Keira Knightley details her hysteria in ‘Dangerous Method’

Keira Knightley

NEW YORK, (Reuters) – In director David  Cronenberg’s new film about Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud and the  birth of psychoanalysis, “A Dangerous Method”, Keira Knightley  plays Jung’s formerly hysterical patient and lover Sabina  Spielrein.

Keira Knightley

The movie debuted in U.S. theaters last week, and  Knightley told Reuters back in September at the Toronto film  festival that she initially turned down the role due to its  spanking sex scenes opposite actor Michael Fassbender, who  portrays Jung.

But the 26-year-old British actress said the promise of  such a dream role and working with Cronenberg, Fassbender and  Viggo Mortensen (who portrays Freud) was too enticing to walk  away. It also helped that Cronenberg promised the spanking  scenes would be clinical, not “sexy.”

Q. Before the movie, what did you know of psychoanalysis?

A. “Absolutely nothing. I mean I had obviously heard of  Freud and Jung, and I knew vaguely that it was all meant to be  based on sexuality and that your parents came into it  somewhere. But apart from that, I really didn’t know anything.  So it was a question of starting from scratch.”

Q. You’ve said you read “a stack of books.”

A: “A Jung biography. And then ‘Memories, Dreams,  Reflections’ and the letters between Freud and Jung. It was  Nietzsche, a little bit of papers by Freud, papers by Jung and  then I found a book called ‘Sabina Spielrein: A Forgotten  Pioneer of Psychoanalysis.’ That was Jung’s notes on Sabina and  then her dissertations and several papers, essays about her and  then diary entries. So it was quite a stack.”

Q. Did you ever think about studying psychology?

A. “No … there are a lot of parallels in acting. You are  trying to understand the world from a different point of view  without judging it. Looking at it from a psychological point of  view is something you do naturally as an actor anyway.”

Q. Your depiction of hysteria in the film has drawn mixed  criticism. How did you come up with say, your jaw movement?

A. “That’s the tricky thing, when you are reading a script  that says, ‘has a hysterical fit, ravished by tics’. And you  go, ‘OK, what does that mean? And what do you mean a tic?’ So  really, a lot of the reading was based on trying to get  descriptions of tics and trying to understand what that was.

“I wanted it to be shocking, because what was going on  internally (for Sabina) was shocking. I just thought, I wanted  to reflect that externally as much as possible, so I literally  sat in my bathroom  pulling faces at myself until I came up  with this jaw thing. And I thought, ‘Well that looks vaguely  demonic,’ and then I got on Skype with David (Cronenberg) and I  had about two or three ideas and he went, ‘That one.’
Q. Is this your most difficult character yet?

A. “As far as a role, every actor wants a role like this.  It sounds perverse to say it’s fun, but it’s so interesting.  Trying to understand that, to get into that point of view.  Particularly if it’s a filmmaker like David Cronenberg. I would  have had serious reservations playing an hysteric with a  director whose work I didn’t admire as much has him.”

Q. Every actor says sex scenes can be difficult. These  seemed particularly so. Would you agree?

A. “They are always difficult and they are always exposed.  This one was, sort of, something quite different…There were  these two scenes, and I didn’t know that I could do those two  scenes. In the age of Internet and all the rest of it, I didn’t  know that that is what I want particularly to be out there.
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“I phoned him up initially to turn it down because I  thought they were incredibly important for the piece. So it  wasn’t a question of trying to negotiate them out of the film  because I thought they were very necessary for the film. But I  just thought, ‘I don’t think I can do that.’

“So, I phoned up David and said, ‘I love you, I love your  work, but I really don’t think that I want to do this.’ And he  said, ‘Well it would be a tragedy if you turned the role down  because of that, so if necessary we can take them out.’ And I  said, ‘No, because I understand why they are there’. He said,  ‘Well look, I don’t want it to be sexy, and I don’t want it to  be voyeuristic. I want it to be clinical.’     “We talked for quite a long time about exactly what it was  and trying to understand it psychologically. Once we discussed,  I said ‘Alright, fine, as long as it is not sexy. That brutal  horrible aspect is kept, and it isn’t a sexy spanking scene.’“