When you mention the name David Cronenberg, what film genres pop into your mind? Horror? Science Fiction? Crime Drama? Chances are, “period drama” was not one of your guesses. His previous works range from the frighteningly surreal and horrific (SCANNERS, THE FLY, VIDEODRONE) to the dramatic (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, EASTERN PROMISES). It would now seem the director is refining his resume with the addition of the analytic psychological period drama A DANGEROUS METHOD.
A DANGEROUS METHOD, written by Christopher Hampton and based on his play, tells the story of newbie psychiatrist Dr. Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), his mentor Dr. Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and their relationship to their patient-protégé Sabina Spielrein (Kiera Knightley). The film is a very interesting examination into the beginnings of modern thought – mainly the experimental treatment known as psychoanalysis or “the talking cure.” Lines between doctor-patient relationships are blurred and new boundaries (what we know today as a code of ethics) are established and discovered.
Surprisingly, Hampton’s existing play didn’t inform Cronenberg’s decision to take on the project. In fact, the writer wound up being quite an asset to the production – working closely with the director.
I worked very closely with him, but I didn’t see the play. I just read it. It was playing in London. It never came to North America. But Christopher and I had known each other before. He’s been a director, he’s been on both sides of the camera and so we got along very well. We worked together. We had the original script to work with, we had a couple of books, and we had all the letters. Then, we worked on a new screenplay, which is basically a combination of all of those things. I think ultimately my main contribution was to decide should be in the movie and what shouldn’t. The number of people flowing in and out of Freud’s life at the time, there were hundreds of them, his distillation of all of that, down to basically five characters was fantastic. In his original screenplay, he had Sabina’s mother and father as characters because they did bring her to the institute and they did talk to Freud and Jung. You get a bit of that, “my mother told me you said that.” It’s still in the script. But, I felt we didn’t have screen time to really develop them and I really didn’t want to have them be vestigial characters who then disappeared. It was just normal writer director kind of stuff. It was really congenial. Christopher was on the set quite a lot. He’s very happy with the movie.
Even though Cronenberg has worked with Mortensen previously, he wasn’t necessarily envisioning the actor in the role of Freud.
I thought we really needed some not obvious casting for this Freud because this was not your grandfather’s Freud, which is to say this isn’t the grandfatherly, sick, sternal Freud they think they know. This was a fifty year old, very dynamic, charismatic, leader of a sort of very intense group of people who were doing some revolutionary things that were considered very revolutionary and dangerous at the time, very subversive and volatile. This was also a guy who was described in literature of the time as masculine, handsome, charismatic, charming, witty, funny – all things we don’t think of as Freud. So Viggo, I know his capabilities of course having worked with him and I felt confident he could do it. He didn’t feel confident that he could do it, but that’s very charming. And so I basically ultimately talk him into it. But when I discussed with him all the things I just talked to you about – what kind of Freud it was… of course he’s got very good taste and he’s very literate and he knew he could tell the writing of Christopher [Hampton] was terrific so eventually he came round and that’s where we were. He’s got a beard of course. We gave him a nose, a false nose. It’s very subtle. You can hardly notice it but that’s not his nose. We gave him brown eyes to make him just to make him a little more Freud like.
Given the iconic director’s previous films also deal with sexual dysfunction and examination of human behavior after a crisis, one would think he has something to say about the subject. But that’s where you’d be unexpectedly wrong.
I have no thoughts. I have no thoughts about sexuality. Seriously, I don’t think about my other movies when I’m making a movie. It’s as though I’ve never made one. Other than I have the craft of having made them. I don’t really try to connect each project with other projects in the way that a critic does. I sometimes have to remind critics that my process and theirs is not the same. These connections. These analyses. They don’t give me anything creatively to help me make this movie – whatever it is that I’m working on. Certainly sex is a subject; I’m hardly the first. I wish I could take credit but sex and death, the Greeks were doing it 3,000 years ago. These are enduring, continuing concerns of a dramatist. After all George Bernard Shaw said, “Conflict is the essence of drama,” and so we are looking for conflict. Whether it be psychological, it doesn’t have to be physical violence but you don’t have the drama without the conflict.
Cronenberg continues,
There are many, many things going on in this movie besides sexuality although they certainly talk about sex a lot, no question about it. But that was an issue for Freud and Jung – his basing a lot of his theory on sexuality. And that was very revolutionary for the time because it was what we would call a very Victorian era in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in middle Europe before the first World War. It was very stable, very controlled. They really felt everyone knew his place and that they achieved an incredible level of European sophistication and civilization. And they felt man had evolved very nicely from animal to super-sophisticated human. Here was Freud saying, “That’s all very well and good but underneath the surface – and not very far underneath the surface – are these forces which we have in us still. We have to acknowledge them. One of them is sex, but it’s not always sex. It’s tribal hostility, tribal violence.” His words were not welcome. People didn’t want to think about that. They didn’t want to hear those things. And of course, World War I proved he was completely correct. Its hard for us to realize now how shocking the first World War was to idealists at the time who thought that man had really achieved an incredible plateau of civilization. They couldn’t believe that in the center of Europe would be all this tribal barbarity, massacres, genocide, hideous atrocities. We’re a little more cynical about it now because there have been so many wars since then. But at the time it was a real crushing blow to idealists who really thought that there was a chance evolution meant getting better because Charles Darwin didn’t think of evolution as getting better. It meant being different to adapt to your environment. But he wasn’t thinking of it, didn’t conceive of it as something that we were evolving to something better. That we were becoming angelic as opposed to human or anything like that. So all of those things were very fascinating to me. It wasn’t really just sex, obviously.
Since these characters were there own first study subjects, Cronenberg brilliantly stages the scenes so the characters would be looking at themselves self-voyeuristically.
They felt they invented a new thing – this psychoanalysis. And the relationship between an analyst and his patient was a brand new relationship that had never existed between humans before. They were experimenting with it. They didn’t really know what the boundaries were. For example when Otto Gross says, “Well maybe it’s a good thing for us to have sex with our patients. Who says it’s not? Maybe therapeutically it’s ok.” At that point the ethical boundaries had not been established and the realities of that relationship was were not known. So they were very obsessive about observing themselves. When Freud talked about, wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, the dreams he was talking about were his own because he didn’t have subjects who were divulging to him yet, their own dreams. So he used his own dreams as his subject. Likewise with Sabina, she would – I felt – having plugged in totally to this obsessive psycho analytic state of mind, would be observing herself. Even while she was having sex, she’d be observing herself; how she felt, what her reaction was, what Jung’s reaction was. You see the way we played that. Jung is not really enjoying those moments. He’s doing it for her. And he would be observing it to from a sort of clinical distance. So that was really the reason for that choreography. We have no proof that those things actually, specifically happened that way. But I felt, given all the things we know about them, that was reasonable.
Kiera Knightley’s character of Sabina goes through a very noticeable change throughout the course of the picture. The role required a certain physicality shift for her too, which speaks volumes of the actresses’ talent and preparation for the role.
She is wonderful. I always thought she was an underrated actress, and that proved to be the case. She is incredibly well prepared, and we discussed, of course, particularly the hysteria. She comes to the clinic suffering from hysteria. She, as we know that she had already been kicked out of a couple of asylums, because she was uncontrollable. She was dysfunctional. She really couldn’t function, and we had to show that. And so it is a question of level: how far do you go with that? In fact, we were being rather subdued compared with what those patients really went through, and we have records of that. And then in addition, I said to Keira, “You are a woman who is being asked to describe things which are unspeakable to you.” Because a woman—a young woman, she is eighteen—she comes from a wealthy family. To say that I masturbate; because I am sexually aroused by my father is beating me. This is unspeakable. This is something that was not accepted, and here she is trying to speak it, because she is being asked for the first time. This is Freud’s talking cure; she is being asked for the first time to say these things, these unspeakable things.
Cronenberg continues,
You know, in the Burgholzli clinic, which was very advanced for its time and it really was like the Garden of Eden for crazy people. They had gardens, they did have orchards. They had forest trails that the patients could walk through, and gazebos for them to look over Lake Zürich and so on. They played music. But the one thing that they did not have was people listening to them. You’re crazy, why would we listen to what you say? Here is Freud saying “No, listen to them, because they will tell you what is wrong with them, and they will tell you how to cure them.” So, here is Sabina for the first time being asked to talk about these fantasies and her sexual reality. And part of her desperately wants to speak it, and wants to confess it. And then part of her feels it is intolerable and vile and repulsive, and she should not say these things, and is trying to pull it back. So, I said to Keira, “I think it really, as is with other cases with these patients; it should all be around your mouth and jaw. You are trying to deform the words so that they are not understandable, and so on. So that was the basis, and Keira is—you know you can talk to her about those abstract things, and then she can find a way to embody it. That is her brilliance as an actress. You can see all the way through, that’s always there, even as she becomes a substantial, professional person, much more in control of her life; married, pregnant. There is still that volatility, that fragility underneath the surface. It is really a beautiful performance.
Interestingly enough, even though A DANGEROUS METHOD chronicals Sabina’s incredible journey from broken to brave, the script makes Jung the protagonist. Cronenberg elaborates why,
Well, Christopher [Hampton] —this originally was a screenplay. I don’t know if you know that. It was commissioned by Julia Roberts about 17 years ago, and she was going to play the lead, and it was called SABINA. And, of course, for that project Sabina was the main character. Then, that movie did not happen, and he asked for permission to turn it into a play and he got the permission. He began to feel that to tell the whole story of everything surrounding Sabina and the context of her life, it meant that Jung had to become more of a prominent figure in the drama. It is a sort of a ménage à trois, you know. It is true that Jung is really the leading character, certainly in terms of screen time he is. So, that was Christopher’s choice. And when I came to read the play that was really the structure. So, it wasn’t sort of me reshaping it. It was sort of in that mode at that point. Really, it is just a matter of dramatic balance, and structuring a drama. It wasn’t a political thing; you know it wasn’t meant to diminish Sabina’s importance. Obviously, she is still really important to the movie.
Quite a few years ago, Cronenberg had directed a short with a similar storyline thread. However, he had forgotten all about this until friends reminded him.
I had friends who pointed out to me something that I had completely forgotten, that the first film I ever made was seven minute short called “Transfer”, and it was about a psychiatrist and a patient. And the patient is complaining that the only relationship that he has ever had that meant anything was his relationship with his psychiatrist, and so he is kind of stalking him and following him around. So, this is kind of coming full circle in that way.
Cronenberg recognizes the value of pyschology in today’s society.
It is a little bit like Einstein’s theories not being able you be proved until we could send spaceships out into outer space, to test his theories about time and space. It turns out that Freud— also with new technology—that some of his theories have been absolutely confirmed. Modern psychologists like to call it non-consciousness rather than unconscious, so that sort of is a different concept, but it is really sort of basically the same thing. So, I think we are not through with Freud, or with Jung. As I say, it seems that it has splintered off into many different kinds of therapy. That great invention of Freud’s—the relationship between an analyst and a patient—seems to still have resonance for people. It is sort of a secular version of the confessional; you have someone not judging you—although I guess a priest is more judgmental really—but the idea that, well, as you see with Sabina, a man she doesn’t know is asking her to say these extremely intimate things, and he is not judging her. He is not saying you are wrong; this is bad you are evil. He is just listening and allowing her to hear herself. So, that still seems to be a valuable thing. We have friends who do that for us sometimes now, but it’s because we all know this kind of analytical procedure, because it has been so much in the zeitgeist for all those years. But, it seems that people need it, and they still look for it.
The pioneering studies of Jung, Freud, and Sabina have somewhat given way to taboo subjects covered on Dr. Drew and Dr. Phil in the modern world. However, Cronenberg doesn’t necessarily agree with the new cultural zeitgeist.
In a way, for better or worse because I hate those shows – I find them totally unbearable and vulgar and ridiculous and hideous – aside from that, in a way these three people: Freud, Jung and Sabina invited that aspect of the 20th century and invented modernity in terms of the relationships that people have. When you read the letters between Freud and Jung, they feel totally modern. Why do they feel modern? Here were two professional men, highly respective in highly conservative professions writing to each other about bodily fluids and erotic dreams and things that men of that time would never speak those words, especially to other men. When Sabina, their intellectual equal, she spoke about woman’s erotic nature at the same time, the same level, it was also unheard of before. Now, any blogger, whatever, it’s all out there. It was really invented by those people, it was unprecedented.
Hollywood has given us a few versions of Freud. A DANGEROUS METHOD’s Freud is the one most faithful to the doctor’s legacy. When speaking specifically about John Huston’s FREUD, Cronenberg clarifies,
I saw when it came out, believe it or not. That was a long time ago [laughs]. I do remember reading that Huston was the absolute wrong guy to direct that movie because I think he didn’t believe in analysis. He didn’t believe in sex as the driving force of all that was the young Freud played by Montgomery Clift, so I think was very much a classic Hollywood blunder, let’s put it that way. They understood that it was something intense and hot, Freud, but they didn’t really get it. Despite that Jean Paul Sartre worked on the script, he really understood Freud, but he wasn’t a screenwriter. Even that element was probably not helpful. At least it was a sort of serious attempt with Freud. There was a BBC miniseries with which was really quite good.
A DANGEROUS METHOD opens on November 23 in New York and Los Angeles.
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