Director David Cronenberg On A Dangerous Method, Dead Ringers The TV Show, And Working With Franchise Film Stars

Watching A Dangerous Method, I was struck that if I were flipping channels, I wouldn't necessarily think, 'Oh! This is a David Cronenberg movie!' Was that was by design? No, it has nothing to do with anything really. Frankly, when I"m making a movie my other movies don't exist, I just forget about them, because each project is unique. Once I decide to do it, I don't really think of it in those terms because it's irrelevant. What you've done before is absolutely irrelevant to me. As a critic, of course, you're looking at all this, the arc of the career and all that stuff. For me, not, it's just like, "Okay here's a movie." I've decided to do it for whatever reason and now I give the movie what it wants. I listen to the movie and it tells me what it wants.

This movie says there's a certain classical style that's required because the people of that era, the tone of that era, was very controlled and very precise. Even though it was full of revolution and passion and all kinds of things, and it was on the eve of the first World War, but of course they didn't know that then. The style of the writing and the style of the people themselves is what determines what I do with the movie. So stylistically, as I say, you have to give the movie what it wants. You don't impose some arbitrary thing.

So it emerges. I'd gone to the set—well of course you've prepared because you've cast the movie, you've found locations, you've designed the costumes and all that stuff—but when I go on the set I still don't know how I'm going to shoot it. I'm like that. Now in terms of the movie being not obvious, of course, but when you think of it? The first movie I ever did was about a psychiatrist and a patient. It was called Transfer. It was a seven minute short, I wrote it and it was my first movie. Then of course in The Brood you have a psychologist, or a psychiatrist, played by Oliver Reed. So in a way you could say I'm coming full circle.

Watching A Dangerous Method I was reminded of a line about the broadcast in Videodrome, "It has a philosophy. And that is what makes it dangerous." That's a good connection because Freud wasconsidered dangerous. Extremely dangerous. And he knew it. That era was one of great control and propriety and appearance. You see the stiff white collars and the many layers of waistcoats and corsets and stuff. It was very controlled, everybody knew his place in society. They really felt that it was a perfect civilization. The European civilization. And it was the seat of the Austro-Hungarian empire that lasted 700 years and had an 80-year-old emperor, literally. It was the empire.

When you go to Vienna—to me it was shocking to see how big it was, how monumental the scale was. You realize that the people who built this city felt that they were the capital of an empire. So for Freud to come and say the things that he said, I mean it was totally body repression. Women were goddesses. They were perfect, dainty, lovely creatures. And here's Freud talking about penises and vaginas and anuses and excrement and incest and women's sexuality and masturbation. This was totally shocking! Completely unacceptable. And worse, they felt that this was the evolution of civilization to it's highest peak and that rationality and reason could control and govern everything. Here was Freud saying, "No this is just a thin veneer that's easily destroyed. And underneath that are all these barbaric, animalistic, unreasonable id things that can destroy us.

So of course the first World War proved that he was completely right. The first World War was a big shock for a lot of people because they could absolutely not believe that Europeans would do those things to each other. By the second World War, of course, they weren't so surprised because they had had the first World War. But that was a shock! They had had 40 years of peace in Europe. 40 years!

No one was really prepared for trench warfare. No, the hideousness of it and the barberism of it was unthinkable. And yet it happened. So Freud was dangerous and there were many reasons for both sort of the sexual, body ones and, once again, there's your hook into Cronenberg-ness, if you want one. Freud really insisted on the reality of the human body, whereas this was a society that was trying to repress the reality of the human body and control it.

It was impressive that in this film with none of your usual special effects you still managed to get Keira Knightley to do something like that with her jaw. [Ed.: when Knightley is undergoing therapy in the movie her jaw appears to have a life of its own] Yes! The cheapest special effect ever!

Did you know she could do that with her jaw? No, I didn't. But the discussion was hysteria, which was a disease of the era, it's disappeared basically as a clinical category. It came out of the repression of women but the word hysteria is based on the Greek word that means uterus. In fact, they also would remove the uterus of hysterical women thinking that would cure them. So this was primarily a disease of women—although men did have it, too—and it involved weird paralisis of weird parts of the body and deformations and weird laughing fits and strange ticks and twitches and repetitive movements and all that kind of stuff.

Christopher Hampton actually went to the University of Geneva where all of Sabina's papers were left in a suitcase when she left for Russia. He saw Jung's notes on what Sabina's symptoms were when she was admitted to the hospital, to the Burghölzli and so we had great detail about what she would have looked like and felt like. Also, there is footage of hysterical patients—silent films from the era and photographs—so I know that some people thought she was very extreme and over-the-top but we thought we were being very subdued compared with what you would have seen because it is very difficult to watch. It's really difficult to watch these people doing that stuff. I said to Keira that I felt that because she was—she's trying to speak the unspeakable things about her passions, her masochism, her father, her sexuality, her masturbation—these are things she can barely speak but she has the desire to force them out of her mouth. But other parts of her are trying to stop them from being spoken. So that's where I felt that around the mouth is really the focus of her particular version of hysteria and that's what she came up with.

Was this an adaptation where you saw Christopher Hampton's play first? I've never seen it. I read it. I had heard that it was playing in London and Ralph Fiennes was in it playing Jung and of course I had worked with Ralph in Spider. Christopher Hampton's work I've known since he was a 22-year-old sort of wunderkind.

He made a splash. Yes, he did. I was very curious and the subject matter was very interesting to me. I had never heard of Sabina until that play. Then I started to get very interested in it and then I read the book it was sort of based on called The Most Dangerous Method. I got in touch with Christopher and that's where it started. Reading the play just made me realize that I probably always wanted to do something about Freud and that era in Europe. But to say that isn't really to say anything because it's really such a huge topic. His life was full of hundreds of amazing, eccentric characters and there's no structure there. Suddenly here was a play with a beautiful structure. The genius of Christopher in particular was to distill this very complex era and moment in time around Freud and Jung's life into basically five characters. Suddenly there was this wonderful, what I think of as an intellectual menage a trois, which I hadn't known about because I didn't know about Sabina. Here's a beautiful structure, beautifully written on which I could base a movie on those things that I'm interested in.

How do you explain to backers, "Hey, I want to make a movie about an intellectual menage a trois?"Well I don't say those words! [laughs] We say, "This is a really sexy movie about shrinks!" I think that the irony is—and you run into it and people say, "It's really very theatrical because they're talking a lot"—that it was a screenplay before it was a play. It was a screenplay written for Julia Roberts to play Sabina and it was calledSabina. Now that was 17 years ago and it didn't happen, for whatever reason.

Well I guess Roberts did Mary Reilly with Christopher instead. Yeah! So it didn't happen and he asked Fox if he could have permission to turn it into a play. Of course they said sure, because there's no money in it and they don't care. So ironically, as I say, it was a screenplay before it was theatre.

The screenplay you shot, I assume, was completely different from his initial one? Not completely. We had the rights to it. We could use whatever we wanted to. There was some of the screenplay, there was some of the book and there was a lot of new stuff as well because of ongoing research that Christopher was doing. He actually came up with other things that he was interested in. So it's an amalgam of things but as I say, I suppose when you're looking for backers, that would be one thing that they would be worried about. If it's a play, is it going to be too theatrical? Is it going to be this or that? But for me, talking is the thing that you mostly shoot when you're directing a movie. People talking. You're shooting human beings, you're shooting the human face, the human body is your subject and it is mostly speaking. So for me it was very cinematic, I didn't have any worries about that aspect of it.

Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen in A Dangerous Method (Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics)

So this is your third movie in a row with Viggo Mortensen. Yeah. It's coincidence in one way and in theory I'd love for him to be in every movie that I do. But I just did Cosmopolis, which he's not in. You don't do an actor a favor by miscasting him. If I hadn't thought he was the right guy for these roles, I wouldn't have cast him. Even though we're close friends, he understands that. It's understood in the business that you can't always work together even if you want to. So it's a fortunate coincidence that these movies could work.

Still, it was somehow surprising to see him as Freud. I'll tell you, right from the start, one of the interesting things for me about the movie was when in their lives we meet Jung and Freud. We all know the 70, 80-year old Jung and Freud. You can see interviews with Jung on YouTube anytime you want. He died in 1961 and he did a lot of interviews but he's in his 70s and he's a big, old grandfather, the Jung that we love. And the same with Freud—not that there's footage, there are no interviews that way with Freud—but there are images and he's in his 80s and he's cancer-ridden and frail. But in the time of the movie, Freud was 50 and he's in the height of his powers. He was described by Stefan Zweig, a Viennese writer who knew Freud, in his book "The World Of Yesterday" as his usual masculine, handsome, charismatic self. This is his understanding of Freud. Likewise Jung was 29 and considered really very imposing and very handsome and charming and charismatic. They were both leaders of psychoanalytic movements at a time when there was a lot of negativity aimed at them, so they had to have that strength and that charisma. I'm showing us a Freud and Jung that we're not used to seeing, basically. Once you start to think of Freud in those terms, then Viggo is suddenly not such an unusual choice.

I didn't want it to be obvious casting because I thought that the obvious casting is actually wrong. You're taking the old Freud and making him a little bit younger but you're still casting a guy who's an old, Jewish grandfather—not that Freud wasn't, ultimately, an old, Jewish grandfather, because he was—but this is Freud in full armor.

Did you shoot with Michael Fassbender before he did X-Men: First Class or after? It was before. He went right from us to X-Men.

Viggo Mortensen, Magneto, and a movie with Rob Pattinson next, with all that Twilight hoopla around him. You don't mind stars with franchise baggage it seems. It's like with Viggo with The Lord of the Rings, frankly. We've talked about this a lot. He wouldn't have been a candidate for