5.
Split-Focus
Cronenberg often uses a split-focus lens during the interrogation scenes, keeping the foreground and background figures in focus with an area of soft focus between them. It comes across beautifully on the Blu-ray, as you can simultaneously make out every hair of Fassbender’s mustache and all those weird veins popping out of a convulsing Knightley’s forehead.
6.
Freud’s Staircase
The staircase used for Sigmund Freud’s introduction was the same one the real Freud walked up and down every day in his hometown of Vienna. The film being a Canadian/German co-production, it was difficult to shoot in any other country so this is one of the few scenes filmed in Austria. Freud’s actual apartment is now a museum, so a replica was built as a set.
7.
Stogies… Lots of them
Freud smoked 22 cigars a day. Thus, Viggo Mortensen smoked a cigar in every scene in the film except one dinner scene with his family. An older Freud would continue smoking cigars, even after he was diagnosed with jaw cancer. Cronenberg says he and Mortensen exchanged 25 emails dealing with the specifics of Freud’s cigars. Size, quality, band on or off…
8.
The Price of Therapy… Double It
Ten francs was the going rate for a therapy session during this story’s period, but there was no 10 franc paper note at the time. Cronenberg thought paper notes worked better than coins in the context of the scene, so he raised the price to 20 francs and had the props department make a replica of the era’s Swiss franc note.
9.
Mortensen’s Method
As part of Mortensen’s ridiculously thorough prep work, he learned to write in Freud’s hand, not only in German, but in gothic script. This allowed Cronenberg to perform a camera move from an over-the-shoulder to a close-up of his hand while writing a letter. He could probably forge Freud’s checks if he was still around. And if people still wrote checks.
So there you have it. Maybe you found this interesting if you already saw the film, even if you have no plans to revisit it. Maybe it’ll help you enjoy the film more than I did if you haven’t seen it yet, but intend to rent or buy the Blu-ray. I suppose it’s worth watching if you’re a Cronenberg completist, I’d just caution that you may not be overly entertained or captivated… I wasn’t.
It’s hard to use the word “minor” to describe a film’s place in its filmmaker’s oeuvre without feeling like one of those pompous pseudo-intellectuals that would be the brunt of some joke in a Woody Allen movie, but that’s the best way to describe A Dangerous Method. It throws a lot of ideas at you, but nothing you can really sink your teeth into and chew on for a while — certainly nothing like you’d find in Videodrome or Scanners.
