Interview: Caitlin Cronenberg and Humane, her debut feature

Caitlin Croenberg, director of Humane

To carry the name Cronenberg while directing a feature debut that blends social satire, scientific speculation, dark comedy, and visceral horror, is to bear the burdens of comparison and high expectations. Fortunately, 39-year-old Caitlin Cronenberg, (already a successful photographer,) also bears her father David Cronenberg’s good-humored self assurance and keen intelligence, qualities she clearly brought to making Humane, a thriller cum family drama that plays out like a situation comedy gone horribly awry when a successful news anchor announces to his four adult children at a family dinner that he and his wife have enrolled in a government-sponsored voluntary suicide program designed to reduce the population in a world beset with a rapidly devolving climate crisis. When mom gets cold feet and runs off, the children are forced by Bob, the unctuous agent for the Department of Citizen Strategy, to choose which of the four will provide the corpse that he needs to collect. Skewering white privilege and income inequality while addressing today’s global crises, Humane is acerbic and surreal as it dissects the grotesque family dynamics that emerge. And befitting its director’s experience as a fine-art photographer, it is a genre movie made with visual style and finely honed craft. Caitlin Cronenberg discussed the making of Humane just a few days before its theatrical release.

Your father is such an incredibly intelligent, funny, pragmatic, and artistic person. What did you learn by observing him over the years that prepared you to direct?

I can tell you with exact confidence that being on his sets–and then having been a stills photographer and being on many other people's sets–the feeling of love and respect on his sets, that goes both ways, both toward him, and from him to his crew, was something that I learned and took for myself, even as a photographer, treating every crew member with the the same amount of respect…I took that in, even before I was a person who ran my own set.

What I also learned from him is that you can love what you do. And you can be an artist. And that can be your grownup job. Which was very exciting. A lot of my friends’ parents were lawyers and business people and had other jobs, and they were being encouraged to go into those family professions. Being given the opportunity to explore if I wanted to be an artist was a very nice way to grow up.

What were your considerations, following in his footsteps in a way as a director, in terms of what people expected, and then what you wanted to do for yourself, making your first feature? 

Having done the photography career first gave me more confidence to step out into the directing sphere and to say I'm coming at this as someone who has experienced doing something else, so I feel good about my choice to try something new. I was looking for a project that just felt engaging, something that I could continue to care about for years and years. And that also comes from watching my father making films and knowing how long it actually takes and how much time you're gonna spend talking about it over the next five years. So I found something that had a unique concept that had characters that you could take to the bank, who I knew would be fun to cast and that they would have fun doing it. And it felt like the right thing. I'm big on trusting your gut. I read a lot of scripts before Michael [Sparaga] sent me Humane and I knew that it felt like a good fit. My gut wouldn't let me stop thinking about it.

Well, it's so much it gets so much about just living in the world these days. But can you talk a about the evolution of the script in terms of the tone because obviously it's balancing being very funny–you cast comic actors in it–it's scary, and it delivers some of the blood you might expect.

Originally the script was quite different, quite different set pieces. Michael and I collaborated and worked to get it a bit tighter, a bit more purposeful and tonally a bit darker throughout. But it remained funny. And I think it turned out actually funnier than I expected. When I watch it with an audience, I hear laughter in moments that I didn't even think were funny when we shot them. There are some moments where you laugh when you're shooting, and you're trying to contain your laughter. But there were moments that I didn't realize how funny they were until I watched with an audience who hadn't seen the film before. And it was heartening, it made me feel good, because I think that people are inherently funny, when they are in dark times, a lot of that comes out because you don't know how to handle the situation that you're dealing with. You kind of let your humor lead. And so I thought that having comedic actors who could also be serious in the emotional moments was a really fun way to address the humor in a dark situation. 

There's a funny way that the film subverts the structure of a sitcom, where you have a family where the members are all different and have conflicts but try to find a way to come together. I love how this film gets at some of the very real tension and darkness that one can find in families, and also that we see the characters change.

Yeah, I liked that the arcs of the characters feel believable. As much as the situation they’re in is absurd, the characters are still within the realm of believability. You don’t just change personalities over the course of one night.

I would imagine that the character Bob gets a lot of the laughs. That actor is so funny, and Bob is just making jokes and wisecracking, and he’s so evil at the same time.

Michael wrote the role of Bob for Enrico, it was in his voice. And, you know, Enrico plays a nice guy so often because he is a nice guy, and he has that sweet guy face. So putting him as this sort of secretly sinister government figurehead, he's not ever the one who gets his hands dirty. He's, you know, he's the one who's calling all the shots, but he's not the one holding the gun. He is the most joyful person to work with. But Jay [Baruchel] and Emily [Hampshire] talk about Enrico–he blew everybody away, he would come on set and deliver these incredibly complex monologues speaking a mile a minute. And I would say cut and everyone would applaud. It happened more than once, because he had the most dialogue and the fewest breaks. And he just nailed it so hard, and I'm so thrilled that he got to play this sinister character who is so complex, and even has these emotional moments. And I think that people are seeing the totality of what he can do as an actor.

All the performances are strong. We could talk about them all. Maya, played by the child actor Siena Gulamgaus, is such an important character. She’s the voice of just straightforward genuine emotion.

There were versions of the script where she was a bit more of an environmental warrior. It ultimately didnt make the final script for no reason other than pacing and timing. But yes, having a young person show up and kind of be the voice of reason and the next generation—she is a true innocent who grows up fast over the course of the evening. 

You got the script, pre-COVID. But, you know, I'm sure as time went on the script just felt more and more real. The world has just gotten worse in so many ways that are dealt with in the script. 

Yeah, a lot of the world building was altered, or at least given a bit more detail and realism after having a true pandemic. And one of the things was the way that corporations leaned into the fear of the population, and what can they do to make money off the fear. So for, you know, umbrellas, everybody has an umbrella. And if you can afford it, you can get the proper umbrella with the silver inside. And if you can't afford it, you have your old umbrella with tin foil inside. But the idea that corporations quickly pivot and say, oh, well, this is the best mask, it has all the, you know, the best filters, and this is the mask that you need. For us, that was umbrellas. And it was interesting to try to tell the story of the world building from inside the house, mostly, and needing to get through to the audience what was happening outside of the world without being too expository. 

The film is so well crafted, I saw it twice. The first time I was just paying attention to the craziness, but it's so beautifully made and lit. What was the day to day experience we have of actually making this film and balancing all the elements?

I just had the best time. I had an incredible crew, the cast was so generous, they were so patient, you know, going out and doing this for the first time. Of course, there are similarities to directing a photo shoot, but it is an incredibly worthy script, there is a ton of dialogue. I felt incredibly lucky and blessed to put my trust into these actors and know that they would show up every day embodying their characters.

I talked with [director of photography] Doug Koch for weeks before we even started pre-production about imagery, things that we both felt would work for us. He was out there with paint chips, looking through cameras at different kinds of lighting, so that we would know what color to paint the interior of the house. And having someone who's so dedicated to the look and feel, gave me so much confidence because, you know, if I were doing a photo shoot in that room, I would know how to shoot it and how to light it. And that would be up to me. But I'm now partnering with someone who knows everything about film cameras and film lighting, which is not my area of expertise. So it just felt so good to be able to trust my crew, and I knew that every moment of that film would be beautiful in Doug's hands

It's all there in the film.It's a crazy film so beautifully made. I can’t wait to see more films from you, and good luck with this one!