The “amazing” actor among the best David Cronenberg has ever worked with
In Canadian auteur David Cronenberg’s long career behind the camera, he’s worked with a long list of high-profile stars. From a series of collaborations with Viggo Mortensen to early star turns from the likes of Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Walken, starring in a Cronenberg film appears to have become a bucket list item for many actors. However, one performance that the director himself singled out as coming from one of the most amazing actors he had ever worked with was actually met with some controversy upon its unveiling.
Speaking to Film Comment in 2011 following the release of psychoanalysis drama A Dangerous Method, Cronenberg spoke of how impressed he was with Keira Knightley’s performance as the tormented Sabina Spielrein, and called criticism of her “wrong-headed”.
Spielrein was an early patient of Carl Jung who went on to become one of the first female psychoanalysts. In early scenes of the film, Knightley depicts her in the throe of what Jung (played here by a moustachioed Michael Fassbender) called hysteria. It’s a tough watch – she’s wracked with contradicting emotions, rocking back and forth in a chair, her face gurning in shapes that suddenly make A Dangerous Method fit more neatly in with the other more body horror-focused instalments in Cronenberg’s oeuvre.
But her full-bodied depiction of a hysterical patient drew mixed criticism, much to the director’s chagrin. “I think that people who have a problem think that at the beginning of the movie, the character is over the top, and they equate that with overacting. But Keira and I felt that we were doing a very subdued version of what hysteria was and what Jung documented as her symptoms. To do it totally accurately would be unbearable to watch.” Cronenberg said the work of psychologists like Jean-Martin Charcot suggests that Knightley’s performance could even be considered subtle in comparison to reality.
When questioned how he successfully directed an actor to do the impossible – inhabit contradiction – Cronenberg took no credit. He said Knightley went to screenplay writer Christopher Hampton for information on how heavily impacted she should be by hysteria, and then she was away. “How to manifest it was all from her. After three days of shooting, we were five days ahead of schedule. I had allotted a lot of time for those early scenes because I didn‘t know what she would need. I hadn’t directed her before. And those extreme scenes were the first scenes we shot. But she was fantastic. She needed very few takes. We were all just awestruck. She was incredibly well-prepared. She had a little binder with all kinds of notes, and she would listen to music of the period, and then she would just do it.”
Knightley herself was just 26 years old at the time, fresh from the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Addressing the mixed reviews to her performance in an interview with Reuters, she questioned how else she could interpret a screenplay that reads “has a hysterical fit, ravished by tics”.
“I wanted it to be shocking because what was going on internally (for Sabina) was shocking,” she said. “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.’”
And Cronenberg’s praise went further, saying Knightley was a joy to have on set. “And what’s more, she was a delight. It wasn’t Method acting in the sense of “Don’t talk to me. I’m in my character.” She would laugh. Viggo [Mortensen] and Michael [Fassbender] are fun-loving guys, as is Vincent [Cassel]. We all are, and she was right there with all that. But she would do these amazing things, which leads me to say that she’s among the best actresses I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with the best. That’s why it bugs me that some people say she’s overacting. She’s hysterical. It’s not just an expression. It meant something at the time, medically.”
It’s high praise from the Baron of body horror, although the two have not worked together again since. It raises the question of whether a Cronenberg-Knightley collaboration could be on the cards in the future once the director has gotten clear of his work on his upcoming release, The Shrouds.
