On the influence of Samuel Beckett on Cronenberg's film, Spider
In an interview with
Film Freak Central, Canadian film director David Cronenberg likens the protagonist of
Spider to Irish dramatist Samuel Beckett:
'Beckett was one of our touchstones. I really thought that Spider was more of a Beckett character--the Beckett as you say, of the prose or the novels more than the plays--I saw a vagrant or a tramp. Someone who has divested himself of almost everything except for the clothes that he wears and maybe one or two things like tobacco for his cigarettes. Then he focuses all his incredible energy and inventiveness on that--he's as obsessed and possessive of his little suitcase as we would be of our house and our car. He becomes so distilled that he becomes a microcosm of any human and at that point he becomes an existential study rather than let's say a psychological study. At that point I think--and it's totally arrogant of me to say this--but I think that we go beyond Freud to an even more basic examination of the human condition. We even did Ralph's hair so that it was a little bit like Samuel Beckett's.'
