mirrored post, so that Bergman, who can see everyone in the room, is all but invisible.
During the eight or ten weeks it takes him to direct a film, Bergman awakens at a reasonable hour, around eight, and drives to Film House in a little maroon car. Film House is a large modern structure twenty-five minutes' walk from the center of Stockholm, and it houses not only film and television production facilities but also the theater, film, and dance faculties of the University of Stockholm. The building is always filled with discussion and activity, much of it centered around the bar of the Laurel and Hardy Pub on the second level, but when Bergman is in residence to make a film, a certain self-consciousness seems to descend on Film House: it's the same, I was told, as when the pope is in the Vatican.
Bergman parks in a reserved space near the side door of Film House and j oins his actors and technicians for breakfast. It is served in a cluttered little room presided over by the hostess for this picture; for every film he makes, Bergman hires a hostess, and lists her in the credits. Her job is to make coffee and serve afternoon tea and fuss over people in a motherly sort of way. When you are making a picture about the silence of God, or metaphysical anguish, or suicide-as Bergman usually is-it helps if everyone feels right at home and there's a pot of coffee brewing.
The film he is working on today will be called Face to Face, and it is about an attempted suicide by a self-tormented psychiatrist, who will be played by Liv Ullmann. "For some time now," Bergman wrote in a letter to his cast and crew, just before production began, "I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause." His attempt to work it out led to the screenplay for Face to Face, in which the woman will face her terrible dread (common enough in Bergman), will attempt to surrender to it (also nothing new), but then will transcend it, will have a small victory over her darker nature (this hopefulness has only started to emerge in Bergman's work in the past three or four years, since Cries and Whispers, and it is the cause of much speculation among his friends).
Face to Face will be Bergman's thirty-sixth film and it comes in his thirtieth year as a director. His career falls out into a certain pleasing symmetry: after early screenplays, he began directing in 1945 as a very provincial Swedish imitator of the Italian neorealists; he had his first international success in 1955, with Smiles of a Summer Night; in 1965 he began work on Persona, that most profound of modern films; today, he is considered one of the greatest living filmmakers. For Face to Face, he has gathered around him once again, as he does almost every spring and early summer, his basic crew and a group of actors he has used time and again. Only occasionally will there be a new face.
Now they join him for coffee. Liv Ullmann is dressed in an old cotton shirt and a full blue denim skirt; she wears no makeup and her hair is tossed back from her forehead as if to make the declaration that she's been asleep until fifteen minutes ago. Bergman first met her on a street corner talking to her friend Bibi Andersson, just at the moment he was casting Persona. He liked the way they fit together, and cast them together, on the spot. She has since become one of the most important actresses in the world, but here in Film House she is friendly and plain-spoken, more like a den mother than a star. This is her seventh film for Bergman.
Gunnar Bjornstrand, tall and stately in his seventies, gravely considers the room and leafs through his script. He was the squire in The Seventh Seal and the father in Through a Glass Darkly, and is one of the most familiar figures in Bergman's repertory company. He has been ill recently, but he came out of retirement to play Ullmann's grandfather in the new film, and has responded to the work so well that Bergman has expanded the role for him. This is his sixteenth
During the eight or ten weeks it takes him to direct a film, Bergman awakens at a reasonable hour, around eight, and drives to Film House in a little maroon car. Film House is a large modern structure twenty-five minutes' walk from the center of Stockholm, and it houses not only film and television production facilities but also the theater, film, and dance faculties of the University of Stockholm. The building is always filled with discussion and activity, much of it centered around the bar of the Laurel and Hardy Pub on the second level, but when Bergman is in residence to make a film, a certain self-consciousness seems to descend on Film House: it's the same, I was told, as when the pope is in the Vatican.
Bergman parks in a reserved space near the side door of Film House and j oins his actors and technicians for breakfast. It is served in a cluttered little room presided over by the hostess for this picture; for every film he makes, Bergman hires a hostess, and lists her in the credits. Her job is to make coffee and serve afternoon tea and fuss over people in a motherly sort of way. When you are making a picture about the silence of God, or metaphysical anguish, or suicide-as Bergman usually is-it helps if everyone feels right at home and there's a pot of coffee brewing.
The film he is working on today will be called Face to Face, and it is about an attempted suicide by a self-tormented psychiatrist, who will be played by Liv Ullmann. "For some time now," Bergman wrote in a letter to his cast and crew, just before production began, "I have been living with an anxiety which has had no tangible cause." His attempt to work it out led to the screenplay for Face to Face, in which the woman will face her terrible dread (common enough in Bergman), will attempt to surrender to it (also nothing new), but then will transcend it, will have a small victory over her darker nature (this hopefulness has only started to emerge in Bergman's work in the past three or four years, since Cries and Whispers, and it is the cause of much speculation among his friends).
Face to Face will be Bergman's thirty-sixth film and it comes in his thirtieth year as a director. His career falls out into a certain pleasing symmetry: after early screenplays, he began directing in 1945 as a very provincial Swedish imitator of the Italian neorealists; he had his first international success in 1955, with Smiles of a Summer Night; in 1965 he began work on Persona, that most profound of modern films; today, he is considered one of the greatest living filmmakers. For Face to Face, he has gathered around him once again, as he does almost every spring and early summer, his basic crew and a group of actors he has used time and again. Only occasionally will there be a new face.
Now they join him for coffee. Liv Ullmann is dressed in an old cotton shirt and a full blue denim skirt; she wears no makeup and her hair is tossed back from her forehead as if to make the declaration that she's been asleep until fifteen minutes ago. Bergman first met her on a street corner talking to her friend Bibi Andersson, just at the moment he was casting Persona. He liked the way they fit together, and cast them together, on the spot. She has since become one of the most important actresses in the world, but here in Film House she is friendly and plain-spoken, more like a den mother than a star. This is her seventh film for Bergman.
Gunnar Bjornstrand, tall and stately in his seventies, gravely considers the room and leafs through his script. He was the squire in The Seventh Seal and the father in Through a Glass Darkly, and is one of the most familiar figures in Bergman's repertory company. He has been ill recently, but he came out of retirement to play Ullmann's grandfather in the new film, and has responded to the work so well that Bergman has expanded the role for him. This is his sixteenth
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