ROUNDTABLE: "Martha Marcy May Marlene" director Sean Durkin, producers Josh Mond and Antonio Campos

Last week we spent some time with the incandescent stars of Martha Marcy May Marlene. Now that we've heard from the people who brought Martha's characters to life, why don't we see what those who created those characters and that world have to say? Round-table with director Sean Durkin and producers Josh Mond and Antonio Campos after the jump.

Can you talk a little bit about your discovery of Elizabeth?
SEAN DURKIN: Yeah. Yeah, she is. Um, open casting, our casting director brought her in, and we wanted an unknown, and she was the best person. With a character like this it’s hard to say; it was totally fleshed-out in the script but how someone’s gonna interpret it is always tricky, especially this role, ‘cause it’s so silent. So you start with what you don’t want, and you don’t necessarily know what you do want, but when you see something and you feel it you have to follow that, and she was the only person that I saw that I felt it from. I just sort of knew after the first audition.

How many people did you see?
DURKIN: Maybe 50.

Were you worried that the Olsen name would give people entirely different preconceptions as to what this film was about?
DURKIN: No, because I just knew how good she was and I just knew that at the end of the day I would pick the best actor, and she was the best actor for it. Once people see it, that’s all that matters.

Do you know anyone who was actually in a cult?
DURKIN: I do, yeah. A friend of ours, all three of ours, was in a group. We were friends with her for a couple years and didn’t know anything about it, and then she heard that I was writing a script and she told Josh about what had happened, and she said that she wanted to help and share her experience. Then Antonio and I sat down with her for the first time, and she shared everything she could remember, and a lot of it was blocked out, and then six months later we met again and she recalled more. The film’s not based on her at all, but understanding the methods of manipulation and the confusion that she experienced getting out and the paranoia—all those things come from her story.

When you brought John Hawkes on board with the project, had he already been receiving attention for Winter’s Bone?
DURKIN: It was out, but I can’t remember if—
ANTONIO CAMPOS: It had just come out, I think. That was the summer it released, so it had gotten attention. But we all knew John Hawkes—not personally, but we knew his work, like Deadwood and everything else he’s done.

What was your biggest challenge in shooting?
DURKIN: You know, I think making a movie is just really hard. How do you keep going? You have to dig every day and find that drive and that discipline and focus and maintain that, not just through production but through post and screenings and festivals and press. It’s ongoing.

It also seems like the timeframe between casting and release was pretty short. Did you guys feel rushed during the production, or were you working like a well-oiled machine?
CAMPOS: We were working like a well-oiled machine, but Sean had been working on the script for a while, and so by the time we went into production Sean had already sort of lived out the story and so many different variations of it that, in that sense, he was so ready to go and just tell the story. The fact is we’ve been working together for so long and we work with the same people over and over again, so there’s a shorthand that allows us to move very quickly and for us to figure things out in a way that allows for that.

How did John and Elizabeth research cults? Did they meet with your friend?
DURKIN: It was never about a cult. The movie was never a cult movie; we never used the word “cult”—it’s not in the film, it’s not in the script, and we never talked about it that way. All it is, is about a girl who goes through these specific circumstances. “Cult” is a word you use later to talk about it, to encapsulate what it is, but there was no need. For Lizzie it was there on the page, and then her interpretation just focused on that, and if she needed anything we would talk about it. Sometimes she wanted to hear a story that I knew from life that correlated with a scene in the film so she could understand it in a different way, but generally not. And John just approached it in that knowing what he didn’t want it to be and what I didn’t want it to be was some clearly evil, over-the-top cult leader. Even using the word “cult leader”—we never did that.

You mentioned in the production notes that there are a whole lot of cult scripts out there at the moment, which surprised me. You don’t hear much about that now.
DURKIN: Cult scripts? Do you mean—
CAMPOS: Scripts about cults.
DURKIN: Are there? Did I say that?
CAMPOS: I don’t know. [LAUGHTER] I do remember John Hawkes saying that yesterday. I do remember that yesterday John said every year there’s a Manson project that comes around that he’s asked to be involved with in some way that he turns down.

Let’s talk about the aesthetic of the film for a second. I found it to be really self-assured and really impressive for a feature debut, and I just wanted to know what your aesthetic touchstones are as far as other directors who might have informed that.
DURKIN: Well, there are definitely directors who influence you but you try to just focus on the material and do, like, the look of the film specifically was very much like, it wasn’t necessarily “Oh, this looks good, let’s do that.” You’re very much trying to find your own thing. So we knew a couple basic principles, which were we wanted the film to be weathered and worn in, so we had to figure out how to create that look. So Jody had an idea for underexposing and making the blacks milky, and we tested that, and that became the look we wanted to create. From there it was, you know, how do you shoot scenes to create tension? Is tension created in this scene by holding a long shot, whether in a dolly or being still? Is tension created by cutting back and forth between people? It was really more about just looking at each point in the script and seeing what was best.

Together, as Borderline Films, you’ve also done Afterschool and you produce each other’s shorts. I was really interested in hearing more about how you work together as a production company: does it function as a collective? Is it a delineated system where you take turns helming?
CAMPOS: It’s very organic. The first projects we did, coming out of film school, the first film we made I was going to try to direct and Josh and I had co-written based on a script that he had started with somebody else, and Sean and Josh were going to produce. So we had set up the dynamic there, and then after that the short film—Buy it Now—got traction and won a prize at Cannes. That sort of made it… it was natural that I would go from there to directing a feature, and once Afterschool was done I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next but Sean had been developing Martha and Sean knew what he wanted to do next, so it was very natural for us to say “Okay, let’s go and try to get this made.” Basically, there’s no pitching or trying to sell each other, no “This is my turn, this is my turn.” It’s like, “This is a film that I want to make; let’s start working on it,” and whosever idea it is, they develop it.
JOSH MOND: And in between the writing we try to get commercials and music videos to support each other so the other one can write and work on the material. While one of them was in the Cannes Residency program, or in the Sundance Lab, we all had to figure out how to pay our rent. But we also had another film in between the two, which was Two Gates of Sleep, which we shot in Mississippi and were producers on as well, which went to Cannes in 2010. But, yes, it’s a very organic kind of thing and we were talking earlier about kind of keeping film school going and we had to figure out a way to sustain ourselves so we could continue to learn and educate ourselves and get to working.

How do you think going to film school and being in that environment, as opposed to teaching yourselves, has helped you—or, more to the point, has influenced your style and what catches your interest?
MOND: Well, for me I’ve been working in the business since I was like 13, and I worked for a director when I was really young, and I really got a lot of work ethic from him—he made really small movies—but going to film school and meeting people that are our collaborators now was the best part of film school and also allowed me to open up my mind to other types of filmmaking, and I think I learned a lot more about European films and international films and films from the ’60s and the ‘70s, which I think heavily influenced all three of us. All three of us kind of grew up on movies, and I think they were more mainstream American films, but I think what we try to do is we try to apply this new kind of filmmaking that’s progressive to us that we’ve seen internationally, trying to do something different but with the same kind of accessibility.
DURKIN: Exactly. I mean, we sort of founded our company on this idea that—commercial films and art house films are separate but we don’t want that to apply. It doesn’t have to be like that. We grew up on The Goonies and Back To The Future, these great adventures that formed the basis of our creativity and excitement. Those films live in your subconscious and they make it in. We’re also influenced by art house films, but we have that love for entertainment too.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is in theatres now.

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ROUNDTABLE: "Martha Marcy May Marlene" actors Elizabeth Olsen, John Hawkes, and Sarah Paulson

Everyone's been talking about Martha Marcy May Marlene. Okay, so most of them are referring to it as "Marcia, Morris... that one movie with all the Ms," but it still counts. Martha Marcy, a film about a girl named Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) who temporarily moves in with her married sister Lucy (Sarah Paulson) after escaping from a cult and its magnetic leader Patrick (John Hawkes), is the most psychologically chilling movie to have debuted in recent years—and it's not even a horror flick. What's more, every last performance of the film—from those of the aforementioned leads to those of the smallest bit players—is a genuine tour de force. In fact, I could wax rhapsodic all day about the film's impressive array of performances... but why not let Olsen, Paulson, and Hawkes speak for themselves?

Hi.
SARAH PAULSON: Hello, hello! I’ll be in the middle.
ELIZABETH OLSEN: Oh, is this on?

So, Elizabeth, Sean said you didn’t actually go and meet anybody that belonged to a cult. Did you want to have done that?
EO: No, we came to that together. Um, there was really only one person that I had entertained the idea of meeting, who was his—I would like to say his main source of understanding the emotionality of this character, but when I thought about it I didn’t want to meet her and feel like I had to tell her story. I also thought it was so private, her life, and there’s no need to invade someone’s privacy for something that’s actually fictitious, um, and, and the questions that I had as far as the experience came when I asked Sean a little bit more about her—so, no, I actually thought that it would be distracting because you want to pay, like, reverence to someone instead of just focusing on the story that he wrote.

You get so immersed in Martha’s world. Did you feel kind of depressed, filming?
EO: Not really. No, I keep myself very separate from what I work on. I’m very clear in my head that I am not the person I’m pretending to be. When you have to relate in some way, you’ll have harder days than others and more draining days than others, and certainly you get more tired than other days; it was emotionally exhausting, but I didn’t feel—we had a great family and we had a lot of fun doing it, so I didn’t feel like I was heavy all the time.

John…
JOHN HAWKES: I’ll speak loudly.

[LAUGHS] You’re an amazing actor. I’m sure you know that.
SP: Well… [LAUGHTER]
JH: Exactly! I’m with you! I don’t know what Sarah’s saying.

Well, you transition from stage to television to film seamlessly. So do you use a different technique when you’re going into different mediums?
JH: I think so. I think it’s all about trying to find your character in a story and how you can best tell that story. That rule doesn’t change. If you’re onstage, obviously, the audience is in a set position far away, and if you’re filming the audience is often a foot away from your face, depending on where the camera is placed, so you may just adjust your performance a little bit that way. The thing about stages is that you can’t be edited, so that’s pretty exciting, but one of the things I love about film is that you can be edited. [LAUGHTER] So it kind of is a double-edged sword there.

Did you base your character on any particular person that you knew or researched?
JH: You know, I often really draw from sources, even family members, people I’ve met along the way, but for this character I took a different tack. I wasn’t interested in trying to ape anyone’s previous performance as a cult leader. There was just no one in life that I wanted to really draw from on this. I wanted it to feel as if Patrick fell from the sky and landed in this place. The whole film is so elusive and deals so much with questions and mystery, I almost wanted the character to be a mystery to the audience and I wanted him to be a mystery to me as well.

Sarah, you’ve also done a fair amount of theatre. Is your experience with different mediums similar to John’s, or do you approach it differently.
SP: I just prefer doing theatre to almost anything, just because—for me—I feel that it’s an experience where it’s the focus or attention paid on the entire journey that the character takes. There’s something about the beginning, the middle, and the end of it, even in the rehearsal process, where I always figure out what to do with the part most clearly on the last day of the performance, and so I love the idea of getting to continue to explore it every night and the fact that every time you go out there it’s a new opportunity. You know, you can have a bad show one night and the next day you can go—I have an opportunity moment-to-moment to change, because the audience only remembers the last thing they saw. [LAUGHTER] So you can have a really shitty false moment and then you can find a way that something really organic is born out of the moment that was really awful and they won’t remember that, really.

So the song that John sings—how many takes did that require?
JH: Three. One of the really wonderful and terrifying things about that is that it was going to be the score of the film for three minutes, and there was going to be no way to edit within it. It would just have to be the take that sucked the least [LAUGHTER] that they ended up choosing, rather than pre-recording the song—as you normally do—and pretending to sing along to yourself. It was a wonderful challenge to basically score live for a few minutes.

Elizabeth, you have a difficult job in that scene as well because that’s sort of a pivotal moment for you but you don’t have any dialogue.
EO: It wasn’t very difficult. [LAUGHTER] A handsome man is singing a song for you; that’s not… you can do that in any situation and that will win someone over.

I know, John, that you got involved with this project shortly after Winter’s Bone. It’s been said that this film is essentially the spiritual successor to Winter’s Bone, and your roles between the two movies are very different but also have a lot of similarities.
JH: Well, I had a really minor trepidation that I might be sort of rehashing old territory, but it was fleeting. They’re very different projects; the characters have an opposite arc, really. It didn’t so much figure in—it’s rough guys in the woods, but their stories are so different and the characters also are so different. I actually felt in a strange way that Patrick needed less research than Teardrop [from Winter’s Bone] did because Teardrop was so specifically regional, for one thing, and there’s also a novel to work off of, whereas this was something where the character could kind of be from anywhere. In fact, the less attachment to any region, the more interesting for him, I thought.

What about the productions? What was it like to move from that production to this production? They were both small films.
JH: You know, I think Martha Marcy May Marlene had less money, a smaller crew.
EO: Re-heh-eally!
SP: I didn’t know that.
JH: Oh, yes, by quite a lot, I would think.
SP: Oh, snap! [LAUGHTER]
JH: I was probably also the oldest person on Martha Marcy May by maybe, what—well, before Sarah got there [LAUGHTER]—by maybe [LAUGHS] 15 or 20 years. But that was really interesting; you know, there were no grizzled teamsters or anyone around on—
SP: Lotta Puma-wearing cool people. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]
EO: A lot of hipsters.
SP: Lotta hipsters.
JH: It was an amazing bunch, though, and the really interesting thing about this film was that the crew was so of a piece, they were, they, it felt that every person there outside of a few of us actors were friends already and had worked together already, and that creates a shorthand, and that creates a continuity of focus that’s there before you begin to roll, and that’s really a great gift. They were a young but really, really focused and really interesting bunch of… reprobates, I guess I would say. [LAUGHTER]

The ending is slightly ambiguous in the sense that you’re not sure whether or not what you see is real or in Martha’s head. Do any of you have a specific take on it?
JH: [WHISPERS] No.
EO: I’m more interested in what John would think because he’s, you’re not in that scene.
SP: He’s pushing the microphones away. [LAUGHTER]
EO: For me, I have no idea what’s going to happen afterwards. I mean, it ends where it ends. But I just love how it ends in a transition and it begins in a transition, and it doesn’t tie anything up and give the audience relief. I feel like audiences want the satisfaction, a lot of times, of something tied together or a crazy twist or something, but usually a lot of times they’re unsatisfied with that satisfaction, with that fixed thing. A lot of times they’re like, “I didn’t want it to go that way and it went that way!” So I think Sean really created an ending that, no matter what, I feel like people really do feel like people can’t be like, “I knew it!” [LAUGHTER] And my brother’s someone who does that with every film, he’s like, “I knew it was gonna end like that,” and when I asked my brother about our ending he was like, “…Well, I figured it was gonna end something like that.” [LAUGHTER]
JH: That’s as close as you’re gonna get!
SP: You were like, “No, you didn’t.”
EO: I was like, “You’re such a liar!”

Martha Marcy May Marlene is now playing in select theatres.

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Cult(ure) following: "Repo! The Genetic Opera" (2008)

Prosperous Christmukah, my dear readers! I've got a special Christmas Eve post for you: the newest installment of our cult cinema showcase, this one spotlighting Repo! The Genetic Opera. Stay tuned this next couple of weeks; as a holiday gift to our readers, you should soon see the site positively inundated with roundtable interviews. In the meantime, let's take a look at the legacy of tonight's cult(ure) following.

Then…: Underfunded and under-advertised by Lionsgate, this celluloid cyberpunk opera was shunted to red-headed stepchild status at the studio almost as soon as it received the greenlight. Even after its release, it never played in more than 11 theaters at once.

…And now: Okay, so those who haven’t seen it still tend to tune out as soon as you mention that Paris Hilton is in the cast—which is probably fair, considering the heiress’s cinematic track record. On the whole, however, the Hilton Factor has done surprisingly little to hinder Repo!’s success: despite its meager theatrical run, the film quickly gathered a rabid cult following and to this day boasts midnight showings across the country—many of them complete with shadowcasts of their very own. (In fact, Hilton herself even makes appearances on occasion.) Repo! is still relatively recent as far as cult films are concerned, granted, but it’s off to a pretty good start.

See it with: Machine Man protagonist Charles Neumann; any cybernetics enthusiast who you think might have taken the wrong message away from said novel.

Drug of choice: The Repo!-verse painkiller Zydrate, duh. Failing that, its real world equivalent—just about any hardcore prescription opiate—should suffice.

Predecessor to: Biopunk. Hey, you can’t start theorizing about the possibility of a designer-organ market until you’ve already conceptualized the organ-as-commodity, amirite?
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Little Red lead singer Dominic Byrne

We might be living in the 21st Century, but musically speaking we still live in the shadow of the mid-1900s. Little Red's understanding of this is perhaps the key to their success. Wildly successful in their native Australia, Little Red synthesizes doo-wop and 60s-style rock grooves with just enough of a modern sensibility to give it a little kick—but not so much newfangled riffing as to constitute an effort to fix what isn't broken. Whether the U.S. will come to appreciate the band's ongoing homage to our musical heritage remains to be seen, as their debut album was all but entirely ignored on this side of the ocean, but perhaps their sophomore album Midnight Remember—which was recently released Stateside—will finally be able to make music lovers the country over sit up and pay attention. I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the band's frontman, Dominic Byrne, about their genesis as a band; their time in New York; and their love of good old-fashioned rock'n'roll.

Hi, is this Dom? How are you?
Yeah. I’m good, I’m good, how are you? I’m actually going through the New Jersey tunnel right now, the New Jersey Turnpike. I don’t know if the reception might cut out. Anyway, how’s it going?

It’s going well. How about you—enjoying beautiful, scenic New Jersey?
Uh, well, we’re not there just yet, but I’m looking forward to passing through it. We’re on our way to Philly; we just came from New York. I’ll see what I can see when I go through there.

I hope you didn’t tell anyone in New York that you’d be heading through Jersey.
Yeah, I’ve already found out that people in New York don’t like being told they have anything in common with New Jersey. They get quite offended, actually.

Yeah. [LAUGHS] Other than that, how was your time in New York?
Really great. It’s I guess my favorite city in the world. We played a few shows, took the train. I went out to Coney Island; that was really incredible. But, yeah, it was fun. I’m actually sorry to leave it, but I guess there are more cities to get to.

Good on you for making it out to Coney Island. Most people skip Brooklyn when they go to New York.
Yeah, well, they’re missing out. [LAUGHS] It’s a pretty unique kind of place. Okay, see, that wasn’t the Turnpike we were in; that was the tunnel. But, yeah, Coney Island, it’s pretty eerie, pretty run-down, kind of. It’s such a beautiful place.

I’d like to hear about how Little Red was formed.
Well, uh, when we got together, most of us had other bands and none of them were really going. They were on hiatus. So, um, we just wanted to do a lot of Beach Boys, rock, a lot of Beatles, stuff like that, and I kind of wanted really to do, like, sixties harmony because I really like harmony groups. Fortunately I knew three of the other guys, and we got together by night and started doing some harmonies, and it felt really good. [LAUGHS] That was pretty much the beginning of it, and then we got a drummer whom one of us had met at a party, and I guess that’s more or less our story.

I was wondering whether you had any modern influences, because the doo-wop sound you guys have isn’t one you hear a lot nowadays.
I mean, I wasn’t born in the 40s or anything, so I was aware of newer stuff, but I was more into older stuff. Like, I had the Golden Oldies station, and so I knew the classics. But in my time I listened to more of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead—they’re one of the best modern bands, I still reckon. But when we were making the band I would listen to the radio, to the oldies station, and I would hear the Beatles, the Beach Boys, all that old rock, and I was smoking a lot of pot and I forgot that it was 2006. [LAUGHS] Then it kind of came out that on our last record it was more of a modern, it wasn’t so typically doo-wop and rock-and-roll; we’re a little bit more modern now. I do have modern influences, like Radiohead, and I think the Strokes is something we all like. I like the Shins. Yeah, there’s a lot out there, but I don’t know how it changes the influence when we’re writing songs.

Well, one of your first singles was a very retro, almost a Coca-Cola jingle. You can’t get more throwback than that.
Yeah, we can go forward more, that’s true. But we can go back; we can do just about anything. We could do big band or maybe ragtime piano. [LAUGHS] Or we could be like some of the really old retro bands and have a guy with a triangle and such.

I remember noticing the temporal difference from the first record to the second record that you mentioned, and I was wondering if you were deliberately trying to bring more of a modern sound to it or whether that just developed.
It all sort of changed kind of quietly, both consciously and unconsciously. It was just what we felt like doing, really. [LAUGHS] I don’t know, I never cared about being a niche band; maybe it was limiting. It might have been limiting to us to be doing too much of that stuff, and I wanted to be unlimited.

Midnight Remember is out now.

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Press conference: 'A Dangerous Method' star Michael Fassbender

There's no escaping it: 2011 is Michael Fassbender's year. Between X-Men: First Class, Jane Eyre, the upcoming Shame, and now A Dangerous Method, there is hardly any chance of your ending the year without having spent some time watching him on one silver screen or another. Not that there's anything wrong with this: rugged good looks aside, Fassbender is a stellar thespian—which is convenient, given his propensity for playing characters with some serious issues. His latest turn as Jung in the Cronenberg's aforementioned Method is no exception, as he acknowledged in this recent press conference.

Morning.
Morning!

How are you doing?
Pretty good.

So how much did you know about Jung before filming the movie?
Not a great deal. When I started looking into it and researching it I realized just how much of his teachings, his philosophies and ideas are intrinsic in our vocabulary, just in sort of everyday use now—you know, the idea of extrovert-introvert personality types. That was quite cool, to sort of find that out. But other than that it was pretty basic, you know? So I had some work to do there, and then it’s a matter of digesting all the information and then kind of throwing it away again and going back to the script, ‘cause whatever else you sort of gather, um, you’ve got, you’ve got sort of, you know, 100-whatever pages to be told in that story. I realized there were various stages to his life, different Jungs at different points in his life, so the guy I was trying to portray was somebody who was young and still felt like he had a lot to prove in his profession, so I wanted to have an element of unsurety there and insecurity, if you like. He’s very much representing the time that he lives in: the stiff collars; everything is sort of controlled. He’s conforming to the social etiquette at the time, and you’re dealing with Europe in the early 1900s. They believed that they were like this hyper-civilization at that point. And then, of course, WWI was right around the corner and proved that theory totally wrong. So I looked at different stages of his life. The red books were interesting for me to take a look at, because that was the Jung that comes right after the movie: he has his breakdown, comes through that, and comes out with the red book. There’s also footage of him on Youtube. I could watch some interviews with him in his sixties or seventies, I’m not sure, but there was an old man that, again, seemed very self-assured and seemed very confident in his life’s work, and he was very charming. And also I got a sort of, I don’t know, a feeling of sensuality in him through his physicality. So—gathering all that information and then trying to find where it applies best in the story.

When Sabina comes to the hospital she is diagnosed with hysteria, and the diagnosis of hysteria—as well as its connection to female sexuality—is a pretty hot topic in movies right now. I was wondering how your research led you to view the topic.
Well, I know it has to do with the womb, isn’t it? It comes from the Latin, I can’t remember what the actual word is, but they actually used to take women’s wombs out because they believed it was sort of linked to this madness, if you like. What I think was pretty amazing with the Burgholzli [hospital] is that theirs was a forward way of thinking, and it was actually a good place to go to if at that point in history you were deemed to be insane or a little cuckoo. As we see with Sabina, what’s fascinating about that is she goes into the Burgholzli as a patient and she comes out as a doctor. And so these were very forward-thinking people for the time, especially to have the patience and to have the sort of interest in these various cases and also these different approaches, sort of allowing this idea of the talking cure, and I think that’s what really sort of binds Jung and Sabina together. He’s trying out this method of sort of dealing with hysteria through the talking cure, this new method, and he hasn’t tried it out yet; she’s suffering, and she gets cured by it, and he also gets a validation of his beliefs, so that forms a really strong relationship between them.

Do you believe in Jung’s theory that there is no real coincidence, only synchronicity?
I was talking about that last night, actually, with a friend. Yeah, kind of. I’m not sure. I don’t really know if I have any set beliefs in anything. I just sort of, I think I’m kind of open to anything. I don’t rule anything out. But it’s funny, sometimes you think that something greater is at play when you look at a series of events that lead you to get to here. But I don’t know. Why would I be sort of born, then, into relative comfort and wealth and then you see somebody who’s born in the Congo and gets his hands chopped off? I don’t know. Those questions remain unanswered for me. But I was just thinking about it yesterday.

What do you think Jung would have to say in terms of diagnosis, treatment, or commentary about your character Brandon in Shame?
Well, I think he’d probably tell him it’s all right. [LAUGHTER] You know, the first stage is, like, “It’s okay. Let’s just talk about it.” I think what’s interesting about these guys is that they were truly very fascinated in human behavior and why we behave in certain ways. I think that, again, there’s a social sort of form that we’re expected to sort of live under and we’re expected to behave a certain way with one another socially; but in actual reality and practice, what way do we really behave? It’s kind of crazy, being a human being and trying to all get along and hold the complications that we have within ourselves—the relationships we have with ourselves and then with others. I think Jung would probably tell him that everything’s going to be okay, as well as “Go see my friend Siggy Freud.” [LAUGHTER]

Both A Dangerous Method and Shame have the common thread of sexual dysfunction. What was it like to first play the character of a psychoanalyst and then that of somebody spiraling out of control?
I didn’t really relate the two together at all; it’s only in hindsight. First I did A Dangerous Method and then I did X-Men and then Shame, and I kind of work very intensely on the project when I’m running up to it and during it, and then I kind of flush it pretty quickly too, and I was jumping from one to the next so I had to get rid of them very quickly. So it’s only in hindsight that you see that. As for how was playing either of them, well, you have the information there with Jung, as we were discussing, so that your biography is taken care of, and in a lot of respects that can be easier: you have the information there, and the character is sort of available, whereas when you’re doing a fiction character—well, what I do, anyway, is I go away and write that biography out of the information given to me in the script. Logically, what would a child go through in order to create this sort of motivation? What did their parents do? Were they popular in school? Where they lonely, a sporter, academic? That sort of thing. And then, you know, I just spend a lot of time with the script, really, and that’s the sort of process that I take on for all work now, regardless of what it is, because just through rereading and rereading and rereading I’m spending a lot of time with the character and with all the other characters in the world. And so after a while it’s sort of like slipping into a new set of skin. With Shame as well, then, I had the opportunity to meet people who were suffering for the condition, and that was a huge insight. I’m very grateful for that, and for the honesty and bravery of these people to come forward like that, and especially for this one guy in particular—because the idea of the intimacy problems that Brandon has is that that’s basically the crux of his problem, and this guy that I met, that was exactly his problem as well. It made me get something tenable and made me understand the condition.

Intimacy on a psychological level, I think, is what led Sabina and Jung to cross over into physical intimacy, which today would be considered out of place—
I’m sure it’s still happening now. [LAUGHTER]

Well, I wanted to gain an insight into what you do when you’re creating characters who share intimate moments over the course of a film. You hear so often about relationships on film sets; can you shut that down?
Well, I suppose it’s the doctor-patient idea of transference, and it is that thing, I think, that special thing that doctors have. We all find doctors sexy; that’s why there are so many TV shows about doctors [LAUGHTER]—because they have the power to save lives, and there’s something, you know, very attractive about that. And so you have that relationship. Also, like you said, it’s a very intimate place, the idea of the patient and the doctor. They go into intimate places together, and that can bleed over for sure. I think that in terms of working on movie sets, I mean, it’s like the office affair, isn’t it, at the Christmas party; it’s just who you see. If you see somebody a lot and if they’re around you a lot, and if people work a lot of hours of their lives, then relationships just happen in the workplace, I guess. That’s where you’re spending a lot of your time. But I don’t think that’s necessarily really any different in acting or that world. What’s impressive and always sort of gets me is the way you come together on a film—how immediately it becomes a family, because it kind of has to. And then you sort of disband after three months, and you might never see the person again for three or four years, and then you’re working on another film and you’re like, “Hey, how’s it going, whatever!” But you have to get tied very quickly. In terms of relationships, though, I don’t know; what’s it like with you guys when you’re all traveling around together? Some stuff goes down among journalists, I’m sure. [LAUGHTER]

As an actor, do you consider yourself an armchair psychoanalyst? Is that part of your job?
I think so. You know, I think the similarities, again, are that interest in human behavior and just trying to understand personalities and where one character’s moral compass lies as opposed to another. And for sure, for me, my best reference for that would be myself. I sort of look at myself and try to be really honest and truthful in answering those questions, trying to find all those elements within myself, because essentially I think we’re all pretty much the same. So trying to identify and understand, as opposed to judge, is very important for me in approaching characters.

Was David Cronenberg someone you were looking to work with, and was working with him anything like you expected?
I was a fan of his for sure. I was very envious, I remember, when they were filming Eastern Promises. I live around Hackney, and when they were filming it I was like, “Oh, god, wouldn’t it be great to be on a David Cronenberg set?” So it was very exciting, the idea and the prospect of working with him. And, yes, it was different from what I expected, because you see his films and they can be quite violent, yes? They’re quite dark. And he’s the opposite: he’s a very sweet, loving energy, very generous and sort of humorous—we actually joked around a lot on set, which is sort of fun, I think, and can also lend to the piece. Especially when you’re dealing with something that’s very much set in a particular time, so therefore it’s a period piece. Again, we talked about the social etiquette of the time, the way people held themselves and sort of related to one another. It was different to today, but you don’t want to get bogged down in that so that it becomes more about the costumes than about anything else; you want to keep it accessible and fresh. So having that humor is a nice device for that because it keeps you nice and relaxed when going into scenes that can be sort of heavy and deep with heavy things and certainly dialogue-heavy. But he’s a joy. He’s really a very collaborative guy, and I’m so lucky that of the great directors I’ve had a chance to work with they do a lot of—they all have to be great manipulators, and they do their manipulation in the weeks leading up. So it’s like a dinner here, or when you’re trying on the costumes or picking the props there’s a bit of a nudge that they give you then, or they drop a phrase here or ask you certain questions at certain times. Then once we get on set there’s very little dialogue. We just sort of get on with it because all of that has been discussed previously.

A Dangerous Method is in theatres now.

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