Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie (Ingmar Bergman gör en film)

INGMAR BERGMAN MAKES A MOVIE

THE SCRIPT

The reason for visiting Ingmar Bergman at the Baltic sea

on the island where he and Kébi Laretei rented a summer cottage

stemmed from my theatrical studies 75 years earlier.

I dreamed of learning how a film director worked.

I knew Bergman was writing a new film about a priest.

I would rather put him in front of a camera in the very act of writing,

but what writer would have the nerve for that?

I had to wait until he had finished the script.

That was August 11, 1961.

Winter Light begins with a service in a desolate provincial church.

After the mass, the priest is visited by a fisherman and his wife.

Jonas Persson is an introverted man, anxious about the nuclear bomb.

With the best literary intentions,

I ask how Bergman, the writer, came upon that story.

Well, it so happens

I know a priest in the countryside

living in a distant congregation.

I visited him and he was very sad.

The idea had been tucked away inside me for many years.

He was depressed, and I asked him why.

“Well, a man took his life here...

and I had spoken with him just the day before.”

The priest blamed himself mercilessly

for not realizing how serious the situation was.

He blamed himself...

for this man's death,

for not being able to help him in his agony.

He thought of how impervious he had been to the man's suffering.

The film is about this fisherman

and his fear of a coming world war.

He has heard that the Chinese are being educated for war

and that they will have a nuclear bomb at their disposal.

He read it in the paper and brooded over it for half a year.

Where did you find that subject?

I read it in the paper some years ago...

and I was pretty shaken by it.

I guess it's about my own agony as well.

Did you know right away what the fisherman would be brooding over?

Yes, I did.

- You didn't have to go looking for it? - Not at all.

If I'm right, you've directed 24 films.

Twelve of them you wrote yourself.

The other twelve were adaptations of various kinds.

Is there any difference for you in writing between now

and when you started?

Yes, a huge difference.

I've always had a huge complex, great misgivings,

about my own writing.

There are people who have often said, perhaps justifiably,

that I am no writer,

which, in fact, I never claimed to be.

In the past I was haunted by these misgivings,

as well as by the fear...

of not getting it right.

It was an obstacle to my writing, which came down to an act of willpower,

with the accompanying tensions and inhibitions.

There was so much I had to overcome.

During the last few years,

I've stopped worrying

about what people might say about what I am doing, because -

It's not that I don't care,

but I can never please everybody anyway.

I'll find no mercy among those who dislike what I'm doing anyway.

I think I've calmed down a bit on that point.

It will take the form it takes.

Was there a period when you tried to please everyone?

Working in this medium and being a man of the theater,

I'm like the common whore.

I have an enormous need for people to like me and what I'm doing.

That it be accepted and praised and so forth.

It's always painful to be disapproved of.

You've said it's difficult to read a script and visualize what's in it.

What is the actual difficulty?

Does everybody in the film business have this difficulty, even the actors?

Yes, very much so.

It's a very complicated task.

When writing my own scripts...

I try to make them readable

by avoiding a lot of technical instructions.

The script that arrives at the studio is structured like...

a play, a drama, with a lot of scenic instructions.

No technical arrangements, though, for cameras and so on.

Can you anticipate any particular problem, anything especially bothersome,

or any specific conflict for this film?

Yes. You see, in writing this script,

I put some serious obstacles in my own path.

Even though I know it's hell to work with children and animals,

nevertheless I have a little boy and a dog in it.

And even though I know that a snowfall that continues throughout an entire scene

is practically impossible,

I have it in there, and I want to solve this problem at any cost,

because I feel it's necessary.

But there are certain limits to what can be accomplished.

“Jonas the fisherman pays a visit to the priest,

who is feeling sick and miserable and shaken by a fever.

Eventually the attack passes, and he calms down,

but when he looks up, Jonas is gone.

No footsteps, no doors closing,

no wind whistling through the cracks - just absolute silence.

He goes to the window - no car, no tracks.”

Will you use a series of different shots or one continuous shot of the priest?

Well, you see, I will partly use the sound.

You see, when working

in close conjunction with the audio track,

it's like an accompanying chord, although unnoticeable.

The most important thing is to create a complete -

As he recovers from his fever attack,

there is this complete silence.

I would minimize the usual noise in the studio,

or in the church, or in these surroundings.

The normal background noise, I will minimize even that.

Each movement will be accompanied by almost no sound at all,

thus creating a frightening silence around it.

And as he looks up in this silence,

it will have a powerful impact on the audience, as silences always do.

A silence will hit -

I'm working much more with silence

than with sound.

The silence will hit people incredibly hard, since they don't expect it.

So he looks up during this silence,

and here I'll insert shots of the door,

the window, the chair where Jonas sat,

and then back to him.

So then there's this feeling of a suffocating loneliness

and silence that has fallen upon him.

Are you after the notion that the fisherman's visit

might have been a dream?

That it may not have happened?

Yes, but not too obviously. One must be able to think -

I want this eerie sort of feeling, that he never was there, to linger on.

Is this a facial shot of the priest?

Yes, always facial. The priest's eyes are so important.

This is the alpha and the omega for me,

the eyes of the actors.

What the eyes can yield is, for me, the essential of all filmed art.

I go on about this only because there's so much

that can't be anticipated when writing, compared to visualizing it.

What will the scenery look like?

For example, there is a scene of the police officer's car

“with its motor running, this being November and outdoors.

He and another man are bending over a body lying by a ditch.

A few boys are standing close by, curious, scared, cold and motionless,

with caps over their faces and running noses.”

This shot will be highly dependent on the choice of the ditch.

Yes, it is extremely complicated,

the choice of exterior sites.

You can search for one damned little piece of road,

ready to kill yourself to find the right one...

that meets your filming needs.

It has to provide the right visual feeling,

the right atmosphere.

It's hard to describe what it might be.

It's always very specific from one time to the next.

Quite ordinary things might create immense difficulties.

Once the script is completed, production starts for real.

Gunnar Bjornstrand and Ingrid Thulin are hired for the leading roles,

Max von Sydow and Gunnel Lindblom for the fisherman and his wife.

In September 1961, the company left for Dalarna to scout for exteriors.

The art director P.A. Lundgren,

photographer Sven Nykvist, and production manager Lars-Owe Carlberg.

And then something very typical occurred.

They traveled all the way from Orsa to Falun

on a railway built in pan' by Ingmar Bergman is' grandfather...

in search of a crossroads near which to film.

But they ended up finding it

just a stone's throw from the hotel where the crew stayed,

in the middle of Réttvik.

They searched for churches as well.

Photographer Sven Nykvist knew he was in for particular lighting problems,

as the story takes place on a cloudy Sunday in November.

Generally one thinks that light on a cloudy day doesn't change,

but to see how it does indeed change during, let is say, a high mass,

we sat in various churches and studied the light.

Every ten minutes I would take a snapshot

to see how the light was changing, and these proved very useful.

I glued them into the script,

and I'd look at them from time to time while filming.

What characterizes that light?

It's completely shadowless.

In the past we'd have used big effects, big windows,

and so on.

This time we tried to achieve a totally shadowless image,

and that proved to be much more difficult

than using conventional filming technique.

We didn't achieve it just with lights.

We had to build special reflectors and large screens

and work with waxed paper sheets and indirect lighting.

And it was very difficult to light churches with indirect lighting.

Have you always studied real light and its reflections

the same way that you did here?

No, I must admit I haven't.

Earlier films had to be beautifully shot,

the beauty of each image for its own sake.

Fortunately, we've left that behind us entirely.

Earlier one could not do a film with enough coarseness and realism.

We were always trying for a certain beauty.

But making as many films as you do -

You work in Germany and back home.