One of Canada’s most provocative auteurs is as busy as ever. David Cronenberg was recently given France’s greatest award, the Légion d’Honneur, while deep in the process of rewriting the entirety of the script for the Tom Cruise/Denzel Washington vehicle The Matarese Circle.

Cronenberg is one of my favourite directors, so much so that I once considered devoting an entire blog to his work. My fascination with his films stems in part from his roots in Southern Ontario, which makes Cronenberg’s assertion that he’ll be trying to keep some of the production of The Matarese Circle confined to Toronto welcome news. I’ll admit that I haven’t been as involved in his most recent movies, but I think that’s at least partly because I’m still trying to wrap my head around how they fit into his oeuvre, if at all. Will Cronenberg’s new approach as a filmmaker lend itself to an adaptation of Robert Ludlum’s work, or is he still too idiosyncratic for the realm of the blockbuster, especially if he’s writing the script himself?