On Movies: For this role, Law went to meds school

In

Side Effects

, the tricky psychological thriller starring

Rooney Mara

as a depressed and quite possibly suicidal New Yorker,

Jude Law

shows up as Dr. Jonathan Banks, Mara's character's psychiatrist.

He meets her after a car accident brings her to the hospital, and then takes her on as a patient. He prescribes antidepressants, and then other antidepressants, and then a new drug, still in clinical trials.

The whole world of SSRI's - Celexa, Lexapro, Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft (has anyone done a study on why all the x's and z's?) - is examined with a critical eye.

"There's a real belief that these doctors, and their patients, have in the medicine," says Law, who researched his role as thoroughly as an actor can. "You can't go off to medical school for five years," he laments.

But Law did go off and talk with physicians, psychologists, and pharm experts. "They have to believe that the medicine can do great things, and it can," he says. "You know, I saw certain situations where people who are obviously very unwell were being given their life back. And that's one side of it.

"But obviously, there's also the side where people are abusing the pills, and the pills are abusing them, where the impact of the drugs isn't always positive."

Side Effects is very much about that side. And when someone turns up dead, with multiple knife wounds and a trail of blood across an apartment floor, the mental state of the killer is brought into question. What meds was she on? And who was the doctor who filled out the prescriptions?

"We've kind of declared an all-out war on sadness, you know," Law notes, talking about the rampant use of prescription drugs to treat depression and anxiety disorders. "There's no time for it, no one wants to deal with it, or try to understand it. We just want to get rid of it, and get on."

This is the second time Law has teamed with director Steven Soderbergh. In 2011's Contagion, the actor plays a conspiracy theorist who takes to the streets when a deadly virus spreads around the country, and the world. He could be the mad voice of reason, or the reasoned voice of the mad.

Although Soderbergh wasn't attached to direct Side Effects at the time, Law was handed the script back then by the screenwriter, Scott Z. Burns, as they were shooting Contagion. A few short months later, the director had signed on, too.

"I think I read it at Christmas, and we were shooting in New York in March," says Law. Side Effects, which opened Friday, also stars Channing Tatum, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Vinessa Shaw.

"It was all very fast. And the same goes on set, too: because of Steven's multiple roles, his multitasking - because he's the director of photography, and the editor - the focus is very much on what is needed, and what he sees as the thrust of the given scene.

"There's not a lot of flesh left on it. You're given a lot of freedom to run with it as you wish, but then he shoots a few shots simply and carefully, and that's when you move on."

Soderbergh has announced that Side Effects will be his final theatrical film. (There remains only Behind the Candelabra, about the relationship between flamboyant Las Vegas entertainer Liberace and his much younger partner, Scott Thorson. Michael Douglas and Matt Damon star. It airs this spring on HBO.) Soderbergh plans to pursue other passions, like painting, and writing. And Law is taking Soderbergh at his word. He says the "retirement" from filmmaking is for real.

"Steven has never struck me as someone who says things for effect, or someone who says things and doesn't necessarily follow them through," Law observes. "I know that he has other interests, other talents that he's obviously curious to investigate. And I can understand also why you want to say that something is finished in order to mentally move on to something else . . . .

"But I hope for all our sakes that he comes back, eventually."

Since shooting Side Effects last year, Law has worked on two new projects.

"I've done a small English film, but a very exciting part and role for me," he reports. "Very much in a different direction. It's called Dom Hemingway." And in it, Law is the title character, a safecracker just back on the streets after years in prison. Richard (The Matador) Shepard directs.

"And I just finished, recently, a very small part in the wonderful Wes Anderson's next film. . . . It's called The Great Budapest Hotel. It is set in a hotel, in a couple of different time periods, and looking at stories around the hotel."

Who else is in that, we wonder?

"I'm sure you can imagine," Law says with a laugh. Aside from Law and another newcomer to the Anderson repertory troupe, Ralph Fiennes, "the others are very much the Wes Anderson family - Bill [Murray], and Owen [Wilson], and Jason [Schwarzman], Tilda Swinton, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe."

And did it feel any different, working in the meticulously designed, deliberately staged universe of the man behind Moonrise Kingdom, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Royal Tenenbaums?

"Every director is ultimately making a film not about themselves necessarily, but I think it's a projection of themselves," he says. "So, yes, sure, you're on a Wes Anderson film, and you really know it. The detail in the design, the attention to the symmetry of the frame, the movement of the camera.

"But the same goes for Steven, in that you know you are very much in something that's coming from inside his head - there's a kind of intelligence and a lean quality to his work. It's very clean."