen as a kid — you know, cowboy movies — they were pretty innocuous: Hopalong Cassidy, Durango Kid, Roy Rogers. People are shot, they just sort of fall down, and there’s no blood. There’s no consequences. The guy’s dead, but physically there’s very little consequence, whereas the depiction of being shot in Shane was horrific for me as a kid.

And I say that in a good way. I thought: Wow, getting shot, it’s a really intense, physical event. It’s a traumatic event for your body. So I think that having this in mind that this is not an inconsequential thing to be shot or to shoot somebody, for example, it’s hugely significant and it does terrible damage, so it’s been natural to portray any violence that way in my movies.

Your films also are frequently ambiguous. In Naked Lunch, the same drugs that lead Bill Lee [Peter Weller] to accidentally kill his wife make everything else he does possible.

I see human life as an extremely complex and contradictory thing. It’s only in politics, I suppose, where you really try to make things simple for people, when in fact we’re a really strange, complex, dangerous species. We are capable of magnificence and compassion and beauty. But we’re also capable of horrific things, the most horrific things imaginable. Those things can be embodied in one person. There’s no doubt about it. So if I’m really legitimately exploring what the human condition is, which is sort of the way I see what I do, then I must acknowledge those contradictions, those complexities.

Because Lawrence is in our readership area, I have to ask you about how you were influenced by William S. Burroughs.

There’s definitely an influence. We come from such completely different places and backgrounds. I could never quite be a Burroughs nor would I want to be or try to be. I have to tell you, I did visit his house in Lawrence, Kansas, a couple of times and went shooting pistols with him there. So I’ve been to Lawrence.

I also found him a very contradictory guy, because when you used to see him in public, he’d sort of snarl and growl, and he’d seem quite dangerous and nasty and vindictive. But when you’d meet him, he was quite capable of a lot of sweetness and gentleness and compassion. And so, he was kind of a strange combination of things you wouldn’t expect.

Certainly, I read him early on in my career as a budding novelist. I’ve just finished publishing my first novel [Consumed]. I would have thought I’d have published it 50 years ago because I never thought I’d be a filmmaker. I always thought I’d be a novelist. Certainly, Burroughs was a voice in my head.

On the other hand, he had experiences and a life that was completely different from mine. I’ve lived a kind of respectable, bourgeois middle-class kind of life, unlike Burroughs. But at the same time, there were many things that he wrote that still speak to me, and his ear for dialogue was so incredibly accurate. And he was so wickedly funny. I think of my movies as being funny even when they’re very dark. In the case of something like Maps, which ends up being rather sad, it’s still also funny.