Asked whether he had much prior knowledge of Jung before filming, Fassbender replies honestly with, “Not a great deal, no. I started researching and realized how intrinsic his ideas are today. My prior knowledge was basic so I had some work to do. There were various stages in his life and I was trying to portray someone who was young and still had a lot to prove in his career. I showed his insecurities. There was this feeling of sensuality with him through his physicality.”
He said he was drawn to this role for many reasons. “I thought it was an interesting story. It was a time overshadowed by WWI and there were these two intense and inextricably interwoven relationships.” This tale of emotional variance with this triangle of Jung, Freud and Sabina that resulted in the birth of modern psychoanalysis intrigued him. “They’re attempting to operate the rules of civilization and steer in the direction of what is considered to be the norm whilst becoming quite aware of the fact that there really is no norm. We live on the fringe and must cope with contradictions. There was this heightened reality, but real can be really boring. So we seek out the drama and the best way to do that is to have conflict, either between the characters or within themselves. I’m interested in when you throw the two together.”
Interestingly, there was a common thread between his portrayal of Jung as well as his portrayal of Brandon in another film he has coming out entitled Shame about a man with a sex addiction. When asked how Jung might diagnose Brandon, Fassbender’s thoughts on what might have been, “He’d say it’s ok. He was truly very fascinated in human behavior. There is this social form we are expected to live under. In actuality, in what way do we really behave?” He adds laughing, “And he’d say go see my friend Freud.” Going into further detail he explains how Jung would want to understand the condition, the intimacy problems with Brandon, not to judge, but to understand. Only in hindsight did Fassbender see the thread line between these two roles where sexual dysfunction played a major part.
Of Jung’s belief that there was no real coincidence, he was asked whether or not he agrees with his theory, “I don’t know if I have any real set beliefs in anything. I think if there is a series of events that there could be something greater at play.”
In his preparation for a role, he always writes a character’s biography from information gathered in a script. “I read and re-read a script anywhere from 300 to 350 times. I spend a lot of time with the characters, stepping into a new skin.” And what he looks for in a role? “As an actor, I am interested in human behavior. I am just trying to understand the various different personalities. My best reference for one is myself, I try to find all of those elements within myself and I try to identify and understand instead of judge.”
The story further piqued his interest as he learned how Sabina influenced Jung in terms of his ideas of introvert and extrovert within personalities. The human elements of these people were also of interest, “They’re actually just human beings doing things to each other that we all do. They have the same lusts and jealousies. They were brilliant people but with that comes ego, as well. I think that’s interesting, people when they’re cornered and the reactions they have and how they deal with the people around them, sometimes the closest people to them.” Evident in the story is that even those who understand humanity best can fall prey to mankind’s most basic emotions. Sabina was relatively unknown, but she greatly influenced both men professionally. No one knew of her until a cache of letters was discovered between the three. She was one of the first female psychoanalysts and a pioneer in her special field of child psychology.
Fassbender was also able to find the humor in the script, “I always found the script really funny. It showed these men as humans who did petty things. Both had massive egos. Viggo and I tried to find the humor; we had a lot of fun. These men were pioneers and psychoanalysis was a revolutionary idea. Clashing ideologies would eventually push them apart. Freud’s rigid adherence to his theories about sex and Jung’s growing fascination with mysticism threatened their alliance.”
With rumors floating around that he might possibly do a remake to Robocop he answers laughing, “I’m always open to read the script and see. I’m up for anything. Might be good to have a helmet to hide behind.”
With Cronenberg at the helm of the table, the questions kept flying. First off, he was asked to confirm that, in fact, this was his third collaboration with Mr. Mortensen. Confirmed. What made him think of Mortensen for the role of Freud? He jokes that it was desperation, but elaborates, “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, stern 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 the literature of the time as masculine, handsome, charismatic, charming, witty, funny and all things we don’t think of as Freud … but he was all those things! And, of course, if you read him you see that he was all those things and funny. He was very funny, especially in his letters. So I thought it would take a slightly oblique, non-traditional kind of casting to deliver this kind of Freud.”
Knowing Viggo, he continues, “I know his capabilities, of course having worked with him, and I felt confident that he could do it. He didn’t feel confident that he could do it, but that’s very charming. And so I basically ultimately talked him into it. But, when I discussed with him all of the things I just talked to you about … what kind of man Freud 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 around and that’s where we were.” The preparation for the role included a beard, of course, but that’s not all. “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 a little more Freud like. That was it.”
Of his personal relationship with this story, with topics like sexuality and people with psychological problems in films like Crash and History of Violence, Cronenberg says, “I don’t think about my other movies when I’m making a movie. It’s as though I’ve never made one. 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. So I actually forget all that other stuff.”
Agreeing that, yes, 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 the enduring, continuing concerns of a dramatist." Pontificating further, he quotes George Bernard Shaw, “Conflict is the essence of drama,” and so, he says, “We are looking for conflict. Whether it be psychological or not, it doesn’t have to be physical violence but you don’t have the drama without the conflict.” They certainly talk about sex quite a lot in this film, but he defends this, “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.” Freud acknowledged, “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. Its tribal hostility, tribal violence." Freud’s 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. It’s hard for us to realize now how shocking the First World War was to idealists at the time that 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.”
Of present day thought, “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.” Admittedly, all of those things were very fascinating to him. “It wasn’t really just sex, obviously. And as I said, when I’m making the movie, I’m literally not thinking at all about my other movies.”
Questioned in regards to his visual choices in terms of Sabina, particularly in the sex scenes, with the spanking, the whippings, the beatings, Cronenberg chose to have her self- voyeuristically viewing herself in the mirrors. His reasoning, “Well, these people were their own first subjects. 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.” He gave the example of 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 were not known, “So they were very obsessive about observing themselves. When Freud talked about dreams, he was talking about his own because he didn’t have subjects who were divulging their own dreams to him yet. So he used his own dreams as his subject.” In regards to 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 from a 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 that was reasonable.”
Keira Knightley’s performance in the film was impressive; especially with her physicality and the way she embodied the role. Asked to talk about working with her on the set, directing her and creating the character, he tells of his experience as follows, "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 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.”
Cronenberg had photographs that were taken by the French psychiatrist Charcot, who was a mentor of Freud’s, and he specialized in hysteria. “Hysteria was considered a disease, a disease of women particularly and the word comes from the Greek word meaning uterus. In fact, they often removed the uteruses of women in order to cure them of this disease, which seems rather barbaric to us now, but they thought it was a reasonable thing to do at the time. As I say, we have the photographs of Charcot’s patients and we also have footage of Charcot’s patients, as well.” In addition, he had fifty pages of what Christopher Hampton found in the basement of the Burgholzli clinic, fifty pages of Jung’s analysis of Sabina, including his handwriting in the margins describing her symptoms in great detail. “What her face was doing, the contortions of her face, and so on. A face ravaged by tics, he said. So, we had all of this accurate information about that.” He tells of a conversation he had with Keira, “You are a woman who is being asked to describe things which are unspeakable to you because you are a young woman, only eighteen, and you come from a wealthy family. To say that ‘I masturbate; because I am sexually aroused by my father 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.”
The Burgholzli clinic was very advanced for its time and it really was like the Garden of Eden for crazy people. “They had gardens and 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.” His thoughts on all of this as expressed to Keira, “I think it really, as is with other cases with these patients, and 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.”
He talks about the first film he ever made which was a seven-minute short called “Transfer” about a psychiatrist and a patient. “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, in a way this is kind of coming full circle.”Of his previous knowledge of these two men, “I would say that I knew a lot more about Freud before I started this movie, and not so much about Jung, who was very popular in the sixties. But, of course a lot of that developed after his break with Freud. You can see that he begins really being a supporter of Freud and psychoanalysis in the Freudian style, and it gradually starts to turn into something quite different. In fact, he went exactly where Freud thought he would go; into a kind of Arian mysticism and religion and so on.”
For him, Jung really became kind of a religious leader more than a scientist. “I know people who have undergone Jungian analysis and they found it very helpful, so it is not to say it doesn’t work. It is just a matter of temperament, I suppose, as to what kind therapy you would go for if you had a problem. In other words, Jung did not always fascinate me, but certainly Freud has influenced us all, whether we know it or not. I mean really, you can’t grow up in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first without being influenced by him, just because our understanding of the way human psychology works is so shaped by Freud. It is inescapable, really." On the choice to make Jung the protagonist as opposed to Sabina, he reasons, “This originally was a screenplay. Julia Roberts commissioned it about seventeen 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 Christopher Hampton asked for permission to turn it into a play and 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 true that Jung is really the leading character, certainly in terms of screen time. 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.”
On psychoanalysis and his thoughts on it, “It is pretty interesting. I mean, if you talk to a psychology student, they’ll tell you that they barely talk about Freud and Jung; they are just sort of past historical figures. They are much more into cognitive behavioral therapy, and there are all kinds of other kinds of therapy that have evolved out of what Freud initially began. And yet, a friend of mine who is a clinical psychologist at Stanford said that in the last fifteen years, people have been coming back to Freud. With MRI’s being able to show us what goes on in the brain, they found that Freud was totally right in that there are thought processes that go on that we cannot consciously access, but they are thought processes. “With Freud with new technology, 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.”
Speaking to a recent article in the NY Times about how Freudian analysis is huge in China right now, he says, “As they develop a middle class, and they have some money and time, they start to think about their own psyches and their family lives. So, you have a lot of Freudian analysts Skype-ing from NY City to China in the middle of the night with their patients. 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. But, it seems that people need it, and they still look for it.”
Of modern times and the advent of shows such as Dr. Phil, “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 twentieth 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. Men of that time would never speak those words, especially to other men. When Sabina, their intellectual equal, spoke about women’s erotic nature at the same time, at the same level, it was also unheard of before. Now it’s all out there. It was really invented by those people, it was unprecedented.”
Of his working relationship with Hampton, “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 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 what 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. 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 that 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.”
A Dangerous Method opens in LA and NY on November 23rd, 2011.
