Director David Cronenberg and actor Viggo Mortensen have made three movies together: “A History of Violence,” in which Mortensen played a family man driven to his physical edge; “Eastern Promises,” in which he played a Russian gangster given to outbursts of rawboned brutality; and now “A Dangerous Method,” in which an actor known for his chiseled good looks and compact muscularity delivers an improbably avuncular turn as psychoanalysis pioneer Sigmund Freud. The film co-stars Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung and Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, a patient of Jung’s who became his lover and eventually precipitated a break between the two men.

At the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Cronenberg and Mortensen talked about what Mortensen called the director’s “first Merchant-Ivory picture,” while Mortensen nursed a double espresso and a small pot of Argentinian mate tea.

Q. You’ve spent a career making movies about the very drives, impulses and sexual taboos that Freud is so responsible for articulating. It feels like the movie you were always meant to make.

David Cronenberg: The usual question I get is, “This isn’t a very Cronenberg film,” so I think what you’re saying is absolutely correct. It’s sort of about time! It was very cathartic for me, and really a lot of fun. I felt that I was connecting with something very primordial in my life, but also in the development of the intellectual life of the 20th century, which is my century, basically.  Read the rest of this entry »