David Cronenberg Says He May Retire From Film Directing

David Cronenberg made his career off his work in films like Scanners, The Fly, and A History Of Violence, but now it’s looking like he may be done with films for good. The director recently indicated to EW he may be done making films and instead devote the rest of his career to writing novels or doing a television series on streaming:

I’ve written one novel (2014’s Consumed) and I really quite enjoyed that. I think that there are things you can do in the novel that you cannot do on a movie. I just came back from the Venice film festival, and I was on a panel with Spike Lee and some others, talking about the future of cinema. There was a lot of discussion about Netflix, and streaming series, and so on, and I was saying that I thought that was the future of cinema, and that it was really an interesting idea, the idea of doing a TV series, a streaming series. Whether I end up doing something like that is a whole other thing. Obviously, it would be a huge commitment of time and so on. To do eight hours of TV is a lot. [But] once again, the idea of a series as being more novelistic than a movie. When you compare the two, a movie is really more like a short story than a novel, and the complexity that you can get into in a series is really quite interesting.

Does a television series by David Cronenberg sound like something you’d be interested in? For me, I think it would depend on the project he’s involved in because his films can be hit and miss for me, but I’ll never say no to a high profile director jumping into streaming.