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"FacebookPinterest\n\n It's no longer remarkable that the director once called The Baron of Blood is a mild-mannered Canadian. Or is it? David Cronenberg is treasured by cinephiles of all stripes, from fans who love his head-splattering early work to art house aficionados waiting for his overdue Oscar nomination. Although A Dangerous Method looks unlike any other Cronenberg film, its themes are the same that torture the car-crash fetishists in Crash and the demented twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers.\n\n Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender star as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, respectively; the older analyst mentors the younger before they fall out over Jung's growing interest in metaphysics, among other things. Keira Knightley's Sabina Spielrein is one of Jung's patients, a test subject for Freud's talking cure and, later, Jung's lover, as well as an analyst herself.\n\n \"I want you to be ferocious with me,\" Spielrein tells Jung before a masochistic bout of verboten sex. Despite its Victorian-era trappings and emphasis on talking about the parasites in our psyche rather than the ones that crawl up through the drain, the through-line of Cronenberg's work remains intact. With his dry humor, Cronenberg seems like the perfect person to confide one's own darkest secrets to, even during a professional interview.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\nGQ: I've always gotten the impression from your work, from even as early as the young woman with the book on Freud in Rabid, to someone like Dr. Raglan in The Brood, that perhaps you're not a fan of psychotherapy. This movie really made me rethink that assumption.\n\n David Cronenberg: Yeah, it's interesting. For example, in The Brood, it's not an attack on psychotherapy at all, particularly. I think the creation of a new relationship between people, which is one of the things that psychoanalysis did, the relationship between a psychoanalyst and a patient is unique and didn't exist before Freud. And it's kind of fascinating. And it's, of course, capable of being used in many different ways, and some of them are perverse ways and some of them are wrongheaded ways, but some of them are very positive ways. So it's really just, as I play with the relationship between doctors and patients, for example, [it's] the same... You have either villains or you have people [who are] ambitious, wrongheaded, whatever.\n\n It really goes back to George Bernard Shaw saying conflict is the essence of drama, that it's really looking for that\u2014not so much necessarily a criticism of the entire profession\u2014it's very specific, in other words. In neither case, would it have been meant to be an attack on the entire profession or the entire idea of it. But it's fun to explore what happens when things go wrong. That's more dramatic than when things go right, let's put it that way. It's part of the nature of drama.\n\nGQ: I found it fascinating to see this side of Jung. We look at him as a sort of New-Age-y, pre-Joseph Campbell-y kind of guy. And Freud's pretty much fallen out of favor. He's kind of a bit of a cigar-is-a-cigar joke. Was that inherent in the text?\n\n David Cronenberg: Well, it begins with Christopher [Hampton]'s writing, of course, and with his play. But one of the joys of making this movie was to resurrect these people at a particular point in their lives, which is not a very well known part of their lives. I mean, we all, as you say, we know the old Jung, we know the grandfatherly Freud. We don't know the 29-year-old Jung and the 50-year-old Freud, very dynamic, described by Stefan Zweig in his book The World of Yesterday, who knew Freud and writes about Vienna. He says he's masculine, he's handsome, he's charismatic, he's witty, he's charming, and funny.\n\n These are not the words that people normally think of in terms of Freud, but they were the reality to people who knew him. And, when you think of it, to be able to hold together this kind of disparate group of very fractious, obsessive, intellectual people and mold them into a movement would take someone with great charisma, with great force of will.\n\n That's why I cast Viggo, as opposed to some more ordinary, kind of obvious casting for Freud. And the pleasure once again to discover Jung, who is not the Jung that you see on YouTube, when you can see him doing interviews, but the sort of young, dynamic, ambitious, career-minded and very bright and very intellectual psychiatrist working at this immense, immense psychiatrist clinic in Zurich.\n\nGQ: The mentorship between Freud and Jung is fascinating, especially because Fassbender and Mortensen have a lot in common. Was there a sort of mentorship on set, as well, between the two?\n\n David Cronenberg: I think everybody finds Viggo to be a bit of a mentor because he's becoming a kind of\u2014and certainly this is nothing that he would want\u2014but I think he's becoming a kind of iconic figure in terms of how you should be an actor. Just your demeanor, your seriousness, but your sense of humor and the kind of research you do and your professionalism, and your loyalty to the project and to the people who are creating the project.\n\n Michael and Viggo really were a very hilarious pair. [laughs] They have a great sense of humor, and they love to play, and yet, of course, Viggo's almost 20 years older and had that much more experience and so on, so I'm sure there was a bit of that. There was a bit of that. But they really worked beautifully together, that's the other thing. I mean, it was a delight to see. Of course, for me, I know Viggo very well. I didn't know Michael, of course. But I had a sense that their chemistry would be terrific, which it has to be for the movie to work.\n\nGQ: Absolutely, it is. And they have both tackled full frontal nudity in movies, which is still very forbidden. For instance, some of my friends and colleagues are referring to A Dangerous Method as the \"spanking\" movie. And we're looking at Shame and we're going to go see, you know, Fassbender being nude and... I mean, they're very brave performances.\n\n David Cronenberg: Yes. Yeah, I think, in terms of nudity, it's really\u2014well, it's a very personal question for an actor, of course. Neither one of these guys is worried about it at all, it's just if it's part of what is to be done, then you do it.\n\n But it doesn't really have\u2014it's not the scariest kind of performance for an actor. I mean, Keira, well, she's a little bit nude in the movie, but it's the acting part of it that was terrifying for her, because it's so difficult and so nuanced and so emotional, and yet so intellectual at the same time. So in a way you can say that's really harder to do and to contemplate, much more than simple nudity, which really doesn't take acting to be nude in front of a camera. Anybody can do it.\n\nGQ: Her performance is really affecting. Was there any sort of off-camera support or coaching, similar to Geena Davis in The Fly, where you played the gynecologist just to put her at ease? Was there anything like that behind the scenes?\n\n David Cronenberg: No, [as] a director, I feel that I'm there to give the actor what the actor needs. If it's guidance, then it's that, but if it's not, if the actor's doing great, I don't say anything. I mean, just explain the shot or whatever.\n\n Keira really needed very little once she was on the set. A lot of directing happens off the set. It happens before you get on the set. It's when you're working out what costumes you will use. You're talking about what the d\u00E9cor is, all of these things with an actor\u2014what their hair will be like and why it's like that and so on and so on.\n\n And Keira did huge research, and she was assisted by many people, including people that she called up herself. Christopher was involved. And then the actors shared information. This is the thing. Viggo did his research, Michael did his, and they would talk about it, as well, amongst themselves. So by the time she came to the set, really all of them, it was there. It was really just a question of, we had discussed at great length, and I've talked about it a lot, about those opening scenes of madness and how far we should go and how accurate we needed to be and so on.\n\n And so, by the time we were there, she just needed the normal kind of, if it's two takes and we're finished, she knows that that's a good sign. So that's really all the support that a good actor needs, is the director says, \"That's beautiful, we've got it, let's go on to the next shot.\"\n\nGQ: What I found really interesting was because of the time period, this sort of outsiderness of Judaism. You see the menorah in the background at Freud's house and he says, \"Put not your trust in Aryans.\" How did your own experience inform that?\n\n David Cronenberg: My parents were both atheists sort of, although I don't think they ever even mentioned that word particularly, but they were\u2014my father was a writer, my mother was a pianist, there was always music and art and books in our house. Secular, liberal, humanistic Jews. You know, the worst kind if you're a certain kind of person with a certain kind of politics.\n\n I can't really say that I experienced personally any prejudice or any anti-Semitism, other than minor, little nibbles of it. Although Canada's history is not that great in terms of\u2014I mean, there was a time when we had a politician saying, an immigration official saying, \"One Jew is too many.\" ... Canada does not have a good record when it comes to treatment of the Jews in terms of immigration and so on during the war, when Jews were desperate to get out of Germany.\n\n It's an understanding that we all have. I know several people with concentration camp numbers on their arms, all of those things. I don't think you have to be Jewish to understand it. And certainly Freud, as with Einstein, these are characters who one might wonder, if you only know the official version of these guys, what their attitude was to their own Jewishness, but they both were, of course, extremely aware of their own Jewishness and where that placed them in historical context and where that placed them in social context, how they were perceived, the problems that it might entail, either because they rejected, let's say, religion as certainly Freud and Einstein did, or accepted it\u2014all of these things. So they were very conscious of it.\n\n That's intriguing to me for obvious reasons, but I think even if I weren't Jewish it would be intriguing to me, because Christopher's not Jewish and it was intriguing to him, you know.\n\n So, once again, conflict. To take a kind of a coldblooded look at it, if you're a Jewish inventor of psychoanalysis in an anti-Semitic society that views psychoanalysis as a threat, that's pretty interesting from a dramatic point of view and we certainly didn't hold back.\n\nGQ: To switch gears a little bit, I have a working theory of some leading men that I like to call the \"Sex Creep.\" And it's this sort of very queasy but very attractive kind of character or scene. For instance, an informal poll among my girlfriends [showed] that the scene where Viggo puts the cigarette out in his tongue [in Eastern Promises] was very sexy. What do you think that says about the viewer?\n\n David Cronenberg: Well, she's obviously insane. And should be locked up for her own protection.\n\n I think sexuality is an obviously endlessly fascinating, intriguing subject, and not just for movies but just in general. And it constantly intrigues me and you play with it with your actors, of course, because whether we like it or not, actors have a persona that goes outside the role that they play, if they become famous enough. Are they perceived as a hunk or are they perceived as a rat hunk? Or perceived as a divine, god-like hunk, or whatever. Or no hunk at all, a nerd. It just goes on and on. Is someone nerdily sexual, sexy? Because there's that, too, the sexy nerd kind of thing.\n\n It's a bit of a minefield, because sometimes it's not something you really want to deal with, because it's not really of the essence of what you're doing. Certainly that scene that you mentioned surprises me, that cigarette out on the tongue being sexy in the sense that, within the movie, there's no sex involved, obviously. He's doing that to intimidate a Turkish thug with his own toughness and it has nothing to do with sex at that point, you know what I mean?\n\n And yet as an actor that he would do that and that he could do that and that it was a gesture\u2014actually, of course, that Viggo came up with himself\u2014then I could see that toughness, that sort of macho virility could be considered sexy to, I don't know if it's a young woman, but [pause] some woman.\n\n But it's not really part of the scene, and it's not really part of what we were doing in that scene. Of course, when you unleash a movie, you are unleashing forces that you can't control anymore. You're aware of that. On the set, you control things as much as you can and I like to be spontaneous, as well, and let certain things happen. I don't do storyboards because I don't really want to control everything.\n\n Ultimately, these things can either be good or bad for your movie, but they're not really controllable because, as I say, who would have anticipated your friend's reaction? I don't think on the set I would have.\n\nGQ: No, admittedly that was me, but I polled my girlfriends to make sure that I wasn't the only one.\n\n David Cronenberg: Okay, it was you.\n\nGQ: I'm 'fessing up\u2014but it was a group of us.\n\n David Cronenberg: Okay, okay.\n\nGQ: No, I have no problem admitting that. Earlier movies, like Crash, Videodrome, definitely address a sort of deviant sexuality that is fascinating and sexy and repulsive and all kinds of things.\n\n David Cronenberg: I think when I was discussing those earlier films, and Crash, of course, the understanding, really, that what with technology and contraception and all of that, sexuality has really physically been quite disconnected from reproduction and has become its own kind of aesthetic, its own kind of pleasure, its own kind of social interaction, which was pretty unknown in the past. Of course, sexuality has never only been about reproduction, obviously, with human beings, anyway. But at the moment it's almost cut free to kind of float wherever it will float. And sexuality has been mid with many things that I think the ancients would have been surprised to find it mid with.\n\n That's intriguing and it's something, because it's in the air and because it's part of my context, you breathe it in and it's very natural for me to play with those things. But standing back and being analytical about it, I can see that it's not. Your reaction, for example, you know, is that a deviant response? Is that deviant sexuality to be turned on by a guy who puts a cigarette out on his tongue? [chuckles] Maybe for some people, yes, and for some people, not even a surprise.\n\n In some movies, it is the subject matter, like Crash, where you have a specifically, concertedly created deviant sexual culture, subculture within society. [In] another movie, it's sort of a peripheral thing. Certainly with A Dangerous Method, the psychoanalytic movement really was creating a kind of a subculture of sexual discourse, because when you read the letters, even between Freud and Jung, the intimacy is quite shocking, and part of the reason it's shocking is that it's modern. We realize that these men, in a way, were inventing modernity. They talked about things like sexual discharges and body parts and erotic dreams that professional men of the era would certainly never talk to each other about or even allow themselves to think about.\n\n The modernity of these guys, and the intimacy that they allowed themselves with each other, was really quite striking. In a way, that created a subculture of sexual discussion and understanding that was sort of like the Crash subculture in its own way.\n\nGQ: There are some interesting parallels, intentional or not, between ideas of mutation, transformation, and the modern culture of body modification. People who looked at Videodrome and stuff like that and said, literally, \"Long live the new flesh. We are mutants.\" Do you have people that come up to you who are physically modified? Is that of interest?\n\n David Cronenberg: Actually, I wrote a script that I never actually made into a movie, where a body modification performance artist was the lead character. And I do know ORLAN, do you know her? She's a French performance artist who's got horn implants and done a whole lot of things, surgery, public performance of surgery on her own body, and things like that.\n\n It's almost gone beyond performance now, because it's just so common. I mean, just cosmetic surgery, which is, in a way, performance surgery in its own way, on a private level, is so incredibly common that it's almost lost its exoticism, let's say, and maybe in a way it's lost its special meaning. But it's accepted now, as in a way it always has been. I mean, people have never accepted their bodies as just their bodies. They've always been decorating them, distorting them, deforming them since time began. I mean, in any primitive tribe, you see incredible body deformations and scarring and tattooing, so it seems to be an innate desire of humans to not accept the reality of their bodies as it's just given by nature, but to decide to create something beyond just a normal body."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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