‘Freud’s Last Session’ Director Matthew Brown Says It Took Two Tries To Get Anthony Hopkins To Agree To Play Sigmund Freud – Contenders Film L.A.
deadline.comAn imagined conversation between two eminent historical figures who may or may not have ever met — nobody seems to know — forms the heart of Freud’s Last Session, an intellectual fable from Sony Pictures Classics that grew out of a play and, before that, a book and an Ivy League seminar.
Oscar-winner Anthony Hopkins plays the inventor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, opposite Matthew Goode as the celebrated author and theologian C.S.
Lewis in a cerebral clash of titans. But as director Matthew Brown said on Deadline’s Contenders Film: Los Angeles panel, the movie version as he envisioned it almost didn’t happen. “I mean you always dream that you would have an actor like Hopkins say he would do the role,” Brown said. “And we did try once and we didn’t get very far.
And then we did some more work on the script and tried again. And then he said yes, which was just miraculous.” Shot in Ireland, where the 86-year-old Hopkins did his first movie more than 50 years ago, Freud’s Last Session presents the two men’s dueling philosophies through an imagined in-person encounter coupled with dream sequences, flashbacks and notable supporting characters including Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) and Lewis’ literary friend J.R.R.
Read more on deadline.com
