Director Matt Brown on directing Anthony Hopkins in Freud film

Matt Brown says directing screen legend Anthony Hopkins in a bio-pic about Sigmund Freud was among the ‘greatest’ experiences of his working life.

Anthony Hopkins in Freud’s Last Session. Picture: Sabrina Lantos/Sony Pictures Classics

American film director Matt Brown is the son of a psychiatrist, so you might assume he would leap at the chance to work on a film about Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the 20th century’s towering intellects.

Yet the opposite was true: Brown says growing up with Freud as a kind of “omnipresence” in his family home “probably had the reverse effect … I was somewhat intimidated by Freud’’. Nor did he want to make a movie that was “disagreeable to my father and his whole community (of psychiatrists). So that was a little bit of a daunting task.’’

Despite his fears, Brown – whose previous film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, starred Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons as gifted mathematicians – went on to direct and co-write Freud’s Last Session. Adapted from a Mark St Germain play of the same name, the film focuses on Freud, a hard line atheist, and Christian apologist CS Lewis, who meet up to debate life, death, suicide, taboo relationships and the existence of God.

Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel in The Man Who Knew Infinity.

This often combustible philosophical exchange is largely set in Freud’s London study and unfolds in an atmosphere of dread.

Hitler has invaded Poland and Freud is a Jewish exile, suffering from oral cancer, and in the last weeks of his life. Lewis, played by Matthew Goode (Downton Abbey; The Imitation Game), is grappling with PTSD – he spent time in the hellish trenches of World War I and The Chronicles of Narnia author can hardly believe Europe is about to tear itself apart again.

Speaking from Venice Beach, California, over Zoom, Brown reveals that securing two-time Oscar and four-time BAFTA winner Anthony Hopkins to play the titular role was a “very exciting” breakthrough that had a complicated gestation. When Brown first asked Hopkins if he would play Freud, the actor was working on The Father – the Welshman’s portrayal of a retired engineer with dementia would see him crowned the oldest actor to snare a Best Actor Oscar.

Director Matt Brown with actor Anthony Hopkins on the set of Freud's Last Session. Picture: Supplied

Says Brown: “He passed and I wasn’t terribly surprised.’’ Brown then anointed Christopher Plummer, “a lovely, lovely man’’, as a potential Freud. But the actor, sadly, died in 2021, aged 91. Hopkins was approached again. Brown was braced for another knock-back and was elated when the Silence of the Lambs star signed on.

The director shot the film during the Covid pandemic and describes Hopkins’ mercurial take on history’s most famous analyst as “breathtaking at times”. “He was just so kind and creatively generous that it was probably one of the greatest working experiences I’ll ever have with an actor … I think it was because of the nature of the role – a man looking back on his life, weeks from his death, examining his mortality.”

While Hopkins’ Freud is a man of forceful opinions – he thought all believers were deluded – Goode’s Lewis is often politely restrained. “It was a choice that we made that Lewis would be a respectful, kind person,’’ says Brown. “He’s dealing with somebody of such a stature and Sigmund Freud is obviously, clearly ill.’’

The director quips: “I am sure there are those that would have loved to have seen a bloodbath.’’ He was never going to go down that path – the reason he embarked on this project was his belief that, in our polarised era, people have lost the ability to debate the big issues in a civil way.

He hopes the movie will help to change this. “I just felt this film was an opportunity to … just let these two people discuss their faith and disagree with one another and do it in a respectful way. By the end of the film, we actually see that they might have some genuine affection for one another, even though neither of their minds have been changed.’’

Brown’s previous film, The Man Who Knew Infinity, was a meeting of another two great minds: a self-taught Indian maths genius (played by Patel) who battles prejudice and poverty in Edwardian England, and his Cambridge University mentor (portrayed by Irons). He says there are parallels between this film – which is “about the loss that comes when you fail to connect with people out of fear’’ – and Freud’s Last Session.

Director Matt Brown with actor Anthony Hopkins on the set of Freud's Last Session. Picture: Supplied

The director’s next film, The Official Mistress, “couldn’t be any more different than the last two films,’’ he says. This Ridley Scott-produced tale is about a food taster in the court of King Louis XVI. “It’s about love and food and it’s just fun,’’ says Brown, who hopes to shoot it later this year.

Freud’s Last Session includes flashbacks to Lewis’s scarring war experiences, and to the Gestapo intimidating the Freud family in Austria. Freud’s unhealthily obsessive relationship with his daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) and his rejection of her homosexuality, is also laid bare.

The father of psychoanalysis conducted therapy sessions with his daughter – something that “would never in a million years happen today,’’ says Brown. He notes, however, that psychoanalysis was then in its infancy and that Anna, a trailblazing child psychoanalyst, valued these sessions.

“We just we have to look at history sometimes through different lenses,” says the director.

Freud’s Last Session is in cinemas now.