Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (13 page)

At the Cannes Film Festival one year, he said, Bergman was talking with David Lean, the director of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr. Zhivago. "What kind of crew do you use?" Lean asked. "I make my films with eighteen good friends," Bergman said. "That's interesting," said Lean. "I make mine with 15o enemies."

It is very rare for Bergman to invite visitors-the word "outsiders" almost seems to apply-to one of his sets. It is much more common, during a difficult scene, for him to send one technician after another out to wait in the hall, until the actors are alone with Bergman, Nykvist, a sound man, an electrician, and the demands of the scene.

"When we were making Cries and Whispers," Liv Ullmann recalls, "none of the rest of us really knew what Harriet Andersson was doing in those scenes of suffering and death. Ingmar would send away everyone ex- ceptjust those few who must be there, and Harriet. When we saw the completed film, we were overwhelmed. It was almost as if those great scenes had been Harriet's secret-which, in a way, they were supposed to be, since in the film she died so much alone."

Liv is sitting in her dressing room, waiting to be called for the next scene. It will be a difficult one; she must explain to her child in the film why she tries to kill herself.

"They say Ingmar has changed," she says, "and he has. He doesn't look the same when he walks on the set. He's mellowed, in a nice way. He's sweeter. We've all been through some hard times with him-fights on the set-but he seems more tolerant now."

Perhaps, she said, Bergman has worked through the problem of death which haunted so many of his films. "He's faced it as a reality, and accepted it, and suddenly there's almost a sense of relief: in Cries and Whispers and Scenes from a Marriage there's a kind of acceptance at the end that wasn't there before. And in this film. He's been saying for years he's going to make a film of The Merry Widow. Well, now I really think he will. It may not be The Merry Widow, but it will be something warm and sunny. He is the most adult director in the world, making serious films for adults, but now if he could really let the child inside of him come out ... and I think he's reached the point where he can."

She lowers her voice. There is movement down the corridor, and it may be Bergman. She isn't supposed to be giving an interview; Bergman is very concerned about the scene coming up, and he wants her to think about nothing else. Ullmann smiles; it will help her, she says, to think of anything but the scene. Every actress approaches these things in her own way.

Elsewhere in Film House, people seem able to think and speak of nothing else but Bergman. He is the greatest Swedish artist, they agreean artist of world importance. And yet he was not much loved until recently in his native land. His two best markets are the United States and France. In Sweden, he was accused of dealing only with the bourgeoisie, of not facing social problems, of being concerned only with himself and not with society. These are charges he more or less agrees with, but they do not bother him.

In the bar of Film House, drinking aquavit and a beer, the Finnish director Jorn Donner waits to talk to Bergman about a documentary he's making for television: Three Scenes with Ingmar Bergman. Donner elaborates on Bergman's problem. "He is known all over the world, and yet he can't afford a single failure," he says. "Up until Cries and Whispers, each film was paying off the debts of the last. For Cries and Whispers, there was so little money that the actors were asked to work for three thousand dollars each and ten percent of the profits. He gave ten percent to Liv, Harriet, Sven, Ingrid Thulin, and thirty percent for himself-and this was a film he totally produced himself!

"Harriet asked me if she should work for three thousand dollars. I said, certainly, to work for Ingmar-and if that's all the money there is. After the film was made, it was turned down by every major distributor. And then look what an enormous success it was! And followed by a bigger success, Scenes from a Marriage. And now The Magic Flute. But no one suspects how close he came to not being able to raise the money for Cries and Whispers."

It's true; until Cries and Whispers in 1973, Bergman hadn't had a financial success since Persona, released in 1966. There were great picturesA Passion of Anna and Shame-and interesting failures like Hour of the Wolf and a movie that no one liked much, The Touch, with Elliot Gould, but they all lost money.

Then the tide turned. Not since the days of Smiles o fa Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal, in the late 195os, has Bergman found more success with audiences than in the last few years. And Scenes from a Marriage found him an audience, at last, in Scandinavia, too: his neighbors on the Baltic island of Faro, where he lives as much of the year as possible, saw it on television and understood at last what it was that he did. Then Bergman's version of Mozart's The Magic Flute played on Swedish television on the first day of 1975, and one of every three Swedes saw it. "It's as if he's in harmony with himself," says Bengt Forslund, a Swedish producer. "All those years of films about suffering and death, and suddenly Ingmar's found all of this joy to draw on."

The red light is still on over the door to Bergman's soundstage. When it goes off, that means Bergman is not actually shooting-but entry is still forbidden except to the favored, like his wife, Ingrid. She slips through the door with some letters that need to be answered. And then it's time for the afternoon tea break. The hostess has set up tea and cakes and Bergman at last acknowledges the interviewer.

He has a little room, long, dim, and cool, like a monk's cell. It's across from the soundstage and down the way from the dressing rooms, and is furnished simply, with two chairs, a cot, and a table (on which rest two apples, a banana, a box of Danish chocolates, and a copy of the script). When he is concerned about the direction a scene is taking, he will declare a break, come into this room, lock the door, and lie down on the cot until the scene is clear in his head.

"So it is thirty years since I directed my first picture," he said. "It's strange, you know, because suddenly you have the feeling there was no time in between. The feeling when you wake up, got to the studio, see the rushes, is still exactly the same. Of course, in 1945, I was more scared, more insecure-but the tension and the passion, and the feeling of surprise every day-that's the same. I solved the problems, or didn't solve them in exactly the same way.

"The artistic problems are already solved when you write the script. But then there are the technical problems. The shooting schedule, the lab, a sick actor ... and it has to do with your own conditions, too. If you feel well, or depressed-you are not a machine. And yet you must be on top of things for nine or ten weeks-if you've not slept well, or you're suffering from lust ... I call those technical problems."

English is not his best language, but he speaks it well enough. Growing up before the Second World War, he was taught German, like all Swedish schoolchildren. As he speaks, he seems to have it all clear inside, what he wants to say. He accepts questions gravely but without a great deal of interest. It's less of an interview than an opportunity to share in his thought process. I asked him about the recent change in the direction of his work, away from despair and a little toward affirmation.

"Well," he said, "you mature. You grow up mentally, emotionally, and it's not a straight line, it's more like the growing of a tree. On the island where I live, the trees always have a strong wind from the northeast, blowing so hard that they grow almost flat against the ground. It's that way with people. You think you're in control, but really you're being changed every day by everything around you.

"Perhaps, someday, I'll stop growing. But I hope that I'll understand it myself, and, in that moment, stop making films. You know, filming and directing on the stage are both the same in the sense that you try to get in touch with other human beings. There's always that hope. But if you have the feeling you have nothing more to tell, to say-it's wise to stop making pictures. You can still work in the theater, because there you're working with big men-Shakespeare, Strindberg, Moliere-so if you're old and tired and sick, at least you still have your experience to share with other actors, you can help them put across the play. To make a film is something else. If you have nothing to say, it's time to stop, because the film is you."

You talk about getting in touch with other people, I said. In so many of your films, that seems to be the subject-people trying to make contact.

"That is exactly right. If I believe in anything, I believe in the sudden relationship, the sudden contact between two human beings. When we grow up, we suddenly feel we are completely alone. We find substitutes for loneliness-but this feeling of a certain contact, a certain instant understanding between two people, that's the best thing in life. It has nothing to do with sex, by the way."

And so, at the end of Scenes from a Marriage, when the man and woman have been divorced for years, you have them holding each other "in a cottage in the middle of the night somewhere in the world."

He nodded. "You know," he said, "I was very surprised by the success of that film, because I wrote it only from my own experience. It took three months to make, but a lifetime to experience. Very strange.

"I was on my island with my wife, and I was preparing a stage production, and j ust for fun I started to write some dialogues about marriage. I started with the scene where he tells her he will go away. Well, I always write by hand, and I asked my wife, who is the only person in the world who can read my handwriting, to type it up. She found it amusing. Then I wrote the fifth scene-even more amusing!-and then the first. I could have written twenty-four more.

"But I had no idea of what would happen. No feeling of what to do with these scenes. Perhaps I could make some sort of program for television. I asked my friends Liv and Erland Josephson to read it, and they were interested. Well, everything happened just like that. It was the biggest success in the history of Swedish television-and all over Scandinavia. At last, my neighbors on the island had seen something of mine they could relate to."

Scenes from a Marriage was shot in sixteen-millimeter, unlike his previous work, which had all been in the standard thirty-five-millimeter. That was fine for television, but now Sven Nykvist was telling him that the new sixteen-millimeter Kodak color film was so good that features could be shot in it, too, with little difference in quality, a great advance in flexibility, and for a lot less money. Bergman was dubious, but agreed to shoot Mozart's The Magic Flute in sixteen-millimeter.

It was a project commissioned by Swedish television, and he decided to film it as it might have been performed in a little eighteenth-century theater like the Drottingholm Court Theater, perfectly preserved for two hundred years in a royal park outside Stockholm. The theater's interiors and its ingenious stage machinery-good for making thunder and lightning and waves-were duplicated in Film House, and the opera was shot in sixteen-millimeter.

After its Swedish television premiere, Nykvist and Bergman screened a thirty-five-millimeter theatrical print blown up from sixteen-millimeter, and were happy with the quality; Bergman agreed with Nykvist that the image was clear and subtle even by their demanding standards, and they decided to shoot in sixteen-millimeter from then on. Face to Face was being shot in sixteen-millimeter-although that was one of the few things regarding it Bergman seemed to be absolutely sure of.

"It's a little difficult to talk about right now," he said, "because we're in the middle of things and often it's not until I take the film back to my island and begin to edit it that it becomes clear to me. Of course I can say, yes, it's about a woman who tries to commit suicide, and the picture is sort of an investigation of why she does that, but-honestly, I don't know. I wrote it, but when I shoot a film I never think of it as my own script, because then I couldn't shoot a single scene. It's very personal, and yet I have to be cold, analytical, about it. Sometimes I read what I've written-dialogue that was written with emotion, and then I try to understand intellectually what a character means, and sometimes I make very strange mistakes.

"The problem is that film is the best way to the emotional center of human beings, but it's very hard to be intellectual about it. There's some sort of strange emotional logic in film that has nothing to do with the meaning. If you're the director, you have to be very careful about what you reach for, because the emotions may make you find something else altogether. But, even then, that's all right, if it makes others feel something ... what makes me unhappy is when the audience is indifferent."

I asked him about Persona, the story of an actress who one day decides to stop talking, and about her relationship with the naive young nurse who's assigned to spend the summer in the country with her. The film created a great deal of critical confusion and debate in 1966, and has continued to reveal levels of emotion; it has the ability to make audiences feel it when they don't really understand it.

"Now there's an example of what I mean," he said. "I have no theories about it. If you asked me to explain it, I couldn't. But I know that Per song literally saved my life at the time I was writing it. I was very ill. I hadn't lost my mental balance, but I'd lost my physical balance. I had an ear disease ... I couldn't stand up or even move my head without nausea. So I started to write down some lines every day, just a few lines, just for the discipline of going from the bed to the table without falling over. As a filmmaker, I could not work if I could not move. Now here was a story about an actress who stopped working one day, surrendered her ability to talk, and the young nurse who admired her, who wanted to understand her, but was treated badly by her ... there's something there, but I can't explain it."

Persona contains one of Bergman's most famous shots, the faces of Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson photographed in such a way that the features of the two women seem to blend. They seem about to become one another, which, in a way, is what happens in the film. They seem capable of exchanging or sharing personalities. I asked Bergman about this shot, and also about his frequent use of two-shots to show characters who are in the same frame but not looking at each other or communicating.