David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen first met at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001 at a promotional party for Lord of the Rings, in which Mortensen starred as Aragorn. It was a chance encounter that would lead to a two-decade collaboration spanning four films— but Mortensen doesn’t really remember it. “I was probably having a good time,” he says with a twinkle in his eye when I sit down with the actor and director in Cannes the day after the world premiere of their latest film together, Crimes of the Future.

Their collaboration began in earnest when they worked together on A History of Violence, a 2005 film in which Mortensen played a man who defends his small-town diner against thieves. They reunited for 2007’s Eastern Promises and 2011’s A Dangerous Method, and now Crimes of the Future, in which Mortensen plays Saul, a performance artist who has his organs removed by his partner (Lea Sedeoux) in front of audiences. The film is set in the future, when people’s bodies have begun changing in dangerous ways and technology — and a world without pain — allows them to perform surgery on themselves.

When together, the 79-year-old director and the 63-year-old actor have an easy rapport, full of witty comebacks and thoughtful reflections on their collaboration. They spoke to me about why Mortensen was apprehensive about playing Saul, how they’ve each changed over the years and what might come next.

After four films and all these years, why does this partnership work so well?

David Cronenberg: It totally doesn't work.

Viggo Mortensen: Yeah, we keep trying.

Cronenberg: We keep trying, we think maybe this time we'll get it right.

Mortensen: This has got to be the worst experience.

Cronenberg: Worst experience in our lives. [Laughs.] We don't want to waste your time but we do need to keep it light.

That’s understandable. So tell me, once you realized you wanted Viggo to star, what’s the first thing you told him about this project?

Cronenberg: The first thing was that Viggo didn't want to play the lead role. He wanted to play the cop because I think he felt more comfortable with that role, knew what it was. Whereas the lead role — this is just me imagining, we haven't really discussed it — is odd, complex, kind of passive, reactive.

Viggo: Very reactive.

Cronenberg: And maybe a little trickier to play. So naturally that made Viggo afraid because he's such a wimp.

Motensen: I actually thought of it as, I said it to you, and I read it and thought this is a great film of our story, I'd like to be sort of the bad guy. The guy who's running the sting operation. But then no, David said, “no, you should play the lead.”

Cronenberg: I harassed him. I berated him. I phoned him and texted him. Harangued him until he finally agreed to play the lead instead.

Mortensen: In the end I liked that as an acting exercise because the foundation of good acting really is good reacting. And this character is reacting to what is happening to his body, to his environment, to what his partner is doing — what they are doing together to his body. I also like there's layers to the character that have to do with a very artistic thing, a human thing. He has an ego. He has vanity. He's jealous of other artists to some degree. There's many layers to him. I found that interesting. But it's true that he's reacting much more than most characters I play, and any that I've played. Even Sigmund Freud [in A Dangerous Method], he's aggressive in his intellectual way and defensive. And Saul is not — he's actually quite a loving, vulnerable person.

Cronenberg: Yeah, he is. Who really opens himself up, literally, to people.

How did the two of you determine how he carries himself physically, because he’s often crouching or seems to be struggling under the weight of his body’s changes?

Cronenberg: Well, I have nothing to do with that. No no I seriously don't. I mean, I'll just refer to another actor — Ralph Fiennes after we did Spider together said that was the least direction he's ever gotten from a director. And he meant it as a compliment, and I took it as a compliment. It's because he really knew what to do. Professional actors, you don't have to teach them how to act. I know there are some directors who like to think that they can do that and should do that. Well first of all, I'm too lazy to do that. But also, you have the script and then Viggo has the script and he has to decide what to do with it.

Mortensen: We did talk about it. You have to show that there's an effect, and a cumulative effect. His problems with digestion that affect his breathing, and the discomfort he feels physically — it doesn't matter what position he's in. He has to move, he sometimes has to release tension in his body in different ways. If you do too much of that it's distracting, it takes you out of the scene because you go "What the fuck is that actor doing? That's really insane." But you also don't want to do too little, so he was helping me gauge that.

Cronenberg: So at some point I'm really just monitoring and suggesting. And Viggo would say "Was that too much or too little?" And I would say "It's too much here, it's too little there." And we would just tweak it and adjust it. But what it is, is coming from the actor. It's not coming from me.

How did you decide that part of the story would be that people can’t feel pain anymore?

Cronenberg: Well, I wanted there to be the possibility of surgery everywhere, including amongst amateurs. But I didn't really want it to be a discussion of S&M, and that immediately starts to suggest that maybe if you can take pain out of the equation that you could have that discussion. In fact, the movie is not really an intelligent discussion of painlessness, because children who are born without the possibility of feeling pain are incredibly vulnerable. They chew their tongues off, they do terrible things, they break their legs and don't even know it. It's really a nightmare if you're a parent. I didn't really want to get into that, so I kind of fudged it a bit and just said "There's no pain in this movie. They're not feeling pain."

Mortensen: Or in Saul's case, there are times he feels it, but it's not like it used to be, and it moves around and needs to adjust. It's not entirely debilitating, but it's uncomfortable — it's a discomfort.

It made me think a lot about the things we already use to sort of avoid pain now, through medications or drugs or technology.

Cronenberg. Right, opioids of course. It can come from a desire to avert pain, but also to deaden yourself to everything is painful — not just physical pain but emotional pain, intellectual pain, and philosophical pain.

Mortensen: Through denial, amnesia.

Cronenberg: But unfortunately when you get rid of it, and this is suggested in the movie, you are starting to deny the reality of your humanity. And you are suddenly losing a lot more than just pain.

Mortensen: There was a title originally that was Painkillers.

When you are making a film like this, how much are you either having to push or pull back when it comes to the gorier aspects of the story?

Cronenberg: It varies from movie to movie. It's the same with violence. Some movies, ultra violence is perfectly appropriate for the movie, because that's what it's discussing. And in others, big violence will derange the movie. You can only judge it, though, on the project itself. I don't have an overall philosophy of how much violence, how much gore, but I did fudge it because there would be a lot more blood in those scenes of surgery. And in fact, most of the blood was added as CG so that I could control exactly how much. In real surgery, there's always somebody suctioning the blood so that the surgeon can see what he's doing. So I was fudging it but not too much. And that was my only concern, not about will the audience be grossed out or not, it was how do I show what I want to show?

Mortensen: I was thinking the audiences might assume if they thought about it much, that just like there isn't pain, that maybe the body's powers of coagulation...

Cronenberg: – And that also. The scene where his big scar is sort of zipped up – not very realistic.

How would you say each of you has changed since you started working together?

Cronenberg: He's gotten very old and crotchety. His memory is gone. I have to remind him constantly of who I am. I could tell him that I'm his brother and he would believe it. [Laughs]

Mortensen: So many face lifts that my mom doesn't recognize me.

OK, now the real answers.

Mortensen: David has become more refined as a human being. When I started working with David he was halfway through what has been his career so far, just over halfway through, as a filmmaker anyway. So he had already refined his approach to storytelling, he was already very confident and secure about what he wanted to attempt. I've noticed that from that movie, to Eastern Promises, A Dangerous Method, to this, he's become even slightly more refined in terms of knowing that he has it. I remember that in A Dangerous Method there was a German crew and they would be astonished some days because it'd be like 4:30 in the afternoon, and he'd say, “that's all I'm going to do for this scene, this is all I need, I've got it.” And on this movie, for what you were trying to do, it was a very tight schedule. It was short, extremely short.

Cronenberg: We had to cut five days off the schedule to get to make the movie because of the financing. It actually began for me with The Fly because I would do a lot of coverage. I would do closeup, loose close up, medium, loose medium, wide shot, moving shot, and it's because I wasn't sure what I would need in the editing room. And gradually I became more and more confident that I knew what I needed and didn't need to waste time doing stuff that I didn't need.

Mortensen: Maybe that's it. You've become more of a person who is editing as he is shooting.

Cronenberg: Yeah. With The Fly, I thought this movie is really three people in a room. It's like an opera, which it later became. So once I accept that, even though it's a monster sci-fi movie, it's still basically a triangle movie about a love story amongst three people. Therefore, that's the kind of coverage I need, I don't really need to do more. So that was the beginning of my feeling that I was becoming a Samuel Beckett, like a minimalist — simple, deceptively simple, we hope that it's actually complex and interesting, but deceptively simple in cutting and shooting and so on. I'm seeing a lot of TV series now, streaming series, and they cover everything. They cover the finger on the button and they always start with a drone shot of the car going through the forest, and I like seeing all that stuff, it's fun. But would I do that? No, not unless it was a crucial, crucial thing. I don't want to deny my audience visual pleasure, which some of that stuff can give you, but at the same time I feel that's not where the movie actually is.

Anything to add about how Viggo has changed since you two first started working together?

Cronenberg: He's more cantankerous. He gave me a little more grief on this movie. [Laughs.] It's totally understandable — there were some special effects that didn't work at first. And because those things were attached to his body, for example, remember the foot things.

Mortensen: Oh yeah.

Cronenberg: And it was really annoying him because he's wanting to get into it but if the physical stuff around him is not working it's very hard to do that. But that's minor, really minor. And actually because of our relationship, I can say, “Viggo this is totally curable by CG, we can make it right, so just ignore it.”

Mortensen: I just need to hear it sometimes, sometimes I don't need to hear it because I can see for myself but there are some things I don't know because I'm not in his head completely. I try to be, but there are certain things that he knows already he's planning to do and he shares that and you're like, “OK I get it.”

Have you two already discussed when you might work on next?

Cronenberg: We haven't yet. I don't want to give him too much hope. I need him to be nervous.

Mortensen: When we were leaving the premiere he said “the movie works in spite of you.” So, he keeps me insecure.

Cronenberg: An insecure actor is a great actor. A pliable actor.