Pop artist Andy Warhol and director David Cronenberg share a fascination with the gruesome. In the early 1960s, Warhol produced a series of controversial silkscreens based on macabre newspaper photos (including those of car accident victims and a lone electric chair). Cronenberg’s 1996 movie Crash featured characters who got off on multi-vehicle pileups. An early master of the sound bite, Warhol called Cronenberg’s 1983 film Videodrome “Clockwork Orange for the 1980s.” This month, the controversial filmmaker gets his 15 minutes with the iconic artist, curating an ambitious exhibition of his work.

What do you make of Warhol’s obsession with fame?
Andy said that what he was painting was always about death, and he wasn’t kidding. Even in his silkscreens of youthful celebrities, it’s there. Other works—like the ones of women about to die from eating poisoned tuna—show normal people celebritized by a spectacular or unusual death. The absurdity of their death is disturbing, but also oddly whimsical.

You suggested that some of Warhol’s films be added to the exhibition. Why?
His movies were also an integral part of his work on celebrity; he filmed drag queens and addicts and assorted weirdos. It wasn’t an anti-Hollywood, because Andy loved Hollywood, but an alternative one.

Did you get a sense of Warhol from his work?
He somehow made himself the subject of his art—he also became a disaster and died young, and was a celebrity himself. As a card-carrying existentialist, I respect that Andy constructed his own reality. It’s amazing that this Slovakian gay artist from Pittsburgh—this triple outsider—used his art to get so inside.

Is there an essential flavour to Warhol’s paintings and films?
It’s the deadpan Andy, at once knowing and strangely innocent. I’d attribute something like Bill Murray’s way of acting indirectly to Andy. He felt you just turned the camera on and let it roll; no emoting. “The surface, that’s all there is,” he’d say. And yet, obviously, what’s intriguing is that there’s something more going on, underneath, isn’t there?

Andy Warhol/Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964 features more than 25 large-scale silkscreens and selected film clips by the 20th-century icon. July 8 to Oct. 22. $18. Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas St. W., 416-979-6608, www.ago.net