KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME director Robert B. Weide will participate in a Q&A after the 7:10 PM screening at the Royal on Friday, November 19. Michael Sragow will moderate.
A triple award winner at Sundance, the Albanian drama HIVE opens at the Royal and Playhouse this Friday, November 12. The filmmaker and lead actress will attend two Royal screenings for Q&As.
Winner of the Audience, Directing and Grand Jury Prize for World Cinema at Sundance earlier this year, HIVE is an intense, beautifully wrought drama based on the true story of Fahrije, an Albanian war widow coping with poverty and patriarchy. New York cinephiles turned out in force at the Film Forum last weekend following Manohla Dargis’ rave review in the Times. Headlined “In the Aftermath of War, a Survivor Finds Herself: In a tough, taut drama, the director Blerta Basholli explores the lives of women whose husbands went missing in the Kosovo War,” here’s an excerpt: “The spare, tightly wound drama HIVE opens with the movie equivalent of a hand grabbing your throat. An unsmiling woman with a hard, monumental profile stands alone next to a truck. People mill around nearby, murmuring indistinctly. Abruptly, the woman ducks under some police tape and into the truck, where she hastily begins unzipping one white body bag after another and just as quickly scanning their contents, her nose wrinkling at the exposed bundles of tattered clothing, remnants of missing persons. She’s soon ejected by a worker, but her search continues.
“The woman, Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), is looking for her husband, one of the missing, who disappeared years ago during the Kosovo War. Now, with her two children and a disabled father-in-law, she struggles to keep the family going. She labors with the beehives that her husband once managed, selling jars of honey at a local market. Sales are modest and sometimes close to nonexistent, but the bees are her only means of scraping together a meager living. Every so often, she meets up with a women’s collective whose members face the same hurdles under the unhelpful watch of the town’s men. And she keeps looking for her husband — a haunting, troubling phantom.
“A liberation story told with easy naturalism and broad political strokes, HIVE tracks Fahrije on her path to independence. (It’s based on the experiences of an Albanian Kosovo woman of the same name.) Like its protagonist, the movie is stern, direct and attentive to ordinary life. The writer-director Blerta Basholli doesn’t bludgeon you with the character’s miseries, or hold your emotions hostage. Fahrije isn’t lovable; sometimes she’s scarcely likable, which means she’s more of a human being than an emblem of virtuous suffering. She has her charms, though these tend to emerge in the intimacies she shares with her family and female friends like Naza (a piquant Kumrije Hoxha)…HIVE seizes and holds your interest simply through the drama created by sympathetic characters trying to surmount awful, unfair hurdles. Mostly, though, what holds you rapt is Gashi’s powerful, physically grounded performance, which lyrically articulates her taciturn character’s inner workings. Together, the performer and her director reveal the arc of a life through Fahrije’s gestures and in the hard lines of her jaw, in her unsmiling lips and in her quickly lowered gaze. And while the character’s stoicism seems like an unbreachable wall, these two women dismantle — and rebuild it — to stirring effect.”
HIVE writer-director Blerta Basholi, producer Yll Uka, and lead actress Yllka Gashi will participate in Q&As at the Royal after the 7:30 PM screenings on Friday and Saturday, November 12 and 13. Clayton Davis, President of the Latino Entertainment Journalists Association, will moderate the Friday Q&A.
“The three great escapes — smoking, drinking, bed.” LA DOLCE VITA 60th Anniversary Screenings November 17.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Abroad Series present Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, LA DOLCE VITA, as part of the monthly revival series of great international classics. LA DOLCE VITA earned four Academy Award nominations in 1961, including Best Director Federico Fellini (the first time in Oscar history for a director of a foreign language film) and Best Original Screenplay. It won the Oscar for Piero Gherardi’s elegant costumes.
Fellini’s sardonic epic about the decadence of modern Rome is one of the most influential of foreign films, and its influence can still be seen today in films like the recent international Oscar winner, The Great Beauty. Fellini even added a new word to our vocabulary when he introduced the character of the celebrity-chasing photographer, Paparazzo. Cruise along the Via Veneto with Marcello Mastroianni, then take a dip in the Trevi Fountain with the voluptuous Anita Ekberg. Writing in The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther praised the film as a “brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay.” Roger Ebert called it “an allegory, a cautionary tale of a man without a center…a handsome, weary, desperate man, who dreams of someday doing something good, but is trapped in a life of empty nights and lonely dawns.”
Also starring Anouk Aimee, Nadia Gray, Walter Santesso, and Yvonne Furneaux, the 60th anniversary of LA DOLCE VITA will play for one night only on November 17 at 7:00 PM at the Royal, Playhouse 7, Glendale and Newhall.
“In ‘Speer Goes to Hollywood,’ Vanessa Lapa uses uncovered audio and never-before-seen archival images to show how Hitler’s confidant tried to make a movie to whitewash his past.”
Check out this excellent piece by Renee Ghert-Zand in The Times of Israel:
Award-winning Israeli doc on camera-hungry Nazi Albert Speer opens in NYC and L.A.: In ‘SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD,’ Vanessa Lapa uses uncovered audio and never-before-seen archival images to show how Hitler’s confidant tried to make a movie to whitewash his past.
[SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD director Vanessa Lapa and producer Tomer Eliav will participate in Q&As on Friday and Saturday, November 5 and 6 after the 7:20 pm shows at the Royal and Saturday and Sunday, November 6 and 7 after the 1:40pm shows at the Town Center.]
In her lauded 2014 documentary film, “The Decent One,” filmmaker Vanessa Lapa used SS leader and Final Solution architect Heinrich Himmler’s private family letters to expose just how deep his evil ran.
Now she is again using a top Nazi’s words against him — this time with audio recordings made by Hitler’s chief architect and minister of armaments, Albert Speer, as he worked on a script for a feature film based on his blockbuster 1970 memoir, “Inside the Third Reich.”
In her new film, SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, Lapa shows just how cunning the manipulative Speer was in whitewashing his crimes, which included enslaving 12 million Jewish, Polish and Soviet prisoners and forced laborers — at least a third of whom died of starvation, injury, or exhaustion — to produce German armaments during World War II. Creating a reputation for himself as “the good Nazi,” he was sentenced to only 20 years in prison at the Nuremberg Trials, while his co-conspirators and subordinates went to the gallows.
Speer spent his time in prison writing extensive notes for his memoir on paper napkins, and charmed sympathetic guards who illegally smuggled them out of prison for him.
Still buzzing with excitement from the film’s having won the 2021 Ophir Award for best Israeli documentary film earlier this month, Lapa recently spoke to The Times of Israel from her Tel Aviv studio, as she geared up for the United States theatrical release of SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. The film opens in New York on October 29 and in Los Angeles on November 5 [at Laemmle’s Royal and Town Center theaters].
As with Himmler’s letters, the 46-year-old, Belgian-born Lapa stumbled upon Speer’s recordings serendipitously. At a 2014 screening for “The Decent One” at New York’s Film Forum, a lawyer named Stanley Cohen approached her and told her that he had bought the film rights to the English edition of Speer’s “Inside the Third Reich,” and had approached Paramount Pictures in 1971 about making a movie based on it.
Paramount commissioned the British writer Andrew Birkin, a protégé of the director Stanley Kubrick, to develop a script. To do so, Birkin, then only 26 years old, traveled to Heidelberg to interview Speer. (By that time, after being released from prison in 1966, Speer was living comfortably in the German countryside and making frequent media appearances.)
Cohen did not know that Birkin had recorded his conversations with Speer, but Lapa discovered that there were 40 hours of tapes recorded in 1971-1972, when she went to visit Birkin in Wales in February 2015.
“After Andrew played me five minutes of the tapes, it was clear to me I wanted to hear all of them and make a film with them,” Lapa said.
According to the filmmaker, Birkin wanted the recordings to be used, and was happy to hand them over to her.
“He had never listened to them again in the last half-century, but he did digitize them at some point in an effort to preserve them,” Lapa said.
On the tapes, Speer and Birkin are heard discussing various scenes from a draft script for the possible Paramount project. It is clear that this was to be a scripted drama, and not a documentary.
“It must be very far away from a documentary. The farther away, the better it is,” listeners hear Speer saying.
Birkin speaks about the need to have the audience identify with Speer, the “hero,” in the first five minutes of the film. The notion of an audience identifying with a person responsible for the enslavement and murder of millions of people may be shocking today, but in the early 1970s people were enthralled with Speer’s book, in which he positioned himself as an impressionable young Nazi leader who really cared about the German people.
In a 2017 New Yorker piece, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, reflected on why she was so taken with “Inside the Third Reich” as a child, but so disgusted by it 30 years later.
“Speer demonstrates a slick honesty whose goal is to disarm. If it disarmed me as a child, it repels me as an adult. His rueful acknowledgment of his dedication to Hitler, and his philosophical puzzlement at his own complicity, seeks to cast a glaze of innocence over him,” Adichie wrote.
“…[Speer] with calm canniness, assembles his follies in flattering light. His self-criticism has a too-smooth edge; it is as though he has considered all possible criticisms he might face and taken them on himself, and there is an egotistical undertone to this that is perverse,” she continued.
According to Lapa, “Inside the Third Reich” still sells 2,000 copies a year.
“It is mind blowing that there is still no preface in the book that puts it in context for today’s readers,” she said.
In Lapa’s film, we hear Birkin checking in with a mentor, who warns him that the script he is working on with Speer is a whitewash, especially with regard to Speer’s denial of knowing about Auschwitz and the Final Solution. But Birkin seems unconcerned.
“I think Birkin did his best. Was he gullible? He was young and it was a time when people knew less about the war and the Holocaust than we do now,” Lapa said.
“Speer managed to charm and manipulate Birkin, just like he charmed and manipulated everyone, including the judges at Nuremberg. Even Speer’s biographer Gitta Sereny believed his regret,” she said.
By contrast, Lapa, who was initially also under Speer’s sway, found extensive archival documentation to contradict Speer’s claims. It led her to see his regret as completely disingenuous and to call him out on his historical lies.
“What I found was a man for whom human life had no intrinsic value…We also see this from the fact that he convinced Hitler to prolong the war by two-and-a-half years, when he knew that Germany was losing.” Lapa said.
Lapa and Joëlle Alexis wrote the script for SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, based on the 40 hours of the uncovered audio, and then Lapa and her team spent several years doing extensive archival research to find still and moving images to match and juxtapose with the audio.
The dissonance between the lies of the audio and the truths of the images is powerfully effective. Although actors lend their voices to Speer and Birkin because the quality of the original recordings were not good enough to use, Lapa assured The Times of Israel that every word is uttered verbatim from the tape’s exact transcripts.
Lapa is passionate about using only preexisting material, which she lets tell the story. Her films have no narrators, talking heads, or newly shot footage.
“When you have such an amount of archival material to show to the world, it is a waste not to do so,” the filmmaker said.
Realizing that Speer was trying to play fast and loose with the facts and truth, Paramount ultimately decided not to greenlight the film based on the Nazi’s memoir.
“Had this film been made, it would have rewritten the history of a historical injustice and transformed its villain into its unchallenged hero,” Lapa said.
Speer maneuvered to avoid the death sentence at Nuremberg and passed away a free man in 1981 at age 76. Forty years later, Lapa, with her incisive film, has let him hang by his own rope.
“I saw my job as getting people to know and love the sea…because you only protect what you love.” Jacque-Yves Cousteau in BECOMING COUSTEAU.
Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau was one of the 20th century’s great explorers, a filmmaker and beloved adventurer who documented the exotic wonders below the ocean with pioneering equipment that yielded a Cannes Film Festival-winning film, two Academy Awards®, and a pair of iconic and long-running television shows, “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau” and “The Cousteau Odyssey.” His work became synonymous with life on the sea and on his famous boat, the Calypso. He authored over 50 books on his aquatic life and invented the Aqua-Lung, advancing the boundaries of scuba diving. Yet, it was as an environmentalist that Cousteau would have his most lasting impacts, alerting the world about the warming oceans decades before the climate crisis made headlines. Instrumental in protecting Antarctica and taking part in the first Earth Summit, Cousteau’s insight into what needs to be done for the planet continues to inspire generations.
In BECOMING COUSTEAU, from National Geographic Documentary Films and opening October 22 at the Laemmle Claremont, Monica Film Center, Newhall, Playhouse and Town Center, two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Liz Garbus (All In: The Fight for Democracy, What Happened, Miss Simone?) poured through 550 hours of archival material and rarely-seen footage to let Cousteau’s films, words and recollections tell his own story. BECOMING COUSTEAU shines a spotlight on the man many of us grew up worshipping yet knew very little about while introducing him to a new generation. After prospecting for oil companies to support his globe-trotting adventuring, he had a late-in-life awakening and became the first great advocate for ocean preservation. Cousteau led a somewhat fractured family life, checkered with great loss, but he remained true to his one great love — the sea. Over 100 hours of audio journal entries, interviews and observations from collaborators and crew members add to this inside look at Cousteau. The documentary also chronicles his first wife and collaborator Simone Melchior (known aboard the Calypso as “The Shepherdess”), his family experiences, his second wife Francine Triplet, the creation of The Cousteau Society and the crucial work they do, and his evolution into one of the most important environmental voices of the 20th century, whose words and images are more vital today than ever.
“Succeeds beautifully in its goal of reminding viewers of Jacques Cousteau’s important legacy of underwater exploration and environmental activism.” ~ Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
“BECOMING COUSTEAU will well serve as a reminder and clarifier for those who remember him from their youth, and an invigorating introduction for those meeting him for the first time.” ~ Todd McCarthy, Deadline Hollywood Daily
“Compelling throughout, BECOMING COUSTEAU will make you want to strap on some flippers, grab a mask and plunge into an ocean near you.” ~ Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Hammer to Nail
Jean Renoir’s FRENCH CANCAN ~ 65th Anniversary Screenings October 13 at the Royal, Playhouse, Glendale, Newhall.
Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present FRENCH CANCAN, one of the best late films created by master director Jean Renoir: a rousing tribute to the 19th century world that his celebrated father, Pierre Auguste Renoir, and other Impressionists created in their paintings. Set mainly in Montmartre and the original Moulin Rouge nightclub in the 1890s, the film chronicles the revival of the cancan that electrified Paris. This film marked Renoir’s return to filmmaking in France after a lengthy exile caused by World War II.
Renoir’s main character, a theatrical impresario named Henri Danglard, is portrayed by legendary French actor Jean Gabin, who had worked with Renoir in the 1930s in The Lower Depths, La Bete Humaine, and the director’s antiwar masterpiece, La Grande Illusion. Gabin, for decades the face of French cinema, creates a vivid character in FRENCH CANCAN, a producer who has the restlessness of an artist, always seeking new challenges—and new romances in his personal life. The principal women in his life are portrayed by Francoise Arnoul and Maria Felix, with the legendary singer, Edith Piaf, in a tasty supporting role.
One of the critics who endorsed the film in the 1950s was Francois Truffaut, who was writing criticism before he embarked on his directing career. Truffaut considered FRENCH CANCAN a milestone in the history of color cinema. He observed that one scene of a dance class “reminds us of a Degas sketch,” and he added that Renoir’s direction was “as vigorous and youthful as ever.”
Later reviews also endorsed the film, especially after footage cut from the initial release was restored. Leonard Maltin paid tribute to the “brilliantly beautiful restored version” and called the film “an impressive, enjoyable fiction about beginnings of the Moulin Rouge and impresario Gabin’s revival of the cancan.” Roger Ebert called the film “a delicious musical comedy that deserves comparison with the golden age Hollywood musicals of the same period.” In The Guardian Peter Bradshaw wrote, “The glorious final sequence, in which the cancan is finally unveiled to the rowdy audience, is some kind of masterpiece, perhaps the equal of anything Renoir ever achieved: wild, free, turbulent, exhilarating.”
This musical delight will play at 7 PM on Wednesday, October 13, at four Laemmle theatres: the Royal in West L.A., the Playhouse in Pasadena, the Laemmle Glendale, and the Laemmle Newhall.
“I hope people are moved by seeing what great moral courage looks like.” The filmmakers on THE RESCUE, opening October 15 at the Monica Film Center, Newhall, Playhouse, and Town Center.
In the summer of 2018, a short outing after soccer practice became a two-week saga of survival and a story that soon captured the world’s attention. Monsoon rains had trapped twelve boys and their coach in a labyrinthian cave in Northern Thailand, and within days thousands of people had descended on the area to try to help. But were the boys even still alive? Anticipation and anguish hung in the air until they were found, trapped in a pitch-black chamber two kilometers deep into the cave. The next question—immediate, obvious, and confounding—was how to get them out.
THE RESCUE, the latest feature documentary from Academy Award-winning directors and producers E. Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, brings alive one of the most perilous and extraordinary rescues in modern times. With exclusive interviews and a wealth of never-before-seen material, the film takes us into the infamous cave, highlights the efforts of the Royal Thai Navy SEALs and US Special Forces, and details the expert cave divers’ audacious venture to dive the boys to safety.
THE RESCUE keeps viewers on the edge of their seats as it shines a light on the high-risk world of cave diving, the astounding courage and compassion of the rescuers, and the shared humanity of the international community that united to save the boys. In the tradition of their earlier films FREE SOLO and MERU, Vasarhelyi and Chin document a profoundly daring physical feat, laying bare the details of the seemingly impossible rescue.
Reviews have been rapturous:
“THE RESCUE keeps you on the edge of your seat for every minute, even if you already know the outcome.” ~ Frank Scheck, Hollywood Reporter
“A stunning documentary of bone-deep moral resonance and cinematic mastery that deserves to be experienced on the big screen.” ~ Tomris Laffly, Variety
THE RESCUE “unfolds with stunning precision, letting the people who were there tell the story, and never softening their unique personalities.” ~ Brian Tallerico, RogerEbert.com
DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT
“Our films attempt to examine questions that transcend their subject matter. Our film MERU is about climbing, but really, it’s about friendship and mentorship. Our film FREE SOLO is about free soloing a mountain, but really, it’s about making intentional decisions about what we want to achieve in life and the sacrifices we make. THE RESCUE is about an impossible rescue, but really, it’s about moral responsibility. When we have the skill set to rescue someone, do we bear the burden to do so even if we put ourselves at risk? It’s also a story about the common humanity that brings us together rather than what divides us.
“All these stories are about overcoming insurmountable odds. They feature unexpected heroes. And they invite the audience into specific worlds in a deep and authentic way. In THE RESCUE, that’s the world of cave diving. Cave diving is very dangerous and very difficult. So why do the cave divers do it? What’s their motivation, experience, inspiration? As a climber, Jimmy knows how vital it is that every last detail be right. Our films are defined by that level of exactitude.
“We wanted to make this movie for many of the same reasons that the story of the Thai children trapped in the cave captivated the hearts and minds of the world in 2018. It was an against-all-odds story that gave you hope. It brought out the best in people who united from many different nations to help these kids. There’s a line in the film that says, “Generosity is the beginning of everything,” and that’s ultimately what the film is about.
“But creating THE RESCUE was very challenging. It has all the ingredients of a film you shouldn’t or can’t make: Everything’s pitch black in the cave. It’s underwater and muddy. The main event is over; you can’t shoot footage of it, and the archival sources are scattered all over the world. And, of course, the pandemic hit. We were scheduled to go to Thailand in spring 2020, but as the shoot neared, it became clear that it was too risky to travel internationally. We did interviews by Zoom and focused on building trust and rapport remotely. We were dealing with different cultures, different languages, different time zones; and there were numerous constraints, but ultimately the story is still moving. The children, the cave divers, the Thai Navy SEALs, the US Special Forces and an entire community all showed us what great courage looks like.
“The story of the rescue is filled with numerous coincidences that could be seen as more than coincidence. There’s a fairy-tale quality to the story. We couldn’t help but be struck by the fact that just as the boys were trapped in place in 2018, the whole world was trapped in place while we were making this movie. And yet, in 2018 the world came together to help the boys. THE RESCUE reminds us that amazing things are possible when people have integrity and a sense of responsibility for each other.”
Asked in an interview, “What would you like the audience to take from the film?” they replied:
Jimmy Chin: I hope people are inspired by the humanity of the global community of rescuers, the courage of the divers and Thai Navy Seals and the bravery of the kids. I want people to come out of the theater asking themselves “Could I ever do that? Would I have made the same choices?” I think the divers really exemplified great moral courage. They didn’t have to go back in. I hope people are moved by seeing what great moral courage looks like and how people are able to achieve great things and overcome seemingly insurmountable odds through perseverance and determination.
Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi: I think it’s the absolute morality of Rick. He felt an absolute obligation to figure out how to save the kids. If only we all did what’s fundamentally decent and responsible… that’s interesting. It’s about the common thread we all share — about finding your place in the world. We see the divers evolve emotionally. We see their attention to detail and methodology. We cherish that, love it, want to honor and respect it. Truth is so much stronger than fiction.
“Filmmaking allows me to recreate memories that tend to substitute for the reality that inspired them.” Mia Hansen-Løve on BERGMAN ISLAND, opening October 15.
French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, BERGMAN ISLAND, follows a couple of American filmmakers, Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth), who retreat to the mythical Fårö island for the summer. In this wild, breathtaking landscape where Bergman lived and shot his most celebrated pieces, they hope to find inspiration for their upcoming films. As days spent separately pass by, the fascination for the island operates on Chris and memories of her first love resurface. Lines between reality and fiction progressively blur and strain the couple.
We open the film October 15 at the Claremont, Playhouse and Town Center, October 22 at the Glendale and Newhall, and October 29 at the Monica Film Center.
“I felt a new reverence for Hansen-Løve’s talent — she sweeps you up and brings the movie to a slow boil.” (Variety)
“Among other things, BERGMAN ISLAND is an ode to a female artist’s freedom to derive creative inspiration and sustenance where she chooses.” (Hollywood Reporter)
“A beautifully shot portrait of Bergman’s beloved island of Faro, the film is also a self-reflexive jeu d’esprit about gender, desire, creativity and the magic of cinema.” (Screen Daily)
Interview with writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve:
Do you believe in the power of landscapes?
I do – and that’s one of the things that drew me to Fårö. Oddly enough, these Swedish landscapes remind me those of Haute-Loire that I shot in Goodbye First Love. The happiness I felt in Fårö brings to mind childhood and teenage memories, although these are very different landscapes – the Baltic Sea on the one hand, Ardèche and the Loire River source on the other. But what they have in common is a wild, pristine quality, a silent atmosphere that invites you to a kind of meditation and that left an impression on my imagination.
Is nature an inspiration to you?
It always has been. The pleasure, the emotion you feel when watching nature can easily go hand in hand with a character’s journey and inspire fiction in me. A landscape may trigger my writing – especially when I feel it’s haunted. That’s what happened with BERGMAN ISLAND. I felt drawn to this physical place, which is also a mental, inner place, naturally.
The film is two-fold – it’s a film about love for cinema, and Bergman particularly, but also about a double love story. Why did you build the film like this?
I didn’t go about it theoretically – it just came to me as an obvious choice. BERGMAN ISLAND is probably my first film that somehow got written “all by itself”, without the pain I usually feel during the writing process. I felt like doors that had been locked so far were opening and that the island made it possible. For the first time, I felt I had the freedom to move playfully between different dimensions – past, present, reality within fiction or fiction within reality… The construction comes from the subject matter that could come down to two interconnected questions – that of couples and that of inspiration. When you deal with a filmmakers couple, how much of their dynamic is based on loneliness and how much on camaraderie? Where does fiction come from? How does it find its way into a script? I’d been wanting to make a film about this but it’s only when I thought of bringing these two filmmakers to Fårö and of using landscapes and Bergman’s world as a backdrop that the project came together. And as I decided to work from there, moving in one of Bergman’s houses and somehow experimenting the film I was writing, I found the structure – in other words, the two parts, a glimpse into the heroine’s film-in-the-making, a painful first love experience without closure inspiring filmmaker Amy’s writing, the subsequent episodes that you can’t tell which part of the narrative they belong to – past or future, reality or fantasy… This confusion echoes my own writing process. I sometimes feel like filmmaking allows me to recreate memories that tend to substitute for the reality that inspired them.
Why did you pick Fårö?
On account of Bergman, naturally. Some ten years ago, I began developing a passionate relationship with his work, his life… I began feeling magnetically drawn to the island. Bergman directed some of his most famous films there and spent the last years of his life there. Remotely located in the middle of the Baltic Sea, the island embodies an ideal both terrifying and attractive, austere and exciting – it’s the ultimate place of absolute artistic integrity that I associate Bergman with. After he died in 2007, a book was published for the auction sale of his properties and all that they contained – it was Bergman’s will, considering it was impossible to divide his properties among his nine children. I held this book in my hands. The pictures of his paintings, of the rooms of his houses, of his objects echoing his everyday life didn’t make his work any less fascinating – all these things, whether highly personal or trivial, only added to the aura and the mystery of an island haunted by his work and his presence. And increased my desire to venture there… Luckily, Bergman’s legacy hasn’t been scattered. All of it was bought out at the last minute by a Norwegian businessman. He brought back all the objects into the houses, putting them each back where they belonged. He then started a Foundation with Linn Ullmann (Bergman’s and Liv Ullmann’s daughter) allowing artists and researchers from all walks of life, just as Bergman wished, to stay in one of the latter’s houses and work on a project that doesn’t necessarily have to be connected to his work. As far as I know, I’m the only one who worked on a script that is directly related to Bergman.
You said that you enjoyed the writing and the shooting as never before. Can you be more specific?
BERGMAN ISLAND is actually a film that, despite a few incidents, brought me unprecedented joy. Fårö was, and still is, a magical place. I’ve been there every year since 2015 to write, prep, and shoot, without ever tiring of it. I’d never been so elated as I prepped for a movie. First, I absolutely relate to the island’s timeless landscapes, stone walls, wildflowers, black sheep, countless birds. To the island’s harshness and silence. And I didn’t feel like Bergman’s presence was overwhelming, but it turned out to be both soothing and stimulating instead. Does it have to do with the fact that I’m not a genius able to make sixty films and have nine children? In no way have I ever felt in competition with Bergman. Although my film touches on the passion of filmmakers for his work, I’ve never tried to imitate it. I’ve always sought to do my own thinking, to find my own voice, and let myself be immersed in the films that I grew up with.
Although the film is not about Bergman, the latter’s presence is palpable through the film’s mood, which raises very interesting issues, including the working of our imagination – it’s clear that our perspective on certain landscapes or places may be entirely shaped by how a filmmaker like Bergman has influenced it. Does our imagination belong to us or is it also shaped by films?
That’s what the film’s about – how a fantasy leaves such a mark on a place that it shapes our perspective on it. As the lady guide explains, Bergman’s Fårö Island existed before the actual Fårö. Bergman fell in love with the place because it echoed a landscape that had been on his mind for some time. But his Fårö is a rougher place than the one I discovered as I got to the island. Most importantly, he explores faces, and with him, you hardly see the actual places, the horizon or the sky, which have such an intense presence on the island. Bergman’s Fårö is a mental construct that tells about his obsessions and inner demons. So, when you’re there, this Fårö is both everywhere and nowhere…
It’s actually what the film addresses – the Bergman diehards featured in the film are desperately seeking for a Bergmanian place that, by nature, is nowhere to be found.
It’s an impossible quest. But that’s also how I made the place my own, without being a prisoner of it. In this respect, going for the scope format, which Bergman had never used, was key. I’d only shot in this way for Eden as I don’t usually trust the format. In the end, what convinced us, Denis Lenoir, my cinematographer, and me, was that we could have a different perspective on the island. This format best did justice to what impressed me the most – the endless sea and sky, the very small number of houses, people, trees even – in essence, the void. Actually, the scope format came as an obvious choice at some point, but I experienced this option as a liberation. And really, the film’s about this liberation. BERGMAN ISLAND is an emancipation story. It’s about emancipation from our masters, but also about a woman’s emancipation from a man. It’s what the Chris character, who considers herself as vulnerable and dependent, finds out about her own creative force.
However, Chris must also free herself from the man she lives with in order to find her freedom…
If they must break up, then it should happen once the film is over. As a rule, I need to feel an off-screen space to be able to believe in my characters’ lives. If the film ends with closure, I don’t believe in their existence as much as if a sequel remained to be written… You may think the journey of this couple is bound to end, but what I was interested in was to show that there’s still some understanding between them. How can they journey on together, in spite of what drives them apart, of a gap widening because of their respective fictions? It all hangs by a thread, but it’s still there…
Chris seems to come to terms with Tony’s sometimes unpleasant attitude…
You can tell this couple’s connectedness and intellectual camaraderie are strong – they have an experience together. Besides, they have a child. But it’s not easy for an artist couple to find the right balance between dialogue and sharing that are desirable, on the one hand, and necessary loneliness, on the other. You need to accept to stay outside the mental space that only belongs to your partner. Some intimate things can only be entrusted to fiction – some confessions can only be made through it. Which may cause some pain – how can you figure out what is said, what is left unsaid? This echoes a more universal question – how well do you know the person you live with? When Chris lays claim to the mill, next to the main house, as her office, it points to her ambivalent relationship with Tony’s filmmaker self. It’s far enough for her to have a chance to forget about him and take hold of the place, and close enough to be able to sense him and watch him through the window… His own relationship to writing doesn’t seem to be as complicated, and he doesn’t seem to have to confide his doubts. But you can wonder if Tony’s resilience isn’t only shallow and if, deep down, his imperviousness isn’t a smokescreen for even greater vulnerability. Regardless, I don’t judge either of my two characters – I just bear witness to what they experience, to what happy and unhappy moments come out of it, and to what my heroine must do to come out on top. The film is about how something unlocks in Chris, how she embraces fiction, imagines a film – a film in the making that’s originally called The White Dress but that could also be named Bergman Island in the end…
“Coming out on top,” that’s just what happens throughout the film. You could think the film also portrays the awakening of self-confidence, of a calling you must pursue…
I’m obsessed with callings, and most of my films deal with them. But BERGMAN ISLAND goes about it in the most straightforward way – for the first time, it’s about a woman filmmaker. And even two, actually – Amy, Chris’s double in the fiction, does the same job. It’s a way for Chris to own up to the fact that in film, her life can inspire fiction, and that fiction can reflect life, like a ping-pong game, or two parallel mirrors reflecting the same story endlessly. This has always been my writing process and I thought it was exciting to try and portray it. To me, BERGMAN ISLAND is the culmination of a thinking process I began in my first film.
Can you tell us about the cast?
For a long time, Greta Gerwig was attached to the role of Chris. At the time, she hadn’t directed her first film yet. But reality surpassed fiction as Greta became a filmmaker in the meantime. Because of her commitment to Little Women, she had to say ‘no’ to my film as our shooting schedules overlapped. When Greta left the project, we were two months away from the shoot, in May 2018. She suggested I wait for her for a year, but if I delayed the shoot, I might lose Mia Wasikowska and Anders Danielson Lie, two actors I just love and without whom I couldn’t possibly consider doing the film! With my producer Charles Gillibert, we made a risky decision – especially for him – but which, I think, was the right one: we’d shoot half the film during summer of 2018 with Mia and Anders, and the second half the following summer. Luckily it didn’t take me too long to come up with a new idea for Chris. I’d just discovered Vicky Krieps in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, and I’d found her wonderful. Although she was unknown at the time, she stole the show from Daniel Day-Lewis. Her being half-German, half-Luxembourgish could give a European flair to the character, which I found interesting. In less than twenty-four hours, her name came as an obvious choice. Fortunately, she was available and, a few weeks later, Vicky was shooting her first scenes with us… Tim Roth joined the cast only the following year. Finding the right actor for this role was much more challenging. In the beginning, I could only consider an American actor for the role. And then I thought of Tim Roth. Not so much for his famous performances, his manly image, but rather for what eludes him, something almost feminine about his presence, far from the tough guys he likes to portray. There’s something both dark and fragile, something complex, about him that I like. Besides, Tim made The War Zone, a painful, challenging film – he has it in him and I think it shows. Shooting the film over two periods of time was a unique experience, we’ve tried to look at the whole thing with humor, to play with it, as in a balancing act…
Do you intend to go back to Fårö one day?
I’ll go back to present the film anyway when we can travel again. I owe a lot to some islanders and keepers of Bergman’s legacy that I can’t wait to meet again. But then again, it’s definitely a place that invites to dream, and I’d like to stay there again, to come across ghosts, to get lost there… and maybe to write there again. Probably not to write a sequel, but something different, why not?
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