Here’s an exclusive clip from Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Me and You” (“Io e Te”), which will make its world premiere in the Cannes Film Festival as an out-of-competition official selection May 23.

It’s Bertolucci’s first film in nearly 10 years (“The Dreamers”) and his first Italian-language film since “Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man” in 1981.

David Bowie also goes Italian in the film with “Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola” (“Lonely Boy, Lonely Girl”) — singing the Italian version of “Space Oddity.”

As for the plot, it’s the story of 14-year-old Lorenzo, a loner who’s not above jettisoning a school ski trip to spend a week hiding in his apartment building’s cellar. But then he’s visited by his older half-sister, Olivia, who changes everything. Their emotional time together will inspire Lorenzo to see the world through new eyes. It’s based on the best-selling Italian novel by Niccolo Ammaniti.

HanWay’s selling the film; no US buyer yet.

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Jude Law, Richard E Grant to star in London-set black comedy from director Richard Shepard

By Andreas Wiseman

Recorded Picture Company and BBC Films are combining to produce London-set black-comedy Dom Hemingway, from writer-director Richard Shepard and starring Jude Law and Richard E Grant.

HanWay will handle sales. Shooting is due fall, 2012.

Law will play Dom Hemingway, a safecracker with a loose fuse who after 12 years in prison travels with his best friend (played by Grant) to collect what he’s owed for not ratting on crime bosses.

HanWay’s slate includes Bernardo Bertolucci’s out of competition entry Me and You, Woody Allen: A Documentary screening in Cannes Classics, Roman Polanski: A Film Memoir which has a Special Screening as well as Kon-Tiki, Seven Psychopaths, Great Expectations, Quartet and Lucky Dog.

Jeremy Thomas said: “I so enjoyed Richard Shepard’s film The Matador, and when I read this script and thought of the film, I was excited. Richard has a special gift between comedy and drama, and we have wonderful actors to inhabit the film. I’m pleased to be working with Christine and BBC Films again to bring Dom Hemingway to life.”

Christine Langan added: “I’m delighted that Jeremy has introduced BBC Films to the inimitable Dom Hemingway. The wicked humour and great energy of Richard’s script and a superb cast make this a wildly entertaining prospect and we’re very excited to be on board.”

Richard Shepard said: “It’s crazy how many of Jeremy Thomas’ films I actually owned on DVD before ever meeting him: From Sexy Beast to Stealing Beauty to A Dangerous Method. He’s clearly got great taste in story, a wicked sense of humor and keen insights in what makes a film unique and memorable. I was thrilled he took an interest in Dom Hemingway. Dom’s character is a true original, and so is Jeremy. It seems like an especially keen fit.”

Shepard is repped by Jerome Duboz at WME and Rosalie Swedlin at Anonymous Content.

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The British actor tells THR what’s different –- and what’s the same — about his current role as Norse demigod Loki, and his upcoming one in Jim Jarmusch’s vampire-themed love story

By Todd Gilchrist

Tom Hiddleston may have made his American breakthrough as a villain in a superhero movie, the comic book adaptation Thor, but he isn’t sitting around waiting for the next opportunity to strap on more spandex. Following The Avengers, Hiddleston is set to appear in writer-director Jim Jarmusch’s latest film, Only Lovers Left Alive, which he describes as “a love story.”

“I won’t be destroying Manhattan for Jim Jarmusch, that’s for sure,” Hiddleston told THR Saturday. “It’s about what happens between a man and a woman and all of the sort of tenderness and complexity of that engagement.” The film focuses on two lovers — who are vampires — who maintain a relationship across several centuries. Tilda Swinton co-stars.

Eager to demonstrate his talent and versatility, Hiddleston also made a memorable impression in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse playing a soldier who briefly cares for the title character before riding him into battle. Although he acknowledges the obvious differences in playing, say, a demigod and a more conventional romantic lead, even in what promises to be an unconventional film, Hiddleston said that the end result is always pretty much the same for him.

“That in a way really will be quite different from this,” he said. “I don’t think Loki’s attitude to women is particularly healthy or tender. But the gold standard has to be honesty and psychological reality and naturalness and depth. Even if you’re playing this crazy, anarchic demon with a horned helmet, it still has to have a foundation in the truth.”

Watch the video above for more comments by Hiddleston about his current character, Loki, and his future one in Only Lovers Left Alive…

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Film producer Jeremy Thomas’ key to success is to work with the masters

By Philippa Hawker

It’s a burden to be a producer, according to Jeremy Thomas. ”It’s viewed as a shit job, and you’re viewed as a crude, crass person with no taste, only interested in money and driving around in a Rolls-Royce, covered in cigar ash.”

He’s not ashamed about the money side of it, he says – cinema is, among other things, a very expensive art form. But his own philosophy as a producer can be reduced to one underlying rule: work with the masters. It’s not the easiest or most profitable way of working, but for a passionate film lover there is no other way.

Thomas, an Englishman in his early 60s, grew up in the business. His father, Ralph Thomas, directed more than 40 movies, including the well-known ”Doctor” comedies, and a version of The 39 Steps with Kenneth More.

Jeremy’s first feature as a producer was in Australia: the eventful 1976 production of Mad Dog Morgan, with Dennis Hopper in the title role. He has made films with Nicolas Roeg and with Bernardo Bertolucci, including the Oscar-winning The Last Emperor. His most recent is A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg.

He produced two other Cronenberg films, Crash and Naked Lunch. ”You get close to someone if you make more than one film with them,” Thomas says. He describes this both as ”like being at school with someone” and ”like a great love affair”: a relationship of shared experiences and intensity.

When Cronenberg told him: ”’I want to make a film in Europe about psychoanalysis,’ I didn’t even have to read it, did I? I said ‘I’m on.”’

The script is by Christopher Hampton, who conceived the project many years ago; he wrote an unproduced screenplay, then turned the material into a theatre piece, before adapting it again as a movie. Its focus is on the breakdown in a key relationship in the history of psychoanalysis, involving Freud, Jung and a woman, Sabina Spielrein, who was a patient of Jung, then his lover, and then an analyst in her own right.

Thomas came on board, raising the money and being involved in ”refining the script, deciding where to shoot it, visiting Zurich and Vienna, and casting – though that wasn’t difficult, every actor wants to work with Cronenberg”.

Keira Knightley plays the tormented, piercingly intelligent Spielrein, and the protean Michael Fassbender is Jung. They did, late in the piece, lose a key cast member, Christoph Waltz, who was to play Freud. So Viggo Mortensen, who had been in two previous Cronenberg features, stepped in.

”It was a lucky break to get Viggo,” says Thomas. ”As Nic Roeg says, all things are for the best. I’ve lost plenty of actors, even on the eve of production, but the people who play the part come to inhabit the role, and you never regret it.

”The film was a German-Canadian co-production, however, and without Waltz, all the German money collapsed.

”It was a wobble for me because it happened a few weeks before shooting started.”

Mortensen’s arrival saved the day, financially. ”I’ve had two near disasters with David,” Thomas recalls.

”When we were doing Naked Lunch [the 1991 adaptation of the William Burroughs novel] in Tangier, the Gulf War happened, and we had to rush out of Tangier, and the insurance company rang up and said we’re not insuring your film in North Africa, and for two weeks it collapsed. Then David rang and said, ‘I have rewritten the script, we’re going to shoot it all in Toronto, and it will probably be cheaper’.”

Mortensen – ”Cronenberg’s muse”, as Thomas describes him – was taking a sabbatical from films at the time of Waltz’s abrupt departure. ”But, he said, ‘OK, I love my brother’, and he came in. He was very generous financially and emotionally and with his time.”

Mortensen gives a striking, shrewd, witty performance. Even at the last minute, he did his usual in-depth research, to the extent of learning to copy Freud’s handwriting – in scenes in which his character is composing a letter, Mortensen is writing the lines in German. The correspondence between Freud and Jung, a significant element of the film, flew to and fro, it seems, with astonishing frequency. ”Do you know,” Thomas says, ”that in Vienna at the time, there were eight mail deliveries a day?”

Cronenberg takes it steady with a psychoanalytical journey into the past

By Ed Gibbs

Restraint is not something we’ve come to expect from David Cronenberg. The veteran filmmaker has long explored the human mind’s desire for gratification, with films such as Crash, Videodrome, The Fly and Naked Lunch all plying the depths of depravity. Now that he’s gone to the source – the birth of psychoanalysis, as pioneered by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, among others – the sky would seem to be the limit.

Instead, the Canadian sticks with his more measured tone of late (think A History of Violence, Eastern Promises), in keeping with Christopher Hampton’s play (and John Kerr’s tome) upon which it is based. Penned by Hampton, the focus remains on the exchange of ideas between a cautious and wise Freud (Mortensen) and his stiff and ambitious successor Jung (Fassbender). Their friendship follows on from the dramatic arrival of a deeply disturbed, and soon-to-be aspiring psychiatrist, Sabina Spielrein (Knightley).

Fassbender and Mortensen are both excellent – and far from type – as Jung and Freud engage in a professional battle of wills. What lies beneath their interplay is, to some extent, left open to conjecture. They are pioneers, of course; the first of their kind to address issues of repressed desire. When the married Jung does have an inevitable fling with Spielrein – seemingly encouraged by Freud, after he sends in a liberal-minded patient (Cassel) – it’s in the name of research.

Eager to immerse herself in the role of Spielrein, Knightley’s severe antics as the deranged damsel come close to lampooning proceedings. Try as hard as she might – and she does – Knightley is miscast and, by the looks of it, out of her depth.

Julia Roberts was, reportedly, Cronenberg’s first choice for the role of the sexually troubled soul (interestingly, Christoph Waltz was also considered for Freud, Christian Bale for Jung).

Matters are largely saved, though, by the arrival of Cassel. For in stark contrast to Knightley’s contorted efforts, Cassel merely flies in to deliver a swift flourish of ”anything goes” abandon.

We know, of course, that he can do far more.

A Dangerous Method is a curious film. On initial inspection, it doesn’t feel like classic Cronenberg, yet it is inherently classical thanks to his teaming with Hampton (who also penned The Quiet American, Dangerous Liaisons and Atonement). There’s a subtle serving of black humour, too, particularly when Jung’s relationship with Spielrein crosses the line into clinical lust. Which may serve as a just reward for Ms Knightley, depending on your point of view.

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BBC Films backs Julien Temple’s “You Really Got Me,” being produced by Recorded Picture Co.

By Stuart Kemp

By Michael Bodley

In assessing a film about Sigmund Freud, discussion concerning ego is pertinent. But film producer Jeremy Thomas demands it with the opening frame in A Dangerous Method announcing “Jeremy Thomas Presents”.

“Well, I’ve been doing this job a long time and ego’s a thing that drives this business,” Thomas says, chuckling.

“It’s just I like to rub the nose of my competitors and colleagues with the fact I can put on my film ‘Jeremy Thomas Presents’ because they can’t do it.

“It shows to them I controlled and designed and decided and was dominant on the production and financing of the movie because they had to get some other credit. So I can say, first frame, Jeremy Thomas Presents, f . . k off, everybody!”

Thomas is half-joking. In an increasingly complex filmmaking world in which the art is forever compromised by risk management and multiple sources of finance, the role of the producer has been diminished. At least in name.

A producer who can bring money to the table or negotiate the witheringly complicated financing, tax and subsidy structures across borders is valuable.

The term producer has been debased because anyone who brings an actor to the project or any amount of financing receives a producer or executive producer credit. Films regularly have more than 10 producers named and the situation became so bloated, the Producers Guild of America limited the number of producers that could accept the best picture Academy Award to three.

“Financing films has become so byzantine, so difficult that I have to give lots of credits away on the film,” he says. “If you look at the films from my early days, there was just one producer credit, not even an executive producer.”

Thomas has reason to be proud of his achievement with A Dangerous Method. He teamed director David Cronenberg and screenwriter Christopher Hampton in a German-Canadian co-production starring Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley, Vincent Cassel and Viggo Mortensen, who replaced Christoph Waltz.

There are other producers credited on the film as co, associate or executive producers but Thomas leads. He adds the credit is important for “all the moguls in Hollywood”.

He says he only uses it on “films that I’ve developed from the beginning, given three or four years of my life to and I’ve cut my wrists and dropped my blood into the glass.

“On other ones I don’t give a shit,” he adds. “But nobody knows producers. They know Cecil B. De Mille or Jerry Bruckheimer, but it has no meaning to the general public. It has meaning inside the business, though.”

Thomas’s name has meaning as the producer of dozens of films, including Mad Dog Morgan and Rabbit-proof Fence, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (for which he won the best picture Oscar), Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, Sexy Beast and Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.

A Dangerous Method pushed all the right buttons. Thomas says he likes making films about interesting people so he can use his enthusiasm “to infect other people to get the cash to make it”. And few are as interesting as Freud and Carl Jung.

“I can’t compete with Hollywood, not able to, don’t want to and therefore I’ve got to make a certain kind of film I can get interest around,” Thomas says.

The producer likes Cronenberg’s films — “I don’t think he ever made a film I didn’t like” — and the director is marketable because he attracts actors.

Hampton’s attributes, as the writer of Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement and The Quiet American, are unquestionable. Thomas has no doubt his adaptation of his own play, The Talking Cure and John Kerr’s book A Most Dangerous Method, would be noteworthy, particularly as it focused on Freud and Jung’s formative friendship alongside Sabina Spielrein, one of the earliest female psychoanalysts.

“The story, that’s all true. I saw all the letters, it is so accurate, all based on material, the words are true, even down to the very dates,’ Thomas says.

“We made a film that’s very, very accurate without being dull or laying it on with a trowel. And the film managed to get four of the hottest actors in the world in this movie at a very modest rate,” he says, laughing.

And all Thomas needs is a modest film. A film budgeted at $100 million must worry about its market. But with a film such as A Dangerous Method, he knows there are people around the world “from Tierra del Fuego to Reykjavik who are interested in psychoanalysis and they’re interested in ideas”.

Although the film “cost a little bit of money but less money than one actor in The Great Gatsby”, Thomas adds, its aspirations mean he doesn’t have to make the most successful film.

“I have to make a beautiful film for the right price with the right actors and they will come,” he says. “Enough people will come. I’m not interested in making other films, I don’t want to make profligate films, I want to tread lightly on the film industry.

“I did have a period of megalomania when I made the three big films with Bernardo (The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha and The Last Emperor) but it was a different time, a different era and the films were different.”

A Dangerous Method fulfils Thomas’s aim to produce “fascinating films that may be popular with a certain type of person”. It is surprisingly dialogue-heavy for Cronenberg, although it needs to be. The director doesn’t play visual tricks but captures the beauty of early 20th-century Austria and ekes wonderful performances, particularly from Mortensen.

Initially, the film focuses on Spielrein’s arrival at Jung’s Zurich clinic and Jung’s success, through Freud’s methods, of calming the manic woman.

The relationship is epitomised as mannered and histrionic; the meat of the film is provided when Jung travels to Vienna to meet Freud. Hampton’s dialogue is delicious and the pairing of Fassbender and Mortensen crackles. And it makes one wonder why cinema hasn’t produced more memorable or significant films about either titan or their relationship (John Huston’s 1962 Freud, starring Montgomery Clift, is the only significant attempt that comes to mind).

Mortensen’s performance has attracted particular kudos, including a Golden Globe nomination. Yet he was a late replacement after Waltz received an Oscar nomination for Inglourious Basterds and left the film, pushing it close to collapse. Waltz was paid five times as much to act in Water for Elephants.

Cronenberg called Mortensen, who came out of a sabbatical to help his friend.

“He learned the part so well, he wrote in German,” Thomas recalls. “He did it just as something to make the film interesting. He learned Freud’s handwriting and you couldn’t even tell the difference between the two.

“They’re very special some of these actors, they enjoy and find it fabulous to go and find the part. He found his Freud.”

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BBC Films is partnering with Jeremy Thomas’s Recorded Picture Company on ‘You Really Got Me’, Julien Temple’s feature film about British band The Kinks.

By Geoffrey Macnab

Thomas, who has secured the rights to the autobiographies of both Ray Davies and Dave Davies, confirmed to ScreenDaily that veteran British writers Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais are writing the screenplay. The film, which may shoot later this year, will focus on the often turbulent relationship between Ray and Dave.

“It’s incredibly exciting, a unique tale, the Cain and Abel of rock,” Thomas said. He described the project as “a snapshot,“ taking in Ray and Dave’s childhood, their major success and “after.”

“Jeremy has worked very hard, very consistently, over a long time to make sure we have all the approvals we need,” head of BBC Films Christine Langan added.

The BBC is already collaborating with Temple on his BABYLON/DON project, which was commissioned as part of the BBC’s London Season (for the Cultural Olympiad)…

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David Cronenberg’s Freud-Jung drama about the founding of psychoanalysis is in keeping with his past themes

By Dennis Lim

Few working filmmakers invite the application of the auteur theory — the notion that some films bear a directorial signature — as frequently as David Cronenberg. The coherence of his body of work is hard to miss. In movies as varied as “Videodrome,” “Dead Ringers” and “Crash,” he has found myriad ways to explore a recurring set of themes: the thrill and danger of transfiguration, the interrelation of the mind and the body.

With these obsessions so firmly established, it is no wonder that many critics and fans watch a new Cronenberg film looking for signs of the old ones, sometimes detecting their encoded presence, sometimes bemoaning their absence.

His most recent feature, the historical drama”A Dangerous Method” (out on DVD this week), reinforced the standard line on Cronenberg, now 69 — namely, that he has settled into a classical, even conventional phase, and is further removed than ever from the horror and science-fiction genres that he once radicalized.

Some described “A Dangerous Method” as a bid for middlebrow respectability, an incongruously restrained period piece from the inventor of body horror. Others pointed out that the material was in keeping with Cronenberg’s preoccupations and that a filmmaker with a long-standing interest in the construction of identity and the mechanics of repression and release would find a wealth of material in a story about the founding of psychoanalysis.

His first film, after all, was a seven-minute short called “Transfer,” which patched together disjointed conversations between a psychiatrist and his patient.

Either way, the temptation is to evaluate the movie in terms of whether it is or isn’t “Cronenbergian,” an impulse that can make for interesting criticism but also tends to overshadow its considerable achievements. Adapted from Christopher Hampton’s play “A Talking Cure” and John Kerr’s book “A Most Dangerous Method,” it traces the intellectual camaraderie and subsequent rift between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and his protégé turned dissenter Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender).

A crucial player in this Oedipal conflict, all but a historical footnote until recently, was Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a Russian Jewish patient of Jung’s who went from case study to lover to colleague (she was one of the first female psychoanalysts).

“A Dangerous Method” may outwardly resemble a “Masterpiece Theatre”-style costume drama, but it doesn’t play like one. From its abrupt opening — in which a hysterically screaming Sabina is transported by horse-drawn carriage to a Swiss clinic — to the terse written postscript that describes the fates of the main characters, this is a movie that never lacks for urgency and immediacy and that never conforms to the tidy, packaged satisfactions of biographical portraiture.

An analytical film about analysis, “A Dangerous Method” engages in unavoidable speculation, especially on the nature of Jung and Spielrein’s relationship, but also draws heavily on letters and journals and on Cronenberg and Hampton’s scrupulous research on the culture of early 20th century Vienna and Geneva.

Just as the three terrific lead actors are entrusted with the tricky task of turning near-mythic figures into flesh and blood, Cronenberg’s comparably difficult project here is to bring ideas to life — and not just any ideas but fundamental theories of human behavior, sexuality and the unconscious, some of which still have the power to startle and some of which we have long taken for granted.

“Do you think they know we’re on our way, bringing them the plague?” Freud asks Jung as their steamship pulls into New York Harbor. It’s a key moment in the film, and not just because the prospect of an intellectual contagion is a supremely Cronenbergian one.

There is plenty to recognize in “A Dangerous Method,” not just from other Cronenberg films but from the map of the unconscious mind that these men shaped and in which we still see ourselves…

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Congratulations to ‘A Dangerous Method’ and Viggo Mortensen

The film won numerous awards previously, including best Canadian feature at the Toronto Film Festival. It was named Canadian film of the year by the Toronto Film Critics Assn.

Viggo Mortensen took supporting actor for his role as Sigmund Freud in David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method,” which won five Genies but mostly in craft categories: original score (Howard Shore), art direction (James McAteer), overall sound and sound editing…

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