The son of British film director Ralph Thomas, and nephew of the Carry On comedies director Gerald Thomas, Thomas quite literally grew up in the cinema before cutting his teeth as an assistant editor. But it was Australia not England that gave Thomas his first break, producing Philippe Mora’s unforgettable and infamous (for Dennis Hopper’s boozing) bushranger biopic Mad Dog Morgan. Evidently drinking on set has changed a lot in the last 40 years…
Back in Australia to discuss A Dangerous Method (pictured), the third film in Thomas and Cronenberg’s partnership (after Naked Lunch and Crash), the softly spoken but fast talking Thomas speaks about the pleasures and problems of producing cinema. Given the film chronicles the beginnings of psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender), it was fitting to talk in terms of dreams and collaborations, as well as expectations. For Thomas, reuniting with Cronenberg with a film that opts for austerity over his trademark ‘goo’ provided its own challenges. But those may well pale in comparison with Thomas’ next project: the tale of North Korea’s dearly departed leader Kim Jong-il and his kidnapping of a South Korean film director and movie star. Now there’s a story you couldn’t dream up!
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Are there any dreams we should talk about right off the bat?
I’m always dreaming. Part of being a filmmaker and a producer is dreaming… dreaming of making the story into a film and making contact with people. That’s the dream. And also movies are such difficult, slippery things – it’s like a fish in your hand – as an independent filmmaker, realising that dream onto the screen, with people seeing it, that is a dream of an end.
Then the current film that I’m doing, about Freud and Jung, Jung and Freud, dreams are at the centre of psychoanalysis – so there is a dream about dreams!
You’re living the dream then!
If making movies is living the dream then I’ve been doing it for more than forty years, which is an incredibly long time to be able to do that. I watched my father being a dreamer before me, and I’ve even made a movie called The Dreamers. It seems privileged and light, but [making movies] has its difficulties as well as its pleasures. It’s an intensity all of its own because it has art in the equation. It is an artistic endeavor that is also business, because films are very expensive to make – so it’s not like other art, like great writers. Artists sometimes have to have a lot of money to make their art, but films are a special thing because they really need a lot of resources, [which] makes them a commercial venture as well.
You’ve worked with some of the best filmmakers in the world Bernardo Bertolucci, Terry Gilliam, Richard Linklater, David Cronenberg, and it’s too good a pun to pass up, what’s your dangerous method?
I grew up in cinema. My dad [Ralph Thomas] was a director [so] I was infected by cinema very early on. I was shown films in the film studios [and] on the movie sets, from my earliest beginnings…I formed my taste. I saw films from around the world and I became a real cinema brat.
[I] initially wanted to be a director as a principle career – because I was an editor - but then when I came to Australia in the early 70s and I produced Mad Dog Morgan with my friend Philippe Mora who I’d just edited a film for. I was going to come here and produce and edit this film and he was going to write and direct. I came here as a neophyte, because it was impossible to believe that a 24 year old could produce a film in England, but Australia was still an open territory, there were no fixed rules, [such as] you’d needed to have apprenticed on fifty movies before you could move up. So that’s really what happened. Australia gave me the break.
We were completely naïve. We didn’t know what it meant to cast a film with Dennis Hopper. It was a different time. Today you can’t have a drink on a film set. Then if you didn’t have a drink on a film set, it would be closed down, today if you have a drink on a film set, you’re in jail. Mad Dog Morgan was made under that old regime of that homage and worship of a tinnie.
Looking over your filmography it struck me that you’re really interested in true stories.
A lot of the films that I’ve done have been true stories and a lot of the films that I’ve done have been novels. Because I’ve made around 60 movies – I don’t know how many movies it is exactly – 60 give or take movies – in different capacities and working in different areas.
What draws you to true stories?
I just go with my taste. I’m not following the market, period. I’ve found a little place for myself; the market is sometimes good to me, sometimes not.
I just did this film recently about Pina Bausche, PINA with Wim [Wenders]. I do lots of films with him, I love him, I love his movies, I want to work with him. I’m drawn very much to people and artists, then there’s a fidelity, you gain some sort of enjoyment and trust, like you do good friends. You’re best friends are the mates you’ve known the longest. And also making movies is very intense on relationships, and if you have a good relationship on a film, I’ve found it good to repeat it. And that’s what I’ve done with Takashi Miike, [David] Cronenberg, principally [Bernardo] Bertolucci…I like friends and I like relationships that can develop, and when you work with directors in the way I work with them you gain a shorthand and then you trust them. Then the longer you work with them the more you trust them.
So it’s been a 20-year relationship with you and David Cronenberg, how’s the shorthand?
It’s developed. We’re very close friends and enjoy having dinner with each other. We could have dinner with each other seven nights a week without being bored. We’ve got the same interests, and similar ideas and ideology. So we’re politically probably in sync and in sync in liking William S. Burrows and liking J.G. Ballard and liking the idea of what’s underneath these films. And I get the benefit [after] having not been to university or school, hardly, [of] having a second education through these filmmakers and the subjects that I do, and they get to make the movies.
A Dangerous Method is a film that pivots around themes of collaboration, legacy and hubris, is it too long a bow to draw to see an analogy with the filmmaking process?
I haven’t really thought about that. I am analytical and I turn things around in my mind. Everybody does it I’m sure, but everybody does it a different way. I like making films about thinkers, I’ve done films about Darwin, I’ve done films about Einstein, I’ve done films about people who are big thinkers. And big thinkers are certainly Jung and Freud and Otto Gross, who was a fascinating person (the character played by Vincent Cassell), he was actually there.
All the characters are as close as we can get to accurate from the photographs of these people. The clothes that Otto Gross wore were identical to what he was wearing, they are all wearing identical [clothes]. [The film] is so accurate. Every little detail is accurate, even to the extent that Viggo learnt Freud’s handwriting, to be able to do it without looking against [an example], exactly. And he was writing in German.
Auf Deutsch! I noticed that!
We thought, ‘Let’s play around with everybody, we’ll get him writing in German.” When you make movies the way we make movies, which are being made for everybody, but for those few people we put in those extra little things. And you hope that they see that.
I’ve tried to be involved with filmmakers who are able to layer movies in lots of clues. Some audiences don’t get it at all, and others get it completely. Everybody reads a screen in a different way. Everybody sitting in front of a screen – you can turn to your companion and say, “Did you see that? How did you not see that, it was a key plot point?” “Well, I didn’t see that.”
So you can have an argument. It’s like [the final shot in Michael] Haneke’s Hidden. And of course it’s fantastic when you get a film filled with stuff like that. Nick Roeg - who we haven’t talked about – I did three films with him and I think he’s one of the greatest masters in the world. He’s like that; he fills the films up with clues, so much stuff. You don’t even scratch the surface and [there’s so much] underneath: visually he’s got paintings and books on the bookshelves and little objects, and you either read them or you don’t read them.
Speaking of accuracy, I wondered about the possibilities of anachronism in A Dangerous Method. Given we’re so conversant in the ideas and language of Freud and Jung, did you worry about anachronism or how the audience would ‘read’ the film?
It has that element in it, but it would have to because their thought – which is now maybe discarded even in the age of Prozac or various other treatments for people with a mind that’s a little bit damaged – but certainly the talking cure and the ideas of dreams and the significance of dreams…
But they were mining then. They were just beginning, without machines or brain scans. They were just exploring the mind. Otto Gross thought making love to the patient was the way to cure the patient. Which we know how wrong that is, but at the time, why not? They had no idea. A woman comes in totally depressed, it’s for the doctor to make love to the patient and the patient feels better. They had no idea, but they were trying to understand that in a prudish society. And I suppose lots of things go back to sexuality and childhood, so they were dealing with that. And of course we tried to make entertainment out of that.
You feel on one side that Freud was very harsh; he came up from a very different background. You notice when they’re going on the boat to America, he’s going to one side and Jung [goes to first class]. Jung was Freud’s favourite.
I loved [them both]. It was another great movie to work on because there was all these wonderful people to collaborate with; [screenwriter] Christopher Hampton, [cinematographer] Peter Suschitzky, all the elements were really enjoyable. The film was really enjoyable to make in terms of it was like a daily pleasure – we shot it in Vienna, in this beautiful place. We shot it on Lake Constance, which looked like Zurich at the turn of the 20th Century.
I was interested the read the project started as a screenplay called Sabina, then it became a play called The Talking Cure. Was their any thought to refocus the story on Freud and Jung?
It has been. Sabina Spielrein was an incredible character. She was an important psychoanalyst and of course she had a tragic story. When you see the titles at the end of the film – it moves you. If you get into the movie, you think, “Wow, wow.” On the eve of the First World War, you feel the torrent of blood.
“I feel a torrent of blood coming”, Jung says that. There are some big words in the film, there’s some big stuff going on. Underneath the story, [historically] there’s some big stuff going on, which I thought was brilliant.
Psychoanalysis seems like it could be a tough sell, is that an exciting challenge for a producer? How did you come on board?
In the subconscious hard drive, the decision making hard drive of my brain, obviously when I read something, then I bring lots of things to it.
A) I want to make it with David Cronenberg anyway.
B) I want to make a film about the fascinating period of these characters.
C) I’ve discovered some incredibly good, interesting stuff about their relationship and with letters proving they definitely had a relationship. We think that [Jung] took [Spielrein’s] virginity, maybe spanked her too.
“Ok,” I think, “that will possibly make the film more attractive.” Because [after all,] people are expecting David Cronenberg.
I was worried about [the audience expectations because], this is a film that doesn’t have any goo in it. Because other films I’ve made with David – Crash and Naked Lunch – and what he’s known for [is goo]. He’s been sort of pigeonholed like Scorsese – you expect a gangster movie where you blow people’s heads off. For Cronenberg, they want goo. Here I was delivering another Cronenberg movie: were we going to see Videodrome, were we going to see Dead Ringers, were we going to see The Fly? He’s been moving a bit in the last ten years with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, with this film he’s even more controlled. It’s still a Cronenberg film for me. It’s still masterly and so controlled.
He’s replaced goo with amazing austerity…
So far it’s got a lot of people to enjoy it and feel emotional about it at the end. And feel, “Hey we know something about psychoanalysis now.”
The casting will surely help get people through the door.
Yes! Beautiful Keira [Knigtley], beautiful Viggo [Mortensen], magnificent Michael Fassbender -- the star of the decade. And Vincent Cassell, one of the most beautiful men on the planet. And [they’re] all good actors. And you put them all in with [David Cronenberg], and you get Howard Shore to write the score, and you cross your fingers. And everyone works modestly, because the film is modest in price. It’s only got certain expectations. So everyone works in that economy.
No caravans. We made it business class. It’s not first class. You’re not down the back, we’re in the middle somewhere and we work comfortably. That’s how I make films. I know my place.
Before you go, what can you tell us about your Kim Jong-il film?
I’m working on it. Of course the dynamic has changed since he died. But it’s a true story of this incredible director Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean director and his wife who was the biggest movie star in South Korea. They were both kidnapped by Kim Jong-il, because he was a big cinema fan. And that’s the story I’m telling. It’s [going to be] a film noir.
Published on TheVine
Watch my review on The Movie Club
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