No matter what genre he's working in, David Cronenberg is keen to explore the horrors within the human form. His latest film, a thriller set among Russian sex traffickers in London, bears the Canadian director's unmistakeable stamp. Though Cronenburg has acquired a degree of respectability, he has never compromised his art, he tells Donald Clarke

TOO many feature articles on David Cronenberg begin the same way. After describing some of the director's most visceral films - Shivers, The Fly, Dead Ringers, Crash - the journalist will go on to pretend that he or she had been dreading meeting the psychopath capable of imagining such atrocities. The writer then ineffectively feigns astonishment when the Canadian auteur turns out to be consistently civil, formidably intelligent and conspicuously unvampiric.

Good grief. It's almost as if you don't have to be a maniac to make art about maniacs.

"I know. It is astonishing," Cronenberg groans. "You'd think that journalists who have spent a lot of time interviewing a lot of people would have figured that out. It doesn't just happen to me, of course. It happens to a lot of people in a lot of genres. Mind you, you might not be surprised to discover that Oliver Stone is the way he is in person. But, still, there is no real reason to believe that somebody who makes abrasive, controversial films may himself be abrasive and controversial."

You can, to be fair, see why Cronenberg gets this treatment more than most. His trademark quiff of hair - rivalled only by Christopher Walken's for its luxuriance - is now battleship grey and a slight paunch hangs over his belt, but he remains the same contained man whose fastidiously neat sentences have reassured generations of initially apprehensive hacks. He could easily be mistaken for a distinguished lecturer in moral philosophy or a high-ranking professor of molecular biology.

None of this should, however, surprise any person properly familiar with his work. Yes, The Fly saw Jeff Goldblum throwing up on his food to aid digestion. True, Dead Ringers found the more evil of two Jeremy Ironses performing gynaecological eviscerations on innocent women.

Eastern Promises, Cronenberg's superb new film, does, indeed, begin with a throat being sliced from ear to ear. But all his films have a clinical discipline that betrays the application of an ordered mind. (He is Canadian, after all.) That sharp brain has focused particularly closely on the treacheries that lurk within our own bodies. Whereas other horror directors have encouraged monsters to travel from distant galaxies or from forbidding sections of Romania, Cronenberg prefers to make villains out of mutating chromosomes or rogue organs.

One might have thought that, as the years progressed and his joints became less flexible, Cronenberg, now 64, might have become even more concerned with corporeal decay. But his most recent two films (though among his very best) have moved some distance away from body horror. A History of Violence might be seen as a contemporary retelling of Shane. Eastern Promises is a twisty thriller set among the Russian mob in London. What gives?

"Maybe there's a balancing act involving the material and myself as a person," he laughs. "Yeah, I think of making a film as personal on one level and very impersonal on another. I have to be able to step back. The shaping of any artistic project requires objectivity, but also personal involvement. It requires a lot of stamina, and I think it might be too draining if the material involved a hook on your personal life."

Eastern Promises, which, following their successful collaboration on A History of Violence, reunites the director with Viggo Mortensen, is an unusual project in several ways. Steve Knight, the screenwriter of Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, appears to have set out to deliver an issue-based movie on the subject of sex trafficking. But, somewhere along the line, the picture has been, well, Cronenbergised into a characteristically cool and detached experiment in less specific wretchedness. Its most brilliant sections have everything to do with direction and little to do with writing.

"It's true that the second half of the script is totally different to how it was in the first draft," he says. "But it was always a thriller and never a social document. The business of the sex trade in London is still at the heart of it, but it was never about the mechanics of that."

Eastern Promises begins with Naomi Watts's midwife delivering a baby to a dying young woman. When she goes to investigate how the girl came to her sorry end, she is drawn into the world of the Russian Mafia and, most significantly, into the life of Mortensen's emotionally tortured (not to mention spectacularly tattooed) driver and all-round hood. In the first 10 minutes Cronenberg manages to draw a bloody parallel between violent death and violent birth. Few other directors would grasp that opportunity with such grim relish.

"Those first three scenes were pretty much as they were in the script," he counters.

Ah, yes. But I am willing to bet the birth was not quite so bloody in the screenplay and that the baby was not quite so spookily inanimate. Only Cronenberg could have discovered such terrifyingly effective rhymes between unhappy murder and its supposedly merry complement.

"Well, yes. The way something is described in the script can never really tell you what camera angle you are using or how much blood there should be. Placental abruption is a very particular kind of event and it would have that degree of blood. If you want to be realistic you have to show that. The camera shouldn't look away. That is how to best serve the hard core of Steve's script. Look, I was at the birth of my two children and it is a potent experience, I can tell you. There are a lot of fluids involved."

Oh, this is interesting. So did that experience worm its way into Cronenberg's films? Has he re-enacted the births as horror?

"No. It just confirmed my feelings about life," he says with a sinister smile. "We mythologise birth, but, by doing that, we do a disservice to birth and to life itself."

David Cronenberg developed his pessimistic attitude towards the human condition while growing up as the child of liberal atheists (his father was a writer, his mother a musician) in the clinically buffed city of Toronto. He initially studied science at university, but, keen to create as well as discover, soon transferred to an English literature course.

His head full of such experimental writers as William H Burroughs, David embarked on a few short films and then two fitful avant-garde features, Stereo and Crimes of the Future, before hitting his stride with the timeless, shameless Shivers. Detailing the spread of a small organism that transforms human hosts into violent nymphomaniacs, the picture became a cult hit and allowed its director to visit further unpleasantness on audiences in Rabid and The Brood.

"There really was no film industry in Toronto," he says. "Now, you look at Francis Ford Coppola and Stanley Kubrick. They all started doing genre films. Doing horror films was an easy way of getting things made. I was just lucky that my sensibility worked in a horror framework. As it happened, it was exactly what I wanted to do."

He describes the early films as genre pieces, but they were, in some ways, sui generis. The pictures certainly embraced violence and depravity, but few horror movies had, to this point, taken place in such bland and soulless urban environments. Few dealt so unflinchingly with the beast within.

"Well, maybe, but I did certainly view them as horror films. I couldn't claim to be naive in that regard. I knew how they would be marketed. That is not to say it was calculated on my part. But it's interesting you say that. I remember a man in the Canadian distributors saying he didn't think they were horror films. You have to remember that, to them, horror was still capes and castles and werewolves. It was gothic. So, yes, what I was doing was confusing."

Though continuing to live and work in Canada - indeed, Toronto remains his home to this day - Cronenberg inevitably came to the attention of Hollywood's men in suits. Films such as The Dead Zone, The Fly and Crash followed. Somewhere along the line a degree of respectability attached itself to him. He won a lifetime achievement award at Cannes, was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada and a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. I wonder if he can isolate the point at which the studios started to treat him with the deference he deserves. Perhaps they still regard him as a faintly disreputable lunatic.

"Well, I am not quite sure I'm respectable yet," he says. "Mind you, when The Fly was the No 1 film in America for three weeks running the studios did suddenly start showing me a degree of respect. That is, frankly, the sort of thing they understand. That did change attitudes."

It is to Cronenberg's credit that, despite the accumulating honours and advancing years, he has never felt the need to be a good boy and start adapting Jane Austen novels. Indeed, he has always done a fine job of annoying the sort of people who deserve to be annoyed. In 1996, Crash, his voluptuously disgusting adaptation of JG Ballard's novel concerning the erotic possibilities of careering motor cars, managed to appal moral guardians and secure banning orders from several British councils.

"Yes, it's still banned here," he says, gesturing towards the door of the London hotel in which we meet. "It is, I believe, technically still banned in the city of Westminster. I was astonished. There is, of course, a very particular tabloid press presence in this country and, at that time, they were concerned with road rage. 'Oh, we can't allow this to encourage road rage.' The next month they were concerned with Frankenfoods."

The most likely source of scandal surrounding Eastern Promises might be the film's treatment of the Russian community. The picture offers us Russians as thugs, sex traffickers, rapists, drunks and murderers. Even the token "Good Russian" - Watts's uncle - indulges in outbursts of racism.

"Well, I think it's pretty accurate," he says without apology. "That character comes from a generation that was racist. You can see it in Russia now. George Bernard Shaw said that the essence of drama is conflict. If everybody was sweet and nice, you would have no film."

So Cronenberg never felt the urge to insert a Russian character who writes poetry and gives sweets to orphans? "I am not a politician. I am an artist. I don't feel the need to balance everything. It would be ridiculous to attempt to be politically correct in that way. It would paralyse everything you do."

Among David Cronenberg's many notable achievements has been his triumph in demonstrating that one can succeed in the film industry without overly compromising oneself. He is, indeed, as firm in his determination to ignore the dictates of his fans as he is those of right-wing watchdogs, liberal handwringers and nervous studio bosses. A Cronenberg film is always a Cronenberg film.

"Oh, yes. I make sure to maintain control," he says. "So if you don't like the film then it is always my fault. You can blame me. I feel that it's a real artistic mistake to worry about people's expectations. I don't worry about what people expect of a Cronenberg film or a Russian gangster film or a Viggo Mortensen film. If you try either to accommodate - or, for that matter, frustrate - expectations, then you are sure to fail. That is another sure way towards artistic paralysis."

So he doesn't concern himself with a film's place in the Cronenberg canon? "Oh certainly not. That's for others to worry about."

Eastern Promises opens today

Cronenberg classics: where flies speak and heads explode

1969Stereo

1970Crimes of the Future

1975Shivers

1977Rabid

1979Fast Company

1979The Brood

1981Scanners

1983Videodrome

1983The Dead Zone

1986The Fly

1988Dead Ringers

1991Naked Lunch

1993M Butterfly

1996Crash

1999eXistenZ

2000Spider

2005A History of Violence

2007Eastern Promises