By James Mottram
Toronto native, Sarah Gadon, has been on a roll since she was cast in David Cronenberg’s in-your-face Sigmund Freud/Carl Jung biopic, A Dangerous Method, in 2010. The legendary Canadian filmmaker has since cast the actress twice more (in Cosmopolis and Maps To The Stars), while his son, Brandon, snapped up the actress for his directorial debut, Antiviral. There’s more than a hint of Cronenberg’s famed fragile iciness in the character of troubled 1950s college student, Olivia Hutton, who Gadon (pictured above with Cronenberg and the cast of Cosmopolis) so effectively portrays in James Schamus’ adaptation of Philip Roth’s Indignation. “David is and will continue to be a really big, creative mentor for me,” Gadon tells FilmInk at The Berlin Film Festival. “I met him at a time when I was studying film theory and criticism, and I didn’t want to just go to Hollywood and make patriarchal films. I wanted to do things that were subverting the classical way that we tell stories. Working with him opened up this whole other world of independent film, and international cinema. He’s a really principled artist, and yet he’s touched so many different kinds of filmmakers. He’s had an effect on everyone from Michael Haneke to J.J. Abrams.”
Cronenberg has also had an effect on the type of roles that Sarah Gadon pursues, and also on the way that she plays them. Gadon drills deep, and excavates what’s most interesting about the women that she plays. “Working with David has made me not want to be just an object of desire in film,” the actress says. “And as much as Olivia is an object of desire to [Logan Lerman’s] Marcus in Indignation, she’s an object of desire on another level. She’s bumping up against that ideology, and that’s why she can’t fit in, and that’s a big reason why she does the things that she does in the film. She doesn’t do those things because Philip Roth was a sexist writer. She does those things because when you’re a young woman, and you’re conditioned to think a certain way, you act to please other people. That was really interesting to me: portraying that, and criticising that in the film too. So yes, David has been a big influence on me.”
So, what is David Cronenberg like to work with? “You’d think that David would be super controlling, and foreboding, and maybe mean even, but he’s the nicest, sweetest guy,” Gadon replies. “He’s really smart, and he knows how he wants to do things, but he’s also open to collaboration. He cares about your ideas, and your thoughts on a character, and that’s the mark of a really great filmmaker: when they give you space to do your own creating, and to make your own decisions. There are filmmakers who feel insecure about their work, and who try to micromanage everything, and who try to control everything, but the thing is, you can’t! It takes so many people to make a movie, and it’s important to communicate your vision. But ultimately, you have to let a department do its work! You have to let the art department do the art department, you have to let the designer design. You have to acquire great people who are going to carry out your vision, but you also have to give them the space that they need to do their work, and David’s like that.”
Indignation is in cinemas now. Click through for our interviews with Logan Lerman and James Schamus, and for more on Sarah Gadon.
