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Michael Fassbender got more than he anticipated when he signed on to play Dr. Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s “A Dangerous Method.” Not only did he get to take Keira Knightley’s incredibly crazed character Sabina Spielrein under his wing for some severe psychoanalysis, but he got to spank her naked – several times over.

It seems that part of the filming experience was anything but a turn on.

“(Those scenes) are always awkward, but Keira is a good sport! She’s got a good sense of humor, but I had to make sure I hit the mark and not her ass,” Fassbender told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “But they are always awkward those kind of things, but you just have to get on with it.”

One thing Fassbender did enjoy about making the film, in which Jung delves into Sigmund Freud's experimental treatment known as the “talking cure,” was discovering how he could better channel and process his own inner conflicts.

“I made a New Year’s resolution that I must stop talking as much as I do and listen more. And I don’t read as much as I should, I end up reading mostly scripts… but I think talking (things out) is good," he said. "These guys came about and said this is psychoanalysis, we have labeled this as a new science, but before that people were always doing it as one fashion or another.”

As for Knightley, the chance to play a screaming, violent young women marred by sexual humiliation and beatings from her authoritarian father, was just too good to pass up.

“It was like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle, it was amazing. I loved it,” she said. “I find understanding people and bad behavior very tricky… trying to understand that horrendous mental struggle that she’s going through.”