For once in his creative life, David Cronenberg is playing a game in which he cannot invent all the rules. The 65-year-old Canadian filmmaker, whose disturbing aesthetic in movies such as Videodrome (1983) and Dead Ringers (1988) became known as “body horror”, is preparing to direct his first opera. And this opera revisits one of Cronenberg’s greatest cinematic triumphs, The Fly, first released in 1986 and certainly his most successful at the box office.

For this project, Cronenberg, instead of being in sole charge as he is on his films, is working with the composer Howard Shore and Placido Domingo, musical director of Los Angeles Opera, who commissioned the work. The result, three years in the writing, is an original composition, quite different from the movie score (which Shore also wrote). The story, however, with a libretto by the American playwright David Henry Hwang, is the same: a love-struck scientist is transformed into a monstrous man/fly hybrid after the teleportation device he has invented goes horribly wrong.