The abiding image in David Cronenberg's new film A Dangerous Method is of Keira Knightley, her jaw thrust out alarmingly as she howls out the dark secrets of a confused childhood to her psychiatrist: Her father spanked her, she cries, and "it excited me." It's an alarming performance, both for its raw power and for the painful grimaces.
It's shocking, just as Knightley wanted it to be. "I stood in front of my mirror for a couple of days and went, 'Hmmm, what is this, how can I f--- this face up?'" Knightley recalled. "And then I went on Skype with David and said, 'OK, I've got a couple of options,' and he went, 'That one.'"
The idea of the 26-year-old actress - whose thin beauty has made her an object of desire for much of her career in film and as a model - twisting her face into expressions of sexual hysteria on Skype is almost as shocking as the result. Knightley said she had deep misgivings about taking on the role of Sabina Spielrein, a true-life patient of Carl Jung at the dawn of psychoanalysis, but once she committed to it, she held little back.
Set in the late 1800s, A Dangerous Method is based on the story of Jung (played by Michael Fassbender) and his contemporary, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), who are pioneering varying approaches to the new science of psychiatry. However, Jung's relationship with Spielrein - who was his patient, became his mistress, and went on to be an influential analyst in her own right - strains their friendship.
Knightley seems an unexpected choice, but since her emergence in the 2002 film, Bend It Like Beckham, she has gone on to a series of diverse roles - Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually, Last Night - in scattered genres. Under her willowy good looks, she is something of a maverick, and she said she decided several years ago that she would like to work with Cronenberg.
"We met five or six years ago, around the time of A History of Violence," she recalled at the Toronto International Film Festival, where A Dangerous Method had its North American debut. "I remember sitting with him, having a cup of tea, thinking, 'Oh you're so lovely.' It was only 20 minutes, but he's an absolutely lovely, calm, interested, interesting individual." She calls him a "magician" as a director. Still, when she read Christopher Hampton's screenplay for A Dangerous Method, she balked at first.
"I did have huge reservations about sex scenes in it," she said. "I had huge reservations about the S&M scenes, and kind of thought about turning it down right at the beginning because of that." She worried that salacious images inevitably make their way onto the Internet.
She phoned Cronenberg, who said he would be willing to cut the scenes. But once he explained that they would be clinical rather than voyeuristic or sexy, she agreed to do them.
"When you're playing a character like that, there's so many pitfalls, and I don't know with another director whether I would have taken it as far as I did, because I don't know that I would have trusted them," Knightley said. "I wanted it to be shocking, and he wanted it to be shocking, and when you watch a lot of his work, it is very shocking. This one is very different in a lot of ways from his work, but I also think it's perfectly clear it's a Cronenberg movie, because of the deeply psychological nature that runs through at least all of the work I've seen, and equally, that kind of shocking nature, which I thought it was my job to do."
The screenplay called for her character to be ravaged by tics and have hysterical fits. Knightley researched Spielrein and talked to psychoanalysts about what that must have looked like. "She described herself as a demon or a dog. I thought, if that's how someone sees herself, that's such a devastating thing, so I thought that's an interesting place to start the physical idea from."
She needed the help, because Knightley has nothing in common with the character. "There was nothing that linked me to her. I didn't understand it on any level, which was why I really wanted to play her. I thought, this is really an opportunity to step into somebody else and really see the world through her eyes." It helped that the performance was planned over four months, so that, when it came time to shoot the scenes of hysteria, only one or two takes were required. In the evenings, to relax, the cast got together to watch World Cup soccer on TV.
The subject matter of A Dangerous Method is dense, and Knightley said she literally didn't understand the words in the first book she read about it. "The psychoanalytical dialogue is difficult. And, obviously, I had to understand exactly what I was saying."
She had never heard of Spielrein, and knew very little about the fathers of psychiatry, either. "I vaguely knew about Freud and Jung. I knew it was all based in sex, and you were meant to blame your parents for everything, and the ego came up an awful lot, but that, aside from that, I didn't know the difference between them." She said that, when she took the part, her mother - Scottish playwright Sharman Macdonald - told her, "Oh God, you're going to blame me for everything." Knightley responded, "I already do blame you for everything."Knightly says she came away from the experience with a new understanding of the complications of the mind.
"The whole thing is a father complex. She loves her father, she hates her father. How does that work? How can you love somebody and hate him? Does she sometimes love him and sometimes hate him? No, she loves and hates him at the same time. I think the biggest thing was that kind of realization of the constant existence of opposites."
It's an idea that has stayed with her in other roles. "You think, 'The opposite is always alive, so have I thought of that? And how can I put the shade in what the opposite is?' With her, it's a constant struggle between the two, a battle."