Bergman: On Writing, Demons and Childhood Secrets

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman's swan song Fanny and Alexander was a sumptuous epic of the bourgeois family. At once charming, unsettling and colourful, it challenges the director's reputation as a gloomy, doom merchant, and makes a wonderful introduction to the great director. However, it also was conceived as Bergman’s last film, in which Bergman made peace with his demons and looks back, through the eyes of children, on the great themes of his early masterpieces.

It is the story two siblings who are raised in a dysfunctional environment. Alexander struggles against his stepfather's coldness  and in certain places, the film is as dark and as terrifying as anything you encounter in Cries and Whispers or Through a Glass Darkly. By the time the film reaches its finale Fanny and Alexander feels like his most mature, insightful, and well-realized film. 

Bergman was notorious throughout his early career of facing the consequences of a world without God, only to conclude that everyone is God, and that humanity builds God in their own image, for better or worse. It is significant to note that the God that appears in the closing moments of Fanny and Alexander is shown to be a cheap dummy, whose puppet-master sets it in motion. 

Bergman gives central focus to a boy grieving over his father's death, the source of the hate and anger that he turns outwards onto the universe. Then he is implicitly his own director; a boy who manipulates the world of theatre, its characters, puppets, to make sense of the meaningless of the universe. 

Bergman's own youth provides the contrast between the two worlds of Fanny and Alexander, the vibrant theatrical family and the severe order of the bishop's residence. On the one hand, his youth was distinguished by 'good humour, plays, songs, music, and poetry reading'; on the other hand, it was defined by 'austerity, moralising, denial, rigidity, and violence'. 

The film's autobiographical elements, characters based on family members, the Ekdahl residence being a replica of Bergman's grandmother's Uppsala residence, and the likeness between Alexander and the young Bergman is undeniable, along with his interests in the puppet theatre and the magical lantern. 

Fanny and Alexander is often viewed as a distillation of Bergman's career, and it indeed has clear echoes from his earlier works: a concern with religion, family, the role of the artist. In addition, Fanny and Alexander takes place in a theatrical setting, with several allusions to dramatists dear to Bergman. Fanny and Alexander is a film infused with a love of the theatre. It is no surprise that in his final film, then, and despite his considerable accomplishments as a filmmaker, Bergman places the world of the theatre at the heart of the story.

Jörn Donner was Managing Director of the Swedish Film Institute between 1978 and 1982 during which he produced Ingmar Bergman’s film Fanny and Alexander (1982). In 1984 the movie won a total of four Academy Awards including the award for best foreign language film. The following dialogue is taken from an interview Donner conducted with Bergman in Stockholm during three days in November, 1997. Aged 79 at the time, Bergman reflects on his writing method, his childhood and the ‘demon of suspicion’. 

Ingmar Bergman: When I am going to sleep at night, I can walk through my grandmother's apartment, room by room, and remember everything in the most minute detail, where different things were, what they looked like, what colour they were. I can also remember the light, winter light or summer light, through the windows, the pictures on the walls. The apartment was furnished before the turn of the century and contained a huge number of things. That was the bourgeois style of the day, not a millimetre was to remain uncovered; there had to be things everywhere. It's really strange. My grandmother died when I was twelve and I haven't been there since I was about perhaps ten or eleven. But I remember it in detail. The things there in the apartment, they still have a magical content and significance to me. I made a lot of use of that in Fanny and Alexander. If any conclusions are to be drawn from that, Jörn, then it may well be that in that way, the whole of my creativity is really tremendously childish, all based on my childhood. In less than a second, I can take myself back into my childhood. I think everything I've done in general, anything of any value, has its roots there. 

Or dialectically, it is a dialogue with childhood...

Jörn Donner: Quite often, you’ve been considerably more experimental in films than in the theatre.

Ingmar Bergman: Films demand their form, and staged plays theirs. I’ve never simply decided that now I shall experiment, but everything has just been given the form I’ve thought it ought to have. I’m not at all interested in whether I’m experimenting or not.

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: But is it some kind of intuition? Who the hell would be crazy enough to write a script such as Cries and Whispers?

Ingmar Bergman: [laughter] It’s like this: it was necessary to write it in that way, or Persona, or the one I’ve just written, Faithless. They’ve found their form simply because it was necessary to write them in that way – to do them in that way.

Jörn Donner: You didn’t think about the drama...

Ingmar Bergman: No, in general I wasn’t thinking about anything.

Jörn Donner: That’s not what I meant. But to go back in time, to Sawdust and Tinsel or Prison. Didn’t you think them out either?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I didn’t. Well, not Sawdust and Tinsel, but Prison – I suppose that was the first time I wrote my own script. I was quite crazy with delight and had to get everything that I had been walking around and thinking about into it. Without my really making any effort, it became... peculiar.

Jörn Donner: I suppose you don’t want to say you’re an intuitive writer.

Ingmar Bergman: But wasn’t it you who said that when you begin writing, you don’t know how it will turn out?

Jörn Donner: That’s right, of course, yes.

Cries and Whispers (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman: It’s just intuition, and it’s the same when I start writing, I have a kind of basic scene, a beginning. I usually say that in Cries and Whispers I went on for very long, and had a scene with four women in white in a red room.

Jörn Donner: And that was all, generally speaking.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it was only that. And then I started thinking about why they were there and what they said to each other, that kind of thing. It was mysterious. It kept coming back again and again, and I couldn’t get that scene to come out right.

Jörn Donner: A kind of dream image.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, you know what it’s like. Then you begin winding in a long thread that appears from somewhere or other, and the thread can suddenly snap. That’s the end of that, but then all of a sudden, it’s a whole ball.

Jörn Donner: Have threads often snapped for you?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, lots of times.

Jörn Donner: But not the kind of threads you’ve spent weeks working on, or in manuscript form.

Ingmar Bergman: No, not once I’ve started writing. By then I’ve already done my working books. In them, I’ve written endless things, masses of stuff, but once I’ve started on the script, then I know what I’m doing.

Prison (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: What are your working books about?

Ingmar Bergman: Absolutely everything.

Jörn Donner: So the script grows out of the working book?

Ingmar Bergman: Exactly. Well, it’s unfinished, completely. Keeping working books is fun.

Jörn Donner: Have you always done that?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, always. At first, I didn’t really have the time. But when I did have the time, yes. Often when I was younger and had to earn money for all my wives and children, then I had to begin on the script, so to speak, bang, directly, I mean. But now I can lie on the sofa and play about with my thoughts and have fun with them, looking at images, doing research and so on. All that’s great fun. My working books are also quite illegible to anyone else but me. But then the actual writing begins out of these notebooks.

Jörn Donner: And it goes quickly?

Ingmar Bergman: Relatively quickly because it’s so boring. It’s hellishly boring, just like when you do a theatre performance and sit there sketching out the scenes, how the actors are to move and stand, when they’re to say what, and all that – hellishly dreary. When I’m writing the script, I write a certain number of pages a day.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

 Jörn Donner: Would you consider writing in any other way but by hand?

Ingmar Bergman: No, never.

Jörn Donner: Why not?

Ingmar Bergman: I can’t type. [laughter] I’ve tried.

Jörn Donner: Is it a physical thing?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it’s a physical thing, profoundly unsatisfactory. I use a sort of notepad to write on. They existed when I was employed as a slave scriptwriter at Svensk Filmindustri in 1942. You were given a kind of lined yellow notepad. Then you had to write by hand and with a broad-nibbed fountain pen. Since then, I’ve always written on that yellow paper and those notepads.

Jörn Donner: Where do you get them?

Ingmar Bergman: About twenty or so years ago it turned out that they weren’t making them anymore, so I had them make eight-hundred pads especially for me. And I’ve still got a few left. I think they’ll just about last me out.

Jörn Donner: I should damned well think so.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ingmar Bergman: I write with a ballpoint pen nowadays, but not just any old damned pen. It has to be a very special ballpoint with a very fat tip. It’s the actual writing, although my handwriting is so difficult to read, that gives me pleasure. I like writing by hand. It is very satisfying. In that I always write on the same kind of pad, I know how much I’ve written, you see. And I never write for more than three hours. When the three hours are up, even if I’m in the middle of a scene or wherever the hell I am, I stop working. I stop for the day. Because it’s so boring. But the working book is fun. That’s the actual creative process. Writing the script is just the arranging process.

Jörn Donner: Do you think you have some sort of ritualistic superstition about these notepads and pens, where you work, and those three hours, or is it just a routine?

Ingmar Bergman: No, it’s a ritual. I have very precise rituals. Get up early and eat breakfast, go for a walk, don’t read the paper, don’t talk on the telephone with anyone. Sit down at the desk. My desk has to be tidy, nothing lying about in a mess on it. I am maniacally pedantic when it comes to what it has to look like if I’m to be able to sit working at it. Then when I’ve been writing for about three quarters of an hour, I take a break. I’ve usually got a backache by then, so I walk all through my house, or go and look at the sea, or something like that for a quarter of an hour. Writing scripts is a ‘compulsory exercise’.

Jörn Donner: A kind of battle? Against...

Ingmar Bergman: Against disorder, sloppiness, lack of discipline.

Jörn Donner: You never lacked that.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, no, I’ve never lacked discipline, but if I had, things would have really fallen apart, I assure you. Because I’m constantly battling against my lack of discipline. You just can’t be undisciplined in my profession, you just can’t. That’s why I’ve become so frightfully pedantic, so trying to so many people.

Sawdust and Tinsel (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: There’s a strange contrast between two things: in both your films and your autobiography you describe your demons with a capital D, while on the other hand in all the pictures of you at work in the theatre and on films, you always seem to be in a good mood.

Ingmar Bergman: I think it’s part of a director’s duty to be in a good mood at work. To create a kind of cheerful atmosphere around the actual exercising of the profession. In the workroom, too.

Jörn Donner: A sense of comfort?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, and security. It’s terribly important. When I was young, I didn’t understand that at all, and took it all with me into my working life, my hangovers and troubles with women, all my shortcomings and stupidities. I dragged them with me into the studio or on stage and raced around like a demon creating hideously unpleasant and uncomfortable situations.
But there’s also something called the educational outburst, that you sometimes have to make use of. These are enormously premeditated attacks of rage. And they are a precision bombing, because that is what’s needed. Things mustn’t be lovely and cozy in a studio, or on stage. And the people we work with, they’re so often tremendously ambitious, so tremendously sensitive, that although we’re playing a game, although it looks like fun – we’re joking and telling funny stories and we relax and so on – they still feel it’s a matter of life and death. And when I say life and death, I actually mean just that.

Jörn Donner: Is it also a matter of keeping up a certain tempo?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, to a tremendous degree. For instance, when you start in the film studio, at nine in the morning, then you start at nine in the morning. The first scene is to be shot at ten. Somehow you have to start punctually. A day shouldn’t start with endless discussion. To me, chatter is largely an abomination, because then there are one or two people, perhaps more involved, while a whole lot of others are standing around, even more in the theatre – should be outside of rehearsals and outside the studio.

Persona (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Jörn Donner: How have you managed to create a distance between what you yourself call your demons and a film studio or a theatre?

Ingmar Bergman: My demons... well, they’ve somehow got to be harnessed. They have to be there, because I suffer from, for instance – how shall I put it – the demon of suspicion. I am an immensely suspicious person.

Jörn Donner: And a hypochondriac, too, perhaps?

Ingmar Bergman: Let’s not keep on counting my demons, for Christ’s sake, but I think they ought to be present. They have to stand at attention, on parade, so that I can convey to the actors how suspicion functions and how hypochondria functions, in gestures, tone of voice or in movements. Obviously the demons have to be brought into it. It would be tremendously risky not to have them with you, but they have to be kept very much under control.

You see, as long as I’m inside the studio, or in the theatre, then that’s a universe controlled by me. Then the demons are also under control. Everything’s under control. But the moment all the lights go off and the camera stops, and I leave by the stage door, or the rehearsal is over, then I no longer have control over the demons. Then it is no longer my universe, so to speak, but the often unpredictable universe that I try to control, but which has constantly bedevilled my efforts...

- Extracted from ‘Jörn Donner: Demons And Childhood Secrets: An Interview’. Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate. Originally published in Grand Street 17, no. 2 (Fall 1998).

Antonioni Discusses The Passenger

The Passenger (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni)

Originally released in 1975, Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger is, on one level, a thriller about a man trying to escape his past. This poignant film is a profile of an exhausted journalist, played by Jack Nicholson, whose means of escape is to take over the identity of a dead man. However, Antonioni is less interested in the suspense inherent in Nicholson’s situation, rather the plot is the starting point for a portrait of a man in spiritual and psychological crisis. 

Based on an original story by Mark Peploe and filmed from a screenplay by Peploe, Peter Wollen and Antonioni, The Passenger begins with Nicholson in remote Africa completing work on a documentary about rebels in Chad attempting to overthrow a tyrannical government. In a bar, he meets a stranger named Robertson (Charles Mulvehill) who unexpectedly dies in an adjoining hotel room (and who, unknown to Locke, is an in-demand arms dealer). Upon discovering the body, Locke — unhappily married and  sickened by the compromises of his work – assumes the dead man’s identity. 

Antonioni further suggests that Locke’s desire to identify with and absorb an alien personality is synonymous with the movie audience’s desire to identify with, and therefore live vicariously through, the experiences of fictional cinematic characters.

As Locke takes on Robertson’s life and commitments, it turns out that Locke has merely assumed one bleak prison for another. His odyssey takes him from Africa to Spain, Germany and England in a doomed flight from the past. In The Passenger, the only motif more prevalent than doubles is the image of spirals (from swirling sand, tyre marks in the dust, a rotating fan, or Antonioni’s spiralling camera movements) – a looped pattern which resolves to the idea that the cycle of life ends where it begins: in nothingness.

The famous climax of the film – a final sequence lasting seven minutes and taking eleven days to shoot – is a synthesis of the movie’s themes and a tribute to Antonioni’s virtuosity as a director. 

Antonioni considered The Passenger his most stylistically mature film. He also considered it a political film due to its topicality and the fact that it ‘fits with the dramatic rapport of the individual in today’s society.’

In the following interview with Larry Sturhahn and Betty Jeffries Demby, originally published in 1975, Antonioni discusses the making of The Passenger and analyses its place in the context of his work.

BETTY JEFFRlES DEMBY: Did you do the screenplay for ‘The Passenger’? 

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI: I have always written my own scripts, even if what I wrote was the result of discussions with my collaborators. The Passenger, however, was written by someone else. Naturally I made changes to adapt it to my way of thinking and shooting. I like to impro­vise  – in fact, I can’t do otherwise. It is only in this phase – that is, when I actually see it –  that the film becomes clear to me. Lucidity and clear­ness are not among my qualities, if I have any.

LARRY STURHAHN: In this case, were there any major changes in the screenplay? 

MA: The whole idea, the way the film is done, is different. The mood is changed – there is more of a spy feeling, it’s more political.

LS: Do you always adapt a piece of material to suit your particular needs? 

MA: Always, I got the idea for Blow-Up from a short story by Cortazar, but even there I changed a lot. And The Girlfriends was based on a story by Pavese. But I work on the scripts by myself with some collaboration, and as far as the act of writing is concerned, I always do that myself

LS: I have often felt that the short story is a better medium to adapt to film because it’s compact and about the same length as a film.

MA: I agree. The Girlfriends was based on a short novel, Among Women Only. And the most difficult pages to translate into images were the best pages as far as the novel and the writing were concerned. I mean the best of the pages – the pages I liked the most – were the most difficult. When you have just an idea it’s easier. Putting something into a differ­ent medium is difficult because the first medium was there first. In a novel there’s usually too much dialogue – and getting rid of the dialogue is difficult.

LS: Do you change the dialogue even further when you’re on the set?

MA: Yes, I change it a lot. I need to hear a line pronounced by the actors.

LS: How much do you see of a film when you’re looking at the script? Do you see the locations? Do you see where you’re going to work with the film?

MA: Yes, more or less. But I never try to copy what I see because this is impossible. I will never find the exact counterpart of my imagination.

LS: So you wipe the slate clean when you’re looking for your location?

MA: Yes. I just go and look. I know what I need, of course. Actually, it’s very simple.

BJD: Then you don’t leave the selection of location up to your assistants?

MA: The location is the very substance of which the shot is made. Those colors, that light, those trees, those objects, those faces. How could I leave the choice of all this to my assistants? Their choices would be entirely dif­ferent from mine. Who knows the film I am making better than me?

BJD: Was ‘The Passenger’ shot entirely on location? 

MA: Yes.

BJD: I believe most of your other films were too. Why do you have such a strong preference for location shooting?

MA: Because reality is unpredictable. In the studio everything has been foreseen.

BJD: One of the most interesting scenes in the film is the one which takes place on the roof of the Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona. Why did you choose this loca­tion?

MA: The Gaudi towers reveal, perhaps, the oddity of an encounter between a man who has the name of a dead man and a girl who doesn’t have any name. (She doesn’t need it in the film.)

BJD: I understand that in ‘Red Desert’ you actually painted the grass and col­ored the sea to get the effects you wanted Did you do anything similar in ‘The Passenger’?

MA: No. In The Passenger I have not tampered with reality. I looked at it with the same eye with which the hero, a reporter, looks at the events he is reporting on. Objectivity is one of the themes of the film. If you look closely, there are two documentaries in the film, Locke’s documentary on Africa and mine on him.

BJD: What about the sequence where Nicholson is isolated in the desert? The desert is especially striking, and the color is unusually intense and burning. Did you use any special filters or forced processing to create this effect?

MA: The color is the color of the desert. We used a filter, but not to alter it; on the contrary, in order not to alter it. The exact warmness of the color was obtained in the laboratory by the usual processes.

BJD: Did shooting in the desert with its high temperatures and blowing sand create any special problems for you?

MA: Not especially. We brought along a refrigerator in which to keep the film, and we tried to protect the camera from the blowing sand by cov­ering it in any possible way.

BJD: How do you cast your actors?

MA: I know the actors, I know the characters of the film. It is a question of juxtaposition.

LS: Specifically, why did you choose Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider?

MA: Jack Nicholson and I wanted to make a film together, and I thought he would be very good, very right for this part. The same for Maria Schneider. She was my understanding of the girl. And I think she was perfect for the role. I may have changed it a bit for her, but that is a real­ity I must face: you can’t invent an abstract feeling. Being a ‘star’ is irrel­evant – if the actor is different from the part, if the feeling doesn’t work, even Jack Nicholson won’t get the part.

LS: Are you saying that Nicholson acts like a star, that he’s hard to work with? 

MA: No. He’s very competent and a very, very good actor, so it’s easy to work with him. He’s intense, yet he doesn’t create any problems – you can cut his hair (I didn’t), he’s not concerned about his ‘good’ side or whether the camera is too high or too low; you can do whatever you want.

BJD: You once said that you see actors as part of the composition; that you don’t want to explain the characters’ motivations to them but want them to be pas­sive. Do you still handle actors this way?

MA: I never said that I want the actors to be passive. I said that sometimes if you explain too much, you run the risk that the actors become their own directors, and this doesn’t help the film. Nor the actor. I prefer work­ing with the actors not on an intellectual but on a sensorial level. To stim­ulate rather than teach.

First of all, I am not very good at talking to them because it is difficult for me to find the right words. Also, I am not the kind of director who wants ‘messages’ on each line. So I don’t have anything more to say about the scene than how to do it. What I try to do is provoke them, put them in the right mood. And then I watch them through the camera and at that moment tell them to do this or that. But not before. I have to have my shot, and they are an element of the image – and not always the most important element.

Also, I see the film in its unity whereas an actor sees the film through his character. It was difficult working with Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider at the same time because they are such completely different actors. They are natural in opposite ways: Nicholson knows where the camera is and acts accordingly. But Maria doesn’t know where the cam­era is – she doesn’t know anything; she just lives the scene. Which is great. Sometimes she just moves and no one knows how to follow her. She has a gift for improvising, and I like that – I like to improvise.

LS: Then you don’t preplan what you are going to do on the set? You don’t sit down the evening before or in the morning and say, ‘I’m going to do this and this’? 

MA: No. Never, never.

LS: You just let it happen as you’re on the set? 

MA: Yes.

LS: Do you at least let your actors rehearse a scene first, or do you just go right into it?

MA: I rehearse very little – maybe twice, but not more. I want the actors to be fresh, not tired.

BJD: What about camera angles and camera movement? Do you carefully pre­plan in this area?

MA: Very carefully.

LS: Are you able to make decisions about print takes very soon, or do you –? 

MA: Immediately.

LS: Then you don’t shoot a lot of takes?

MA: No. Three. Maybe five or six. Sometimes we may do fifteen, but that is very rare.

LS: Would you be able to estimate how much footage you shoot per day? 

MA: No.

LS: Just whatever you can accomplish?

MA: In China I made as many as eighty shots in one day, but that was very different work; I had to rush.

LS: How long did it take to do the final scene of ‘The Passenger’?

MA: Eleven days. But that was not because of me but because of the wind. It was very windy weather and so difficult to keep the camera steady.

BJD: One critic has said that the final seven-minute sequence is destined to become a classic of film history. Can you explain how you conceived it?

MA: I had the idea for the final sequence as soon as I started shooting. I knew, naturally, that my protagonist must die, but the idea of seeing him die bored me. So I thought of a window and what was outside, the afternoon sun. For a second, just for a fraction – Hemingway crossed my mind: ‘Death in the Afternoon.’ And the arena. We found the arena and immediately realized this was the place. But I didn’t yet know how to realize such a long shot. I had heard about the Canadian camera, but I had no first–hand knowledge of its possibilities. In London, I saw some film tests. I met with the English technicians responsible for the camera and we decided to try. There were many problems to solve. The biggest was that the camera was 16mm and I needed 35mm. To modify it would have involved modifying its whole equilibrium since the camera is mounted on a series of gyroscopes. However. I succeeded in doing it.

LS: Did you use a zoom lens or a very slow dolly?

MA: A zoom was mounted on the camera. But it was only used when the camera was about to pass through the gate.

LS: It’s interesting how the camera moves toward the man in the center against the wall but we never get to see him, the camera never focuses on him.

MA: Well, he is part of the landscape, that’s all. And everything is in focus – everything. But not specifically on him. I didn’t want to go closer to anybody. The surprise is the use of this long shot. You see the girl out­side and you see her movements and you understand very well without going closer to her what she’s doing, maybe what her thoughts are. You see, I am using this very long shot like closeups, the shot actually takes the place of closeups.

LS: Did you cover that shot in any other way or was this your sole commitment? 

MA: I had this idea of doing it in one take at the beginning of the shoot­ing and I kept working on it all during the shooting.

LS: How closely do you work with your cinematographer?

MA: Who is the cinematographer? We don’t have this character in Italy.

LS: How big a crew do you work with?

MA: I prefer a small crew. On this one I had a big crew – forty people­ but we had union problems so it couldn’t be smaller.

LS: How important is your continuity girl to your work?

MA: Very important. Because we have to change in the middle, we can’t go chronologically.

BJD: How closely do you work with your editor?

MA: We always work together. However, I edited Blow-Up myself and the first version of The Passenger as well. But it was too long and so I redid it with Franco Arcalli, my editor. Then it was still too long, so I cut it by myself again.

BJD: How closely does the edited version reflect what you had in mind when you were shooting?

MA: Unfortunately, as soon as I finish shooting a film I don’t like it. And then little by little I look at it and start to find something. But when I finish shooting it’s like I haven’t shot anything. Then when I have my material – when it’s been shot in my head and on the actual film – it’s like it’s been shot by someone else. So I look at it with great detachment and then I start to cut. And I like this phase.

But on this one I had to change a lot because the first cut was very long. I shot much more than I needed because I had very little time to prepare the film – Nicholson had some engagements and I had to shoot very quickly.

LS: So you didn’t have time before the shooting to cut your screenplay down to size. 

MA: Right. I shot much more than was necessary because I didn’t know what I would need. So the first cut was very long – four hours. Then I had another that ran two hours and twenty minutes. And now it’s two hours.

LS: Do you shoot lip sync – record the sound on location? 

MA:Yes.

LS: What about dubbing?

MA: A little – when the noise is too much.

BJD: The soundtrack is an enormously important part of your films. For ‘L’avventura’ you recorded every possible shading of the sound if the sea. Did you do anything similar for ‘The Passenger’?

MA: My rule is always the same: For each scene, I record a soundtrack without actors.

BJD: Sometimes you make critical plot points by using sound alone. For instance, in the last sequence we have only the sound of the opening door and what might be a gunshot to let us know the protagonist has been killed. Would you comment on this?

MA: A film is both image and sound. Which is the most important? I put them both on the same plane. Here I used sound because I could not avoid looking at my hero – I could not avoid hearing the sounds con­nected with the actual killing since Locke, the killer, and the camera were in the same room.

BJD: You use music only rarely in the film, but with great effectiveness. Can you explain how you choose which moments will be scored?

MA: I can’t explain it. It is something I feel. When the film is finished, I watch it a couple of times thinking only about the music. In the places where I feel it is missing, I put it in – not as score music but as source music.

LS: Who do you admire among American directors?

MA: I like Coppola; I think The Conversation was a very good film. I like Scorsese; I saw Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and liked it very much­ it was a very simple but very sincere film. And you have Altman and California Split – he’s a very good observer of California society. And Steven Spielberg is also very good.

LS: I have the impression from your films that your people tend to just appear full-blown in a particular situation, that there’s not much  of a past to your characters. For instance, we find Nicholson in an alienated place with no roots behind him. And the same for the girl; she’s just there. It’s as though people are just immediately in an immediate present. There’s no background to them, as it were.

MA: I think it’s a different way of looking at the world. The other way is the older way. This is the modern way of looking at people. Today everyone has less background than in the past. We’re freer. A girl today can go anywhere, just like the one in the film, with just one bag and no thoughts for her family or past. She doesn’t have to carry any baggage with her.

BJD: You mean moral baggage?

MA: Precisely. Moral, psychological luggage. But in the older movies peo­ple have homes and we see these homes and the people in them. You see Nicholson’s home, but he’s not tied down, he’s used to going all over the world.

BJD: Yet you seem to find the struggle for identity interesting.

MA: Personally, I mean to get away from my historical self and find a new one. I need to renew myself this way. Maybe this is an illusion, but I think it is a way to reach something new.

RJD: I was thinking of the television journalist like Mr. Locke getting bored with life. Then there’s no hope for anything because that’s one of the more interesting careers.

MA: Yes, in a way. But it’s also a very cynical career. Also, his problem is that he is a journalist – he can’t get involved in everything he reports because he’s a filter. His job is always to talk about and show something or someone else, but he himself is not involved. He’s a witness not a protagonist  And that’s the problem.

LS: Do you see any similarity between your role as a film director and the role of Locke in the film?

MA: In this film it may be yes; it’s part of the film. But it’s different in a way. In The Passenger I tried to look at Locke the way Locke looks at real­ity. After all, everything I do is absorbed in a kind of collision between myself and reality.

LS: Some people think of film as being the most real of the arts and some think it’s purely illusion, a fake, because everything in a movie is still pictures. Can you speak a bit about this in relation to ‘The Passenger’?

MA: I don’t know if I could speak about it – if I could do the same thing with words I would be a writer and not a film director. I don’t have any­ thing to say but perhaps something to show. There’s a difference.

That’s why it’s very difficult for me to talk about my films. What I want to do is make the film. I know what I have to do. Not what I mean. I never think the meaning because I can’t.

LS: You’re a film director and you make images, yet I find that in your films the key people have a problem with seeing – they’re trying to find things or they’ve lost something. Like the photographer in ‘Blow-Up’ trying to find reality in his own work. Are you, as a director working in this medium, frustrated at not being able to find reality?

MA: Yes and no. In some ways I capture reality in making a film – at least I have a film in my hands, which is something concrete. What I am fac­ing may not be the reality I was looking for, but I’ve found someone or something every time. I have added something more to myself in making the film.

LS: Then it’s a challenge each time?

MA: Yes! I fight for it. Can you imagine? I lost my male character in the desert before the ending of the film because Richard Harris went away without telling me. The ending was supposed to be all three of them – the wife, the husband, and the third man. So I didn’t know how to finish the film. I didn’t stop working during the day, but at night I would walk around the harbor thinking until I finally came up with the idea for the ending I have now. Which I think was better than the previous one – for­tunately.

BJD: Have you ever wanted to make an autobiographical film?

MA: No. And I’ll tell you why: Because I don’t like to look back; I always look forward. Like everyone, I have a certain number of years to live, so this year I want to look forward and not back – I don’t want to think about the past years, I want to make this year the best year of my life. That is why I don’t like to make films that are statements.

BJD: It’s been said that in a certain sense a director makes the same film all his life – that is, explores the different aspects of a given theme in a variety of ways throughout his pictures. Do you agree with this? Do you feel it’s true for your work?

MA: Dostoevsky said that an artist only says one thing in his work all through his life. If he is very good, perhaps two. The liberty of the para­doxical nature of that quotation allows me to add that it doesn’t com­pletely apply to me. But it’s not for me to say.

– ‘Antonioni Discusses The Passenger’ in The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. University Of Chicago Press (2007).

  

Emeric Pressburger: The Early Life of a Screenwriter

Emeric Pressburger was a Hungarian-born screenwriter who wrote and produced innovative and visually striking motion pictures in collaboration with British director Michael Powell, most notably The Red Shoes (1948).

Pressburger was born on Dec. 5, 1902, in the Hungarian village of Miskolc, and attended college in Prague and Stuttgart, before moving to Berlin in 1925. There, he wrote newspaper articles and film scripts, which he submitted to UFA, the German film company. 

Pressburger was hired by UFA’s script department in 1928, and his first writing credit was for a 1930 sound film by Robert Siodmak called Abschied (Farewell). He contributed to about eight films between 1930 and 1932, including Emil and the Detectives (1932) and many musicals. After Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Pressburger went to Paris, where he wrote several scripts, including La Vie Parisienne, a 1935 film directed by Siodmak.

Pressburger moved to London in 1935, and began working for Alexander Korda, the Hungarian-born British film producer and launched his partnership with Powell with The Spy in Black (1939; U.S. title U-Boat). In 1941 he won an Academy Award for best original story for their third film, The 49th Parallel (U.S., The Invaders).

From 1942 Pressburger and Powell shared equal credit for writing, producing, and directing the 14 films that were released by their joint production company, The Archers. The team’s most successful films, which were notable for their use of lavish sets and vivid colours, included The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), A Canterbury Tale (1944), Black Narcissus (1947), A Matter of Life and Death (1946; U.S. Stairway to Heaven), and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). After The Archers was amicably disbanded in 1956, Pressburger wrote two novels, Killing a Mouse on Sunday (1961; filmed as Behold a Pale Horse, 1964) and The Glass Pearls (1966). He was named fellow of the British Film Institute in 1983.

In the following extract, Emeric Pressburger describes how he started out working as a scriptwriter for the mighty German film studio UFA in the 1920s.

I called again at UFA for my appointment with Herr Podehl. He was a splendid man, genuinely anxious to do a good job and a true friend of writers. He fought for them and for their work, supporting them when they were ground up in the huge mills of the organiz­ation. He liked me, I believe, and I certainly took to him at once. He explained, with a total lack of condescension, how production worked at UFA. There were six production units, each with a leader, and they chose and developed about twelve subjects a year, from each of which about half were actually made. It was the dramaturgy department which found subjects, wrote treat­ments, doctored scripts and made contact with writers, before handing the material on to the production units. Herr Podehl said that he had liked my story and had circulated it among some of the production heads, but he couldn't generate a lasting interest in it. I immediately opened my battered attache case and handed him another treatment.

A fortnight later he contacted me again to say that he liked this one too, but that, again, the production chiefs had been lukewarm. When a third story met the same fate I was again summoned to Podehl’s office, and he admitted that he was a little worried by the situation. ‘You have brought me three decent stories. I encouraged you, and yet you haven’t earned a thing from us yet. So, if you want to do it, take a look at this book. If you like it, write me a short film treatment. That would be a commission, of course. I can pay 200 marks.’ I took the book from him and left the office, trying not to appear too eager, although I knew, and he probably did as well, that it wasn't a case of liking it, or even reading it - I would do it.

When I had completed my assignment I took the treatment to Podehl and he seemed pleased with it. But I don't think he ever imagined it would get made into a film. It was one of those dud properties which every film company has which are given out to young writers just to let them practise and cam a little money. My mother couldn't believe her eyes when I showed her that handful of crisp, new ten-mark notes, and she shook her head in awe and disbelief when I said, ‘Mother, I'm going to leave my job as a house agent's clerk. I’m going to be an author.’ ‘Don't rush it, darling,'’she pleaded. ‘Don’t throwaway a good job, a lasting job.’ But I had already made up my mind.

The next time I went to see Herr Podehl he told me that he had still had no luck with my stories. However, a new young director working in Bruno Duday’s production group had been very interested in one of them called Mondnacht (‘A Moonlit Night’), a clever romantic trifle about the power of the moon over the lives of ordinary Berlin folk:

That was the introduction. Anyway, Podehl wanted me to go and see this new director who had been under contract for months hut who had not found a subject which he found sympathetic. I found the director in his office, quite depressed. His first film had been an avant-garde success called Menschen am Sonntag (‘People on Sunday’), a short, silent documentary-style 
film about the ordinary adventures of four ordinary working-class Berliners. UFA had hired him on the strength of it and now he couldn't find anything to follow it up with. Did I have any ideas? I told him that I did, and rushed straight home. Of course, I hadn’t had any ideas when I was in his office, but by the time I arrived home I had the whole story mapped out in my head. I stayed up all night typing and retyping, and first thing in the morning I went to see the director. I waited in his office as he read the treatment, and when he had finished he looked at me and said, ‘This is my next film.’ I was overjoyed, stunned speechless. In his autobiography Robert Siodmak, for that was the director, says that I started to cry. I don’t remember that, but it is quite possible.

To write the script I was given a collaborator by Herr Podehl, a wonderful lady called Irma von Cuhe, an experienced writer who would teach me how to write in the proper style. The film was called Abschied (‘Farewell’) and was set in a boarding house of the type I knew well. It was about ordinary Berliners and the tragic misunderstanding which splits up two young lovers. The great invention in it, and what Siodmak particularly loved, was that it was a film that took place in real time. It was a two-hour film and concerned itself with two hours in the life of the boarding house.

The critics loved it, the ordinary people shunned it, but on the strength of it I was employed by the mighty edifice of UFA, as Lektor und Dramaturg. I was given my own little office, and on my first day there I bought a camera – being an UFA employee you got terrific discounts at the camera shops ­ and photographed myself at work. And that was how I got started in films.

– The Early Life of a Screenwriter by Emeric Pressburger, edited by Kevin Macdonald in Projections ed. John Boorman.