David Cronenberg On Josh Trank's Fantastic Four Being Inspired By His Films

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last few weeks, there is a good shot that you've seen the trailer for 20th Century Fox's Fantastic Four. And if at points in the trailer you thought some of the imaginary looked like something from a David Cronenberg film, like The Fly or Scanners that is because director Josh Trank ("Chronicle") admitted that those films inspired his take on Fantastic Four.

Trank had told Collider that he was a "huge David Cronenberg fan" and especially wanted to bring Cronenberg's style to the transformation scene to convey "something horrible happening to your body and [it] transforming out of control." A good example of that would be what Jeff Goldblum's character goes through in 1986's The Fly.

But how does David Cronenberg feel about being Trank's inspiration? "It's fine," Cronenberg told Collider. "Once you've contributed your voice to the cinematic conversation, it's out there and it's up for grabs, absolutely. So I don't complain. In fact, I take it as a compliment." He later added, "When you come up with something original and it really strikes a chord in people, it's going to imitated, it's going to be appropriated, and it's actually kind of nice when someone just flat out admits it. That's actually pretty good. Not everybody does."

Cronenberg is glad that Trank admitted where his inspiration came from as many filmmakers don't. He then talks about how Ridley Scott's Alien ripped off his film Shivers. "As far back as Alien, for example, which totally ripped off things from my movie Shivers - Shivers featured a parasite that lives in your body, bursts out of your chests, jumps onto your face, and jumps down your mouth, and suddenly you see this in a studio film, which was hugely successful, Alien," Cronenberg said. "The writer of the script, Dan O'Bannon, had seen Shivers, we know that he had seen my movie and, shall we say, appropriated it. So this is not new stuff for me."

Fantastic Four will land in theaters August 7, 2015.