David Cronenberg: I hope so.

Taubin: You often talk about being an atheist, but your secular Jewish identity seems to be more on your mind than in the past.

Cronenberg: I think circumstances have forced it a little more out in the open. We all know about the Holocaust and that it’s never really gone away. There’s just been an incident here in Canada. A radical Muslim preacher had a regular show on VisionTV, a television network devoted to religion. Every week he’d give his sermon, saying Jews are parasites, the Holocaust was divine retribution, and ultimately all Jews will be annihilated. People started saying we don’t think this should be on the air in Canada, so they pulled him off, and then they were going to put him back on because he’s highly respected. Meanwhile the guy issues a statement saying, “I’m not anti-Semitic. Everything I say is just prophecy. It says in our holy book that the Jews will be annihilated. It’s not that I don’t like Jews.”

So in that short film, it was interesting to think for all these people who would like there to be no Jews. Let’s propose we’re down to the last Jew. What does America think, and what does popular media culture think? I have one of my younger TV commentators saying, “I’m much younger than you so, no, I have no memories whatsoever.” So will this yearning for extermination of Jews really make much of an impression? Or will it be a moment of dancing in the streets in certain cities of the world, and then what? I was alluding to all that without making a big deal of it. I don’t think this is something new for me to be thinking about. I was also thinking of all those nice beheadings you can get on the Internet.

I was thinking about that in Eastern Promises. The current biggest provider of snuff pornography is the Muslim extremist movement. Remember when Al Goldstein from Screw magazine offered $50,000 if someone could bring him a real snuff film, and no one could? Now they’re everywhere, and most involve beheadings and throat slitting, and once again, as in Eastern Promises, it’s very sexual, very intimate. And needless to say, very disturbing.