David Cronenberg and Viggo Mortensen talk about ‘A Dangerous Method’

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.

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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.

Viggo Mortensen: Do you think maybe if you’d done this early on you wouldn’t have been as — you know, with the [visual approach] being relatively simple, would that have occurred to you earlier?

Cronenberg: I don’t know. This is the interesting thing, and it’s unknowable. . . . However, I have really simplified my approach to filmmaking. I think it’s more efficient. That’s the dry term, but it’s more ascetic and more constrained.

Mortensen: Well, you also know when it’s working —

Cronenberg: — That’s true, I don’t spend as much time in the editing room.

Mortensen: But just for me as an actor, working with you as a director was more efficient each time. Less needs to be said, and we’re in sync in a way that I might have doubted more the first time around or the second time. I don’t know that I would have played a character like this with another director, or a few years ago. I think it would have been harder. But a lot of it had to do with your approach, I think, of not being weighed down by an idea of the importance of the subject matter or the characters or the profound things that are said in the script. It was just like, “Let’s film a story that’s fun and what’s really going on with these people — who’s jealous, who isn’t, who’s saying what they mean, who isn’t, all that sort of stuff.” That’s what it’s about. If you get burdened by the academic importance of it, I think it would be hard to make an entertaining movie.

Cronenberg: I think, ideally, I should disappear. A director should disappear. When people get to the set, they think my assistant director is the director, definitely. Because they don’t see me. It’s pretty invisible.