FEATURE


work somewhat within the Hollywood system and it’s a little uneasy, whereas working with pro- ducers like Jeremy and Paulo is such an easy fit.” Cronenberg bristles at the bureaucracy of


Hollywood. He likes to draw up his own budg- ets, not to shoehorn his vision into what the stu- dios request. “They’re very conservative whereas with Paulo we did the budget and the schedule in, like, two seconds. We budgeted for 40 days and I came in five days under, in 35 days.” Cosmopolis, sold by Kinology and starring


Robert Pattinson, is in post. This is one of several collaborations Cronenberg has had with major writers. He relished his time working with JG Ballard on Crash and with William Burroughs on Naked Lunch. Ballard was with him on the front line, relish-


ing the controversy Crash caused in Cannes in 1996. Burroughs, for all his counter-culture cre- dentials, turned out to be something of a softie. “The thing about Burroughs was that I found


him very sweet. There was a sweetness to him he hid in his public persona,” Cronenberg reflects on the notorious underground novelist. As he prepares for the Toronto screenings of A


On set: David Cronenberg


Dangerous Method, Cronenberg does not seem fazed by his status as one of the senior figures in Canadian cinema: “Leader of the Canadian wolf pack,” as he calls it. “It’s rather nice to have film- makers like Atom Egoyan saying I’ve been his mentor. The fact I could stay in Canada and have a film career was very inspiring to a lot of Cana- dians. Before that, the model was Norman Jewi- son, who had to go to LA or Ted Kotcheff who had to go to England because there was no film industry in Canada. I’m just a film-maker but I do love the collegiality with other directors.” n


s


Confessions of a Dangerous mind E


arly evening on the terrace of the Excel- sior Hotel in Venice, and David Cronen- berg, whose new film A Dangerous Method screens here at TIFF, is ponder-


ing venereal disease and prostitution in turn-of- the-century Vienna. As part of his preparation for the film — about Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and the early days of psychoanalysis — Cronenberg read The World Of Yesterday, the memoir by Freud’s contemporary Stefan Zweig. “I knew Viggo (Mortensen) had read that


book. Several other people had recommended the book to me, so I started to read it.” The book made clear that prostitution was


rife in Freud’s Vienna, as was anti-Semitism. There was a very dark underbelly to the Austro- Hungarian Empire in the years leading up to the First World War. This was partly what drew the film-maker to A Dangerous Method. No, Cronenberg does not see the film as a


radical departure from his earlier work. Thanks to The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome etc, the Canadian director used to be known as one of cinema’s supreme practitioners of body horror. A Dangerous Method, adapted from Christopher Hampton’s play The Talking Cure and starring


Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and Keira Knightley, is a costume drama that is heavy on dialogue. However, thematically, he argues it is not such a leap from his familiar turf. “You could not avoid the presence of Freud if


you are an artist, his influence on Salvador Dali and the surrealist movement. He was certainly present in my head,” Cronenberg says of his early days as a director. “And Freudian analysis is very much rooted in the human body — penises, vagi- nas, sex of children… [Freud] accepts the primal reality of the human body. Jung wanted to flee the human body. That is my feeling.” A Dangerous Method (sold internationally by


Hanway) sees Cronenberg working again with UK producer Jeremy Thomas (with whom he has previously made Naked Lunch and Crash). The film had no sooner finished than Cronen- berg began shooting Cosmopolis, a Don DeLillo adaptation which he made in Canada with Por- tuguese producer Paulo Branco. “I knew DeLillo was a seriously good writer. I read the book and two days later I said I would do it.” Why does Cronenberg work so frequently


with European producers. “It’s a very comforta- ble fit,” he says. “I do try from time to time to


n 24 Screen International at the Toronto Film Festival September 9, 2011 A Dangerous Method


‘The fact I could stay in Canada and have a film career was very inspiring to a lot


of Canadians’ David Cronenberg


David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method sees the Canadian fim-maker delve into the world of Freud, Jung and psychoanalysis — but it is not such a leap from his body-horror roots, he tells Geoffrey Macnab


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