‘Freud’s Last Session’: Read The Screenplay That Imagines What Happens When Sigmund Freud And C.S. Lewis Decide To Have A Chat

Patrick Hipes
·2 min read
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Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series spotlighting the year’s most talked-about scripts continues with Freud’s Last Session, which Sony Pictures Classics pre-bought after teaming with star Anthony Hopkins to release his Oscar-winning turn in The Father.

The film had its world premiere at AFI Fest and hits U.S. theaters December 22.

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Freud’s Last Session began as a play by Mark St. Germain, who adapted the script for the feature with director Matt Brown. The premise originally came to St. Germain after reading Harvard psychiatrist Armand Nicholi’s book The Question of God (later a PBS series), which compared Sigmund Freud’s and C.S. Lewis’ thoughts on faith and human nature based on their collective scholarship and letters.

Both the play and movie are set on September 3, 1939, when the atheist Freud (Hopkins) and devoutly religious Lewis (Matthew Goode), two of the century’s greatest minds, meet and debate the future of mankind and the existence of God. It comes as Freud and his daughter have recently escaped the Nazi regime, and as he is nearing death with cancer.

The imaginary in-person encounter is peppered in the film with dream sequences, flashbacks and notable characters turning up including Freud’s daughter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries) and Lewis pal J.R.R. Tolkein (Stephen Campbell Moore). Jodi Balfour also stars.

“It’s a balance of the psychology of these two men and this thing that I think is within all of us: We’re all struggling with this human experience,” Brown told Deadline at the recent Contenders Film: Los Angeles.

Click below to read the script.

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