Keira Knightley enjoyed work and research on 'Dangerous Method'
-
Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung psychoanalyzes Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein in "A Dangerous Method."
Share with others:
Keira Knightley did exhaustive homework, practiced making alarming, contorted faces in her bathroom mirror and then contacted director David Cronenberg.
"I wanted it to be as shocking as possible. ... I sort of came up with a couple of options and then got on Skype and went, 'All right, what do you fancy?' and he went, 'That one.' "
After all, her character Sabina Spielrein in "A Dangerous Method" was described as having a hysterical fit and being ravaged by tics. "There were no descriptions anywhere as to what the actual tics were," she said, not even in the original case notes of Carl Jung, who treated the young woman.
But the actress found some hints in Sabina's diary entries.
"She described herself like a demon or a dog, which wasn't in the script. I thought that's pretty huge, if that's the way you see yourself, and I thought it was quite important somewhere to reflect that."
Taking that kernel, along with the notion that Sabina may have desperately been trying to release pent-up emotion, she perfected the faces (her jaw jutting so far forward it seems off its hinges) she showed to Mr. Cronenberg. Their movie, which played to a sold-out crowd during the Three Rivers Film Festival, opens today at AMC-Loews at the Waterfront, Manor in Squirrel Hill and Destinta near Bridgeville.
"A Dangerous Method" premiered during the Venice Film Festival in September, stopped in Telluride and then headed for the Toronto International Film Festival. That is where Ms. Knightley talked about researching Sabina, co-stars Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, and the inspiration she found in her character.
In 1904, Sabina was brought -- screaming, laughing, crying like a madwoman -- more than 1,000 miles to a Zurich psychiatric clinic and Jung. He would employ Freud's experimental psychoanalysis or "talking cure" to help her, and would later surrender to his sexual attraction to his onetime patient.
The movie is based on the John Kerr book, "A Most Dangerous Method," and Christopher Hampton play, "The Talking Cure." Mr. Hampton wrote the film also featuring actor Vincent Cassel as a hedonistic psychiatrist and Sarah Gadon as Emma Jung, Carl's wife.
Ms. Knightley, a long way from "Bend It Like Beckham," "Pirates of the Caribbean" or "Atonement," read books by and about Jung, Spielrein and Nietzsche, along with Sabina's dissertation and other work and papers by Freud and Jung. She also spoke to two psychoanalysts, capitalizing on the four months she had to prepare for the role.
She doesn't pretend to have understood everything, but it helped to launch her into the part. "It's pretty dark stuff," she conceded of Sabina's family and her later association of pain with sexual pleasure.
"The idea that you've got somebody that is so sick at the beginning -- I don't mean sick but ill -- completely trapped within herself, she'd been chucked out of tons of asylums beforehand, people had completely given up hope with her and she'd given up hope in herself. She literally thought she was possessed, she was demonic. ...
"And through analysis, she can be pulled out of herself and not only that, but her intellect can be stimulated, she can be functional within society and become a psychoanalyst in her own right and come up with ideas that inspire both Freud and Jung." That is what Ms. Knightley calls "an extraordinarily inspiring story."
And yet one that comes with a devastating end for the pioneer at the hands of the Nazis in the early 1940s.
Ms. Knightley, 26, is slight and delicate in person but talks two or three times as fast as co-star Mr. Mortensen or their director. The Oscar nominee ("Pride & Prejudice") met the Canadian-born Mr. Cronenberg roughly six years ago in Los Angeles for a cup of tea.
"I think he's phenomenally intelligent, and he's interested and interesting. He's also so calm and so kind to work with. He is gentle and the team around him are just lovely people," a counter to the material -- rife with violence, sex, altered reality, biological horror -- he often tackles.
In this case, though, Sabina's early obsessions with masturbation and (yes) fecal matter were minimized, mainly due to the film's economical 99-minute running time.
Mr. Cronenberg's instructions to her: He wanted Sabina's tics to be facial, so he could shoot her in close-up, and he wanted a "mid-Atlantic accent with a blush of Russian."
Ms. Knightley said, "OK, I don't know what that is, but I'll find it. Fine." She studied with a dialogue coach, listened to a lot of tennis players on YouTube and practiced layering one accent on top of another, as if she were a Russian learning to speak English.
As for her leading men, she said, "I've come to work in a very similar way to Viggo, which is research, so when we were doing the scenes together, it was like books piled up to here and notes coming out of everywhere."
And Mr. Fassbender?
"Michael is equally wonderful, but he doesn't work that way at all. He's repetitive. So repetition, repetition, repetition on the script and only the script. But it's really funny, they're both ... hysterical and they're both jokers, so it's lovely seeing them together.
"They're like twins in some weird way as much as they're completely different, they're incredibly similar. They're both great. They're great guys."
First Published January 27, 2012 12:00 am
