Ingmar Bergman: Why I Make Movies

Fanny and Alexander (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Ernst Ingmar Bergman, a Swedish film and theatre director, writer, theatre manager, playwright, and novelist, was born on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden, and died on July 30, 2007, on the island of Fårö, Sweden. This prolific filmmaker directed or scripted over 60 feature films and over 150 stage performances, and penned over 100 books and essays. Ingmar Bergman was a master of many genres, cinema, theatre and autobiography. 

An extremely common motif seen in many of Bergman's films is the importance of broken families, unsuccessful artists, and a God who is absent, coming to symbolise our incapacity to connect with one other. 

Actors, writers, and playwrights most notably Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen, and Strindberg are influential not just in Bergman's theatrical work, but also throughout his whole career as an artist. 

Starting with the 1961 film Through a Glass Darkly, many of Bergman's films have been set on and shot on the island of Fårö, northeast of Gotland. The popularity of Bergman's films abroad has been linked to his keen dramatic sense, penetrating dialogue, portrayal of female sexuality, and sincerity of the performances and existential themes.

An important characteristic of both Bergman's work for the stage and for cinema is the recurring use of collaborators who are devoted to the director. Most notably, the cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and the actors Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, and Bibi Andersson.

The ties between the life and work of the artist are as convoluted as they are intriguing in the case of Ingmar Bergman. Bergman often made references to his youth and childhood experiences, which were an integral part of his creative vision. 

In a 1960 magazine article, Ingmar Bergman wrote about how a film begins for him – ‘with a chance remark... a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street’. His respect for the magic of movies remains an inspiration for writers and directors today.

During the shooting of The Virgin Spring, we were up in the northern province of Dalarna in May and it was early one morning, about half past seven. The landscape there is rugged, and our company was working beside a little lake in the forest. It was very cold, about 30 degrees, and from time to time a few snowflakes fell through the gray, rain-dimmed sky. The company was dressed in a strange variety of clothing – raincoats, oil slickers, Icelandic sweaters, leather jackets, old blankets, coachmen’s coats, medieval robes. Our men had laid some 90 feet of rusty, buckling rail over the difficult terrain, to dolly the camera on. We were all helping with the equipment – actors, electricians, make-up men, script girl, sound crew – mainly to keep warm.

Suddenly someone shouted and pointed toward the sky. Then we saw a crane high above the fir trees, and then another, and then several cranes, floating majestically in a circle above us. We all dropped what we were doing and ran to the top of a nearby hill to see the cranes better. We stood there for a long time, until they turned westward and disappeared over the forest. And suddenly I thought: This is what it means to make a movie in Sweden.

This is what can happen, this is how we work together with our old equipment and little money, and this is how we can suddenly drop everything for the love of four cranes floating above the treetops.

Smiles of a Summer Night (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

My association with film goes back to the world of childhood. My grandmother had a very large old apartment in Uppsala. I used to sit under the dining room table there, ‘listening’ to the sunshine that came in through the gigantic window. The bells of the cathedral went ding dong, and the sunlight moved about and ‘sounded’ in a special way. One day, when winter was giving way to spring and I was five years old, a piano was being played in the next apartment. It played waltzes, nothing but waltzes. On the wall hung a large picture of Venice. As the sunlight moved across the picture, the water in the canal began to flow, the pigeons flew up from the square, gesticulating people were engaged in inaudible conversation. Bells sounded, not from Uppsala Cathedral, but from the picture itself. And the piano music also came from that remarkable picture of Venice.

A child who is born and brought up in a vicarage acquires an early familiarity with life and death behind the scenes. Father performed funerals, marriages, baptisms; he gave advice and prepared sermons. The Devil was an early acquaintance, and in the child’s mind there was a need to personify him. This is where my magic lantern came in. It consisted of a small metal box with a carbide lamp – I can still remember the smell of the hot metal – and colored glass slides: Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, and all the others. The Wolf was the Devil, without horns but with a tail and a red mouth, strangely real yet incomprehensible, a picture of wickedness and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery.

When I was 10 years old, I received my first rattling film projector, with its chimney and lamp. I found it both mystifying and fascinating. The first film I had was nine feet long and brown in color. It showed a girl lying asleep in a meadow who woke up and stretched out her arms, then disappeared to the right. That was all there was to it. The film was a great success and was projected every night until it broke and could not be mended anymore.

The Seventh Seal (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

This little rickety machine was my first conjuring set. And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye, I really am a conjurer. I have worked it out that if I see a film with a running time of one hour, I sit through 27 minutes of complete darkness – the blankness between frames. When I show a film, I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner – make them laugh, scream with fright, smile, believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked, charmed, deeply moved, or perhaps yawn with boredom. Thus I am either an impostor or, where the audience is willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with an apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any performer in history would have given anything to own or to make use of it.

A film for me begins with something very vague – a chance remark or a bit of conversation, a hazy but agreeable event unrelated to any particular situation. It can be a few bars of music, a shaft of light across the street. Sometimes in my work at the theater I have envisioned actors made up for yet unplayed roles.

These are split-second impressions that disappear as quickly as they come, yet leave behind a mood – like pleasant dreams. It is a mental state, not an actual story, but one abounding in fertile associations and images. Most of all, it is a brightly colored thread sticking out of the dark sack of the unconscious. If I begin to wind up this thread, and do so carefully, a complete film will emerge.

Wild Strawberries (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

This primitive nucleus strives to achieve definite form, moving in a way that may be lazy and half-asleep at first. Its stirring is accompanied by vibrations and rhythms that are very special, and unique to each film. The picture sequences then assume a pattern in accordance with these rhythms, obeying laws born out of and conditioned by my original stimulus.

If that embryonic substance seems to have enough strength to be made into a film, I decide to materialize it. Then comes something very complicated and difficult: the transformation of rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones, and scents into words and sentences, into an understandable screenplay. This is an almost impossible task.

The only thing that can be satisfactorily transferred from that original complex of rhythms and moods is the dialogue, and even dialogue is a sensitive substance that may offer resistance. Written dialogue is like a musical score, almost incomprehensible to the average person. Its interpretation demands a technical knack plus a certain kind of imagination and feeling – qualities that are often lacking even among actors. One can write dialogue, but how it should be delivered, its rhythm and tempo, what is to take place between the lines – all this must be omitted for practical reasons. A script with that much detail would be unreadable. I try to squeeze instructions as to location, characterization, and atmosphere into my screenplays in understandable terms, but the success of this depends on my writing ability and the perceptiveness of the reader, which are not predictable.

Through a Glass Darkly (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Now we come to essentials by which I mean montage, rhythm, and the relation of one picture to another: the vital third dimension without which the film is merely a dead product from a factory. Here I cannot clearly give a key, as in a musical score, or a specific idea of the tempo that determines the relationship of the elements involved. It is quite impossible for me to indicate the way in which the film ‘breathes’ and pulsates.

I have often wished for a kind of notation which would enable me to put on paper all the shades and tones of my vision, to record distinctly the inner structure of a film. For when I stand in the artistically devastating atmosphere of the studio, my hands and head full of all the trivial and irritating details that go with motion picture production, it often takes a tremendous effort to remember how I originally saw and thought out this or that sequence, or what the relation was between the scene of four weeks ago and that of today. If I could express myself clearly, in explicit symbols, then the irrational factors in my work would be almost eliminated, and I could work with absolute confidence that whenever I liked I could prove the relationship between the part and the whole and put my finger on the rhythm, the continuity of the film. Thus the script is a very imperfect technical basis for a film. And there is another important point that I should like to mention in this connection. Film has nothing to do with literature; the character and substance of the two art forms are usually in conflict. This probably has something to do with the receptive process of the mind. The written word is read and assimilated by a conscious act of the will in alliance with the intellect; little by little it affects the imagination and the emotions. The process is different with a motion picture. When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion; putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of images plays directly on our feelings without touching on the intellect.

The Silence (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has as much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not by way of the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my greatest source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.

It is mainly because of this difference between film and literature that we should avoid making films out of books. The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms – and it, in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film. If, despite this, we wish to translate something literary into film terms, we must make an infinite number of complicated adjustments that often bear little or no fruit in proportion to the effort expended. I myself have never had any ambition to be an author. I do not want to write novels, short stories, essays, biographies, or even plays for the theater. I only want to make films – films about conditions, tensions, pictures, rhythms, and characters that are in one way or another important to me. The motion picture and its complicated process of birth are my methods of saying what I want to my fellow men. I am a filmmaker, not an author.

Thus the writing of the script is a difficult period but a useful one, for it compels me to prove logically the validity of my ideas. In doing this, I am caught in a conflict – a conflict between my need to transmit a complicated situation through visual images and my desire for absolute clarity. I do not intend my work to be solely for the benefit of myself or the few but for the entertainment of the general public. The wishes of the public are imperative. But sometimes I risk following my own impulse, and it has been shown that the public can respond with surprising sensitivity to the most unconventional line of development.

Winter Light (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

When shooting begins, the most important thing is that those who work with me feel a definite contact, that all of us somehow cancel out our conflicts through working together. We must pull in one direction for the sake of the work at hand. Sometimes this leads to dispute, but the more definite and clear the ‘marching orders,’ the easier it is to reach the goal which has been set. This is the basis of my conduct as director, and perhaps the explanation for much of the nonsense that has been written about me.

While I cannot let myself be concerned with what people think and say about me personally, I believe that reviewers and critics have every right to interpret my films as they like. I refuse to interpret my work to others, and I cannot tell the critic what to think; each person has the right to understand a film as he sees it. Either he is attracted or repelled. A film is made to create reaction. If the audience does not react one way or another, it is an indifferent work and worthless.

I do not mean by this that I believe in being ‘different’ at any price. A lot has been said about the value of originality, and I find it foolish; either you are original or you are not. It is completely natural for artists to take from and give to each other, to borrow from and experience one another. In my own life, my great literary experience was Strindberg. There are works of his which can still make my hair stand on end. And it is my dream to produce his A Dream Play someday.

The Virgin Spring (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

On a personal level, there are many people who have meant a great deal to me. My father and mother were certainly of vital importance, not only in themselves but because they created a world for me to revolt against. In my family there was an atmosphere of hearty wholesomeness that I, a sensitive young plant, scorned and rebelled against. But that strict middle-class home gave me a wall to pound on, something to sharpen myself against. At the same time my family taught me a number of values – efficiency, punctuality, a sense of financial responsibility – which may be ‘bourgeois’ but are nevertheless important to the artist. They are part of the process of setting for oneself severe standards. Today as a filmmaker I am conscientious, hardworking, and extremely careful; my films involve good craftsmanship, and my pride is the pride of a good craftsman.

Among the people who have meant something in my professional development is Alf Sjöberg, who directed my first screenplay, Torment, and taught me a great deal, as did [film producer] Lorens Marmstedt after I directed my first (unsuccessful) movie. I learned from Marmstedt the one unbreakable rule: You must look at your own work very coldly and clearly; you must be a devil to yourself in the screening room when watching the day’s rushes. Then there is [screenwriter] Herbert Grevenius, one of the few who believed in me as a writer. I had trouble with scriptwriting and was reaching out more and more to the drama, to dialogue, as a means of expression. He gave me great encouragement.

Finally, there is Carl-Anders Dymling, my producer. He is crazy enough to place more faith in the creative artist’s sense of responsibility than in calculations of profit and loss. I am thus able to work with an integrity that has become the very air I breathe – one of the main reasons I do not want to work outside of Sweden. The moment I lose this freedom I will cease to be a filmmaker, because I have no skill in the art of compromise. My only significance in the world of film lies in the freedom of my creativity.

Persona (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

Today, the ambitious filmmaker is obliged to walk a tightrope without a net. He may be a conjurer, but no one conjures the producer, the bank director, or the theater owners when the public refuses to go to see a film and lay down the money by which producer, bank director, theatre owner, and conjurer live. The conjurer may then be deprived of his magic wand. I would like to be able to measure the amount of talent, initiative, and creative ability that has been destroyed by the film industry in its ruthlessly efficient sausage machine. What was play to me once has now become a struggle. Failure, criticism, public indifference all hurt more today than yesterday. The brutality of the industry is unmasked – yet that can be an advantage.

So much for people and the film business. I have been asked, as a clergyman’s son, about the role of religion in my thinking and filmmaking. To me, religious problems are continuously alive. I never cease to concern myself with them, and my concern goes on every hour of every day. Yet it does not take place on the emotional level but on an intellectual one. Religious emotion, religious sentimentality, is something I got rid of long ago – I hope. The religious problem is an intellectual one to me: the problem of my mind in relation to my intuition. The result is usually some kind of tower of Babel. Philosophically, there is a book that was a tremendous experience for me: Eino Kaila’s Personality. His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs – negative and positive – was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built on this ground.

People ask what are my intentions with my films – my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be.

Shame (Directed by Ingmar Bergman)

There is an old story of how the Cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed – master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who rebuilt the Cathedral of Chartres.

Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality,’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable to his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility.

Today the individual has become the highest form, and the greatest bane, of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny each other’s existence. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal.

Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil – or perhaps a saint – out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

– This story was originally published in September 1960 issue of Horizon magazine. Reprinted here.

Michelangelo Antonioni: A Study in Color

Red Desert (Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni) 

Red Desert (1964) was Antonioni’s first color film: a bold experiment in tone and design which often borders on the abstract. 

Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is a young mother recovering from a nervous breakdown. Her emotional insecurity propels the film’s journey through Antonioni’s preferred psychological terrain: the isolation, withdrawal and anxiety associated with life in a society where no one really belongs. 

With her engineer husband Ugo (Carlo Chionetti) absent, Giuliana forms an attachment to businessman Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris). It’s a relationship conducted against the bleak industrialised landscape of the Ravenna valley, a foggy, empty no-man’s land over which cranes and pylons loom like alien installations. 

It’s this nightmarish vision of the future that fascinates Antonioni – a landscape that almost deprives his characters of possibility. As the director once said, it was always the people, not the machines, that were broken in his films. 

Red Desert is the purest articulation of Antonioni’s cinematic vision. It’s a film in which the characters’ alienation is mirrored by an environment which is both forbidding and alluring in its detachment. ‘There’s something terrible in reality,’ says Giuliana at one point. ‘And I don’t know what it is.’ Antonioni’s images exist in a strange realm of their own. 

At times Red Desert feels like it has more in common with modern art than it does with traditional cinematic narrative. Antonioni once said of a Mark Rothko painting, ‘It’s painted anxiety’ – an apt description of Red Desert’s visual landscape. 

For all its formal virtuosity Red Desert is a poignant and compelling journey into a woman’s fractured state of mind. 

Michelangelo Antonioni gave an insight into his cinema and working methods in an interview with Pierre Billard in 1965:

In general, where does the original idea for your films come from? 

It seems to me that no one engaged in creative activity can answer that question in good faith. Lucidity is not one of my outstanding qualities. I look at everything, avidly, and I also think I listen a great deal. One thing is certain: ideas come to me unexpectedly. But I’m not really interested in getting to the bottom of such a question.

What does the writing of the scenario mean for you: clarifying the dramatic line, making the visual aspect of the film more specific, familiarizing yourself with the characters? 

To me, the visual aspect of a film is very closely related to its thematic aspect in the sense that an idea almost always comes to me through images. The problem lies elsewhere. It has to do with restricting the accumulation of these images, with digging into them, with recognizing the ones that coincide with what interests me at the time. It’s work done instinctively, almost automatically, but it involves a great deal of tension. One’s whole being is at stake: it is a precise moral choice. What people ordinarily call the ‘dramatic line’ doesn’t interest me. One device is no better than another, apriori. And I don’t believe that the old laws of drama have validity any more. Today stories are what they are, with neither a beginning nor an end necessarily, without key scenes, without a dramatic arc, without catharsis. They can be made up of tatters, of fragments, as unbalanced as the lives we lead. Familiarize myself with characters? But the characters are not strangers that I may or may not be on intimate terms with; they emerge out of me, they are my intimate inner life.

What does the fact that you work in collaboration with others on your scenario mean to you?

Every time I have tried to let others write parts of a rough script, the result, even if it was excellent from an objective point of view, was something foreign to me, something close to what I wanted without ever coinciding with it exactly. And that gave me a terrible sense of impotence. Then began the great task of selecting, correcting, even adapting work that was as difficult as it was useless, because it inevitably led to compromise. I can never manage to be objective when I judge the work of my collaborators. The film stands between me and them. So, after trying this a few times, I ended up writing almost all the shooting scripts of my films myself. However, I haven’t ruled out collaborations altogether. I don’t choose my collaborators on the basis of our affinities, but for the opposite reason. I need to have people who are very different from me around me, people with whom there can be animated, lively discussions. We talk, we discuss things for months before the film. We talk about a lot of things. Sometimes we also talk about the film, but not necessarily. What I say ricochets off them, comes back to me in the form of criticism, commentary, suggestions. After a certain time, the film becomes clear. It is only then that I begin to write the rough script. I work many hours a day, often beginning at dawn, until I’m completely exhausted.

What form does your script take in its final phase? 

The shooting script is never definitive for me. It’s notes about the direction, nothing more. There are no technical notations such as used to be made. The placing of the camera, the use of various lenses, the movements of the camera, all concern the phase in which the film is shot, not that in which the script is written. I would say the same thing about dialogue. I have to hear the dialogue in the living voices of the actors, that is to say of the characters, within the scene, to decide whether or not it’s right. And then there’s another factor. I believe in improvisation. None of us has the habit of preparing for a meeting to further business, love, or friendship; one takes these meetings as they come, adapting oneself little by little as they progress, taking advantage of unexpected things that come up. I experience the same things when I’m filming.

Can the choice of locations or actors influence the scenario, and if so, how? 

In general, I decide upon the outdoor locations before writing the shooting script. In order to be able to write, I need to have the surroundings of the film clearly in mind. There are times too when an idea for a film comes to me from a particular place. Or more precisely, when certain locales come to mind because of the themes or characters running through my head. It’s sometimes a rather odd series of coincidences.

What possibilities for improvisation do you allow for while you’re filming? 

Speaking of improvisation, I must add something to what I said before. If I think of the past, it’s possible for me to say that I have always lived minute by minute. It’s the way I live even today. Every moment of the day is important to me, every day is a new experience. And this doesn’t change when I’m shooting. On the contrary, the pull of reality increases during shooting, because you’re in an extremely receptive state, and because you’re making new contacts, you’re establishing often unexpected relationships with the crew, and these relationships are constantly changing. All that has a definite influence on my work, and leads me to improvised decisions, and even to radical changes. This is what I mean by improvisation.

How are your relations with the crew? 

Excellent. I try to create a cordial atmosphere. I like to have people laughing and joking around me. People who seem to have no problems. It’s quite enough that I have problems. I admit, however, that I am very demanding. I don’t allow anybody around me to show that he doesn’t know his business. Or that he’s unwilling to work. There is a certain laziness about crews, it’s natural, inevitable. But it’s what I dislike most. When I happen to scream at someone (as all directors do, it seems), I’m railing against this sort of indifference.

What are your relations with the actors? 

I’ve always had excellent relations with actors sometimes too good. Hearing me say that may seem odd, but it’s true. Even with Jeanne Moreau, who claims the opposite, I have never I repeat never had arguments during filming. I know, however, that actors feel somewhat uncomfortable with me; they have the feeling that they’ve been excluded from my work. And as a matter of fact they have been. But it is precisely: this form of collaboration, and no other, that I ask of them. Only one person has the film clearly in mind, insofar as that is possible: the director. Only one person fuses in his mind the various elements involved in a film, only one person is in a position to predict the result of this fusion: the director. The actor is one of these elements, and sometimes not even the most important. There is one thing the actor can’t do, and that is to see himself in the view-finder; if he could, he’d come up with a number of suggestions regarding his acting. This privilege is reserved to the director, however, who will thus limit himself to manipulating ‘the actor element’ according to criteria and exigencies known to him alone. There are various ways of getting certain expressions from actors, and it is of no interest to know whether or not there is a corresponding mood behind these expressions. I have often resorted to foreign actors for practical reasons: agreements with distributors, unavailability of Italian actors, and so forth. But sometimes it was because I thought actors were better suited to the roles than those at my disposal here.

Do you prefer to record the sound on the set or to dub it afterwards? 

When I can, I prefer recording on the set. The sounds, the noises, and the natural voices as picked up by microphones have a power of suggestion that can’t be obtained with dubbing. Moreover, most professional microphones are much more sensitive than the human ear, and a great many unexpected noises and sounds often enrich a soundtrack that’s been made on the set. Unfortunately, we are still not advanced enough technically to be able to use this system all the time. Shooting indoors it’s hard to get good sound. And dubbing also has its advantages. Sometimes I find that the transformation of a noise or of a sound becomes indispensable for certain special effects. Thus in certain cases it is necessary to change the human voice.

Who decides on the exact framing and the camera movements? 

I can’t imagine a director who would leave that up to other people. Excluding or including a detail, even an apparently secondary one, in the film image, choosing the angle of the shot, the lenses, the camera movements, are all decisions essential to the success of a film. Technique is not something that can be applied from outside by just anybody. Practically speaking, technical problems don’t exist. If style is there, it permeates technique. If style is missing, the problem disappears.

Do you shoot any sequences from several angles so as to have greater freedom when you edit? 

Until Red Desert, I always filmed with a single camera, and thus from a single angle. But from Red Desert on, I began using several cameras with different lenses, but always from the same angle. I did so because the story demanded shots of a reality that had become abstract, of a subject that had become color, and those shots had to be obtained with a long­ focus lens. Obviously I have the editing of the film clearly in mind during shooting. And it is only when I am led by circumstances to improvise, and consequently to shoot quickly, that I try to accumulate protection takes.

How much do you have to do with the cutting of your films? 

I have always had an editor at my side on all my films. Except for Story of a Love Affair, this editor has been Eraldo da Roma. He is an extremely able technician with vast experience, and a man who loves his work. We cut the films together. I tell him what I want as clearly and precisely as possible, and he does the cutting. He knows me, he understands immediately, we have the same sense of proportion, the same sensibility concerning the duration of a shot.

What is the role of music and the soundtrack in your films? 

I have always opposed the traditional musical commentary, the soporific function ordinarily assigned to it. It’s this idea of ‘setting images to music,’ as if it were a question of an opera libretto, that I don’t like. What I reject is this refusal to let silence have its place, this need to fill supposed voids. The only way to accept music in films is for it to disappear as an autonomous expression in order to assume its role as one element in a general sensorial impression. And with color films today this is even more necessary.

Do you concern yourself with the public and its possible reactions at any stage of making your films? 

I never think of the public. I think of the film. Obviously, you’re always speaking to someone, but this partner in the conversation is always an ideal one (perhaps another self). If this weren’t true, I wouldn’t know what to base my work on, since there are at least as many publics as there are continents or human races not to mention nations.

What phase of making a film presents the most difficulty, requires the most effort?  

Each film has its own history. One will demand inhuman efforts during shooting, another intellectual tension at the scripting stage, another an iron will during the cutting or the dubbing, when you’d swear that the material you have on hand is completely different from what you wanted. And then we each have our private lives which are not broken off during filming; on the contrary, they acquire new point and bite, giving our work a function that is sometimes stimulating, sometimes debilitating, sometimes calming, and so forth.

Do you feel that the language of film has evolved, and to what extent do you think you have contributed to this evolution? 

My contribution to the formation of a new cinematic language is a matter that concerns critics. And not even today’s critics, but rather those of tomorrow, if film endures as an art and if my films resist the ravages of time.

– PIERRE BILLARD From Cinema 65 100, November 1965. Originally translated in L’avventura. A Film by Michelangelo Antonioni, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.