For the 64-year-old Canadian director, violence is too essential a part of our nature to be left to B-movie gore-feasts. So in his films it is depicted unadulterated for mainstream consumption.

Cronenberg has made the human body with all its fragility and vulnerability a central concern of his cinema, subjecting it to every conceivable . . . or worse . . . form of mutilation and disease.

Going beyond mere gun blasts and knifings . . . whether in Crash, Scanners, Dead Ringers, The Fly or Videodrome, to mention only a few of his cinematic autopsies . . . he has turned car accident wounds into sexual fetishes, filled the screen with a man's head being blown up from within, given a childless woman three cervixes, morphed Jeff Goldblum into a fly as a metaphor for ageing and had a man implant a video machine in his stomach to generate his own pornography.

"The first fact of human existence is the body, " he tells me, echoing the philosopher Schopenhauer. "If you accept that, then you accept our mortality as being what it is, an absolute. That is very difficult for many people to accept.

Therefore a lot of art and culture and primarily religion tries to evade that reality or to deny it or say, well you don't really die, your body dies but that's not really you, so therefore you're really floating around somewhere and you'll still be you and you'll meet all your friends again.

"A lot a people believe that, maybe the majority of people on earth. There is a denial of the reality of what the body and our existence as animals really is.

When you deny that you prevent yourself from discovering many other truths. If applied to politics it can be quite destructive, as with George Bush and stem-cell research. It's a strange thing that's going on in America right now."

Having set out as a young filmmaker in Toronto in the early 1960s "to show the unshowable, speak the unspeakable", Cronenberg has no intention of letting up. He seems genuinely surprised if people keep talking to him about the violence in his films. "It's common for people to say, what are you trying to say, what's your message? And of course it's not that at all.

"I'm really doing an exploration and making observations, asking the audience to come on that same philosophical journey with me and make their own observations in the form of their own response to the movies." He smiles, and adds: "They are, obviously, not always interested."

There is a deadpan humour to Cronenberg that also runs through his films, even at their bloodiest. "I think all my films are funny, " he says. "I'm a big fan of Samuel Beckett and JeanPaul Sartre. If you're an existentialist and talk about the absurdity of life, there is an absurdity involved in that understanding."

So have his perceptions on the human condition changed much over the years? "I now have children and grandchildren, " he shrugs. "I've had many more experiences than when I was first making films. So my understanding of the human condition is much deeper. A lot of it is confirming what my intuition told me as a young person, though.

"I wouldn't say that philosophically I've moved very far from where I was when I was about 10. Whether that means I was precocious then or I'm infantile now, I'm not sure. But my understanding of what life is in the most general sense has not really changed much."

His father was a journalist and wrote pulp fiction for True Detective. His mother was a pianist who accompanied Nureyev in exercise classes when he came to Canada. They were Jewish, but rejected religion. "I wasn't reading philosophy then, but I think I was living it. I was reading books about insects and animals. I was reading adventure stories, a lot of them British because my father was an Anglophile. He would get the Horatio Hornblower series that came out every month in British magazines, stuff like that. I was exploring the world through reading and to some extent movies.

"The natural world had all kinds of resonances for me. I loved animals but not in a cutesy way. I lived in Toronto. My parents didn't have a car, so I never got out of the city and into the countryside. But Toronto is a city of ravines so there was a lot of nature happening within it. It was a very congenial way to spend your childhood."

It has led him to explore the human body and its many accelerated mutations and transformations as he would that of any other animal.

"When my father died it was a confirmation of my understanding rather than a big shock or a revelation. He died fairly young, but I was 30. It wasn't as though he died when I was four. Of course it has a different impact on me now. I could work myself into a frenzy of outrage that he died at the age I am right now. I can realise how youthful and childlike you still feel when you're 64 years old and you think, it's absurd that I should be near the end of my life because you fell very vital and alive and vibrant, as much as you ever did.

"When you get to a certain age you realise that you know more dead people than living people.

Some of the people you know have died because of a stroke, an embolism, an aneurism. It's like hydraulics. If they were plumbing it would be a minor problem. And it's enough to bring down something as complex and wonderful as an entire human being. But to turn away from this is a kind of atrocity in itself. You have to look at that and see that fragility is a beauty in its own way. The evanescence of human life is really something beautiful and not to be feared, but you have to have a certain philosophical angle on that before you can really accept it and not deny it."

Cronenberg still lives in Toronto with his family.

Eastern Promises is the first movie he's shot completely outside Canada. A Russian mafia variation on The Godfather, with Armin Mueller-Stahl as a sinister Don Corleone figure and Mortensen his driver-cumbodyguard, it was filed on location in London from an original screenplay by Stephen Knight, whose earlier film Dirty Pretty Things explored a somewhat similar emigre milieu.

"I made huge changes in the script, " says Cronenberg. "The whole second half is quite different to what it was. I think Steven had set up a wonderful thing and not really followed through. He had fallen in love with his characters to the extent that he didn't want to hurt them.

But I don't mind hurting them."

It's easy to see Eastern Promises as a companion piece to A History Of Violence, in which Mortensen also plays a man who is hiding his true nature . . . in that case a mild-mannered smalltown family man whose secret mob past catches up on him . . . but Cronenberg didn't approach it with that in mind.

"Obviously I'm attracted to certain themes and interconnections and stuff, but when I'm thinking about a project I don't think about it in those abstract terms.

Unconsciously I'm sure that's all working and I have no doubt that there are those linkages in most of my movies, but creatively that doesn't help me. There are many ways of paralysing yourself as an artist and that's one of them."

To Cronenberg, each film is fresh world to explore. He enters it with curiosity, much as he probed the insect world as a small boy. "It's not that I can analyse the script because it's not just the script, " he says. "It's in the making of the movie and working with the actors and the crew and evolving the characters and finding the visual style for it that it gradually reveals itself to you. You then see what it was that drew you to the movie and what compelled you to go through the two years of effort, sometimes anguish . . . but hopefully not . . . that it takes to make a movie. I think for me it's very much you make the movie to find out why you had to make the movie."

What, no gore? Five David Cronenberg films for the faint-hearted Fast Company (1979) An aberration among Cronenberg's early horror films, this drag-racing movie has plenty of fireballs but little in the way of scares M. Butterfly (1993) Not a drop of blood . . . until the final scene . . . in this story of a French diplomat who engages in a relationship with an opera singer in 1960s Beijing Spider (2002) With all of its horror psychological, this masterpiece about a former asylum inmate is safe enough (almost) to show your granny Dead Ringers (1988) You'd think this true story of twisted gynaecologist twins would see the baron of blood let rip, but he remainsrestrained Crash (1996) A JG Ballard adaptation about autoerotica, in which people crash cars to become aroused, is gore-free.