Image My Life in Film Read online

  The next morning we went down to the lobby and waited for Harris (and his lady friend) to appear. We waited in vain. The porter informed us, only when asked point-blank, that Mr. Harris had left early that morning, after booking a room at the Savoy Hotel in London.

  In desperation Nebenzahl and I chartered a private plane, flew to London, and went straight to the Savoy, only to be told that Harris had checked in but was not to be disturbed. I rushed out and went for a walk along the Thames to calm my nerves. About ten o’clock that night I called Harris from my room, informing him that we had to stop this game of hide-and-seek. He replied that he was mad as hell that his director had not been there to meet him as he arrived in Munich, and he considered the Goethe Prize a poor excuse for my absence. After a while he agreed to meet in his room, where we sat talking until the wee hours. He finally agreed to be in The Serpent’s Egg, but he needed to make a quick trip to Los Angeles first to settle some business. In a couple of days he’d meet us at Bavaria Studios, and we could then start shooting the film.

  Relieved, we returned to Munich, and the entire crew celebrated with cake and coffee.

  The following day Dino De Laurentiis called me to say that Richard Harris had contracted pneumonia from some kind of amoeba bacteria in the water tank in Malta, and a long convalescence was expected. We had to find someone else.

  At this point the name of David Carradine was mentioned as a possibility. Dino sent me a copy of Carradine’s latest film [Bound for Glory], which I viewed the next day. It was the story of a country singer and enchanted me. One of the Carradine clan, David Carradine had an exciting look and sang with heartfelt musicality. He reminded me of the Swedish actor, Anders Ek, and the thought that God’s finger had finally pointed to the right Abel Rosenberg took hold of me.

  Two days later Carradine arrived in Munich. We were finally ready to begin. But when I met him for the first time, Carradine seemed absent-minded and a bit strange. To help him get into the right frame of mind for this film, we launched the shooting with a viewing session of two classic Berlin movies: Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück and Ruttmann’s Berlin — die Symphonie der Grosstadt. The minute the lights in the theater went out, Carradine fell asleep, snoring loudly. When he woke up, I had no chance to discuss his role with him.

  Carradine’s behavior repeated itself during the filming. He was a night owl and kept falling asleep on the set. He was found slumped just about everywhere, sound asleep. At the same time he was hard-working, punctual, and well prepared. Because of this, among other factors, we finished the film within our planned time schedule. I was pleased, to say the least, and very proud of our accomplishment. I also nourished considerable hope for a positive reaction.

  It didn’t hit me until much later — The Serpent’s Egg was a substantial failure. I made myself immune to the rather tepid reaction from the critics. I remained optimistic, refusing to see the film for what it was. After the film’s release, my life began to calm down; then I painfully realized the serious extent of my failure. Still, I do not regret for a moment making The Serpent’s Egg; it was a healthy learning experience.

  IN THE MAGIC LANTERN I wrote about a film I began writing during the summer of 1985 on Fårö Island.

  It was to have been about an old maker of silent movies, whose decaying films are found in countless metal cassettes left underneath a summer cottage being restored. A dimly perceived connection runs between his pictures. An expert on deaf-mutes tries to read the actors’ lips in the silent films in order to record their lines. Different kinds of montage are tried, which result in various action sequences, all with different outcomes. The project begins to involve more and more people. It grows and thrives, and thus is costing more and more money. It becomes increasingly difficult to handle. Then one day, it all catches fire, the nitrate original as well as the acetate copies, and the whole lot goes up in smoke. The relief is universal.

  I put this screenplay aside rather quickly after I had begun to write it. My body reminded me again of the promise of abstinence (from film work) that my soul had forgotten. The idea of attempting to put together a film from fragments, without access to a script, was fascinating, however. It was an idea that I had toyed with once before.

  During my second year in Munich (in 1977), I had begun writing a story I called Love with No Lovers. It was heavy and formally fragmented, and it mirrored an upheaval that clearly had something to do with my exile. The setting was Munich, and it dealt, as did my silent movie dream, with a large amount of film segments that had been abandoned by the director.

  The screenplay for Love with No Lovers, finished in March 1978, carries an introduction in the form of a letter to friends and co-workers:

  Whenever I begin working with a play for the stage, I first consider these questions: Why did the playwright write this play, and why did it turn out exactly like this? Now I direct these same questions to myself: Why has B. written this film, and why did it turn out exactly as it did? The answers become uncertain and loaded down with rationalizations after the fact. So if I insist that I was driven by a gratifying disgust to portray certain forms of human behavior, political cynicism, and emotional detachment, then I have only told half the truth. Because I have also a need to show the possibilities of love, the richness of living in the moment, and the human ability to do good.

  Nobody in Sweden wanted to invest a penny in Love with No Lovers, even though I was willing to put my own money into it. I spoke with Horst Wendlandt, who was the German coproducer of The Serpent’s Egg, but he had been burned by that experience. Dino De Laurentiis declined as well, and it was soon evident that this large, expensive project would not get off the ground. That was all there was to it. I had been around and knew that the more expensive your projects were, the greater the possibility of refusal.

  With Robert Aztorn and Christine Buchegger in

  From the Life of the Marionettes.

  I buried the project without bitterness and didn’t think about it further. Later, in order to foster and strengthen the ensemble at the Residenz Theater, I thought it might help if we made a television play together. So I carved the story about Peter and Katarina out of the buried Love with No Lovers.

  There are a few scenes left from the original script, but, by and large, From the Life of the Marionettes is fresh.

  The film is based on concrete observations and memories surrounding a theme that had haunted me for a long time: how two human beings who are insolubly and painfully united in love at the same time try to rip themselves free of their shackle.

  The main characters of From the Life of the Marionettes, Peter and Katarina, appeared previously in Scenes from a Marriage, in which they acted as counterpoints to Johan and Marianne in the first episode.

  In the earlier film, Peter and Katarina cannot live with each other or apart. They commit cruel acts of sabotage against each other, actions that only two individuals this close could invent. Their time together is a sophisticated and destructive dance of death. When they fight at the dinner table, they hurl the first assault on Johan’s and Marianne’s marital cardboard world, and Johan and Marianne first witness the purgatory of their every day.

  I wrote Scenes from a Marriage in six weeks one summer. I wanted to make it for television, a more beautiful everyday product, since we had practically no budget. We planned to create six episodes, each to be rehearsed for five days and then filmed during the subsequent five days. About fifty minutes of film would be made in ten days, which meant that the six episodes would be finished in a little more than two months.

  Scenes from a Marriage: Peter and Katarina Egerman make their first entrance.

  When we actually shot the film, it went much faster than that. Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann enjoyed their parts as Johan and Marianne and learned them quickly. Suddenly we had a film that had cost practically nothing, which was great since we were broke. (Cries and Whispers had not yet been sold.)

  All in all, Scenes from a Marriage was a pure j
oy to make because we approached it as a television production and made it without feeling the paralyzing pressure of making a feature film.

  From the Life of the Marionettes, however, was not a joy to make. It, too, was made as a television film and was mainly financed by Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Outside of Germany, it was unfortunately presented as a feature film.

  In Love with No Lovers, the main character, Peter, is a desperado who shoots Franz Josef Strauss. While I was writing From the Life of the Marionettes, I quickly realized that it was not Strauss Peter ought to shoot.

  Peter says that all roads have been closed, that he has no possibility of getting out. Alcohol, drugs, and sexuality offer only the illusion of an exit.

  The film poses the question of why Peter, seemingly without reason, ends another human being’s life. I offer several different explanations in the film, none of which, purposely, holds water. When I watch the movie today, I feel that the character of Tim, a homosexual, is closest to the truth when he hints that Peter is bisexual. For Peter, the acknowledgment of his split sexuality would possibly have been liberating.

  I also offer a glimpse of this explanation in the final analysis made by the doctor, but the whole analysis is a conscious hoax: a cynical codification of a bloody drama in slippery psychiatric terms. The doctor sees what is about to happen, but he lets it go on since he has private designs on Katarina. So, in the end of the film, Peter should have shot the doctor.

  From the Life of the Marionettes is my only German film.

  The Serpent’s Egg may at first glance appear equally German. But I conceived it in Sweden and wrote it at about the same time I was receiving the warning signs of my own personal catastrophe.

  The Serpent’s Egg is presented from the point of view of an outsider’s desperate curiosity, but when I made From the Life of the Marionettes, I had to some degree accepted my own life in Germany and no longer had problems with the language. I had been working in the German theater for some time and could tell if what was said sounded right or wrong. I felt that I knew the German people and their culture. I had also already written Love with No Lovers, an ambitious attempt to delve more deeply into my German existence.

  From the Life of the Marionettes is notable for the rigor with which it was written. After I had written the screenplay, I cut out about 20 percent of the dialogue. Then about 10 percent more was slashed during the actual filming.

  Through this editing, the film acquired a compressed form: short episodes with Brechtian texts in between. These texts relate the ongoing events to the final catastrophe.

  I have made bad films that are close to my heart, and I have made good films, objectively speaking, to which I am indifferent. Other films, in a comical way, are subject to my own changes of attitude. Sometimes it happens that someone says, “I really liked that film.” Then I am instantly happy, and I decide that I also really like that film.

  I am rather proud of From the Life of the Marionettes. I think it holds its own.

  One criticism I can accept is that which deals with the film’ constricted form. In my youth, I had staged an adaption of Olle Hedberg’s Rabies, in Helsingborg, Sweden. The play was taken from one of the later novels in a series Hedberg had written. In a final monologue the main character, Bo Stensson Svenningson, says that we all live in a dark room without windows or doors. But he adds: somewhere there must be a small fissure, invisible to our eyes, which gives us the idea of fresh air.

  With Walter Schmidinger in Tim’s room.

  But in From the Life of the Marionettes the characters reside in a hermetically closed room without even this fissure. In retrospect, I can see this modification as a weakness.

  Another mistake, as big as a beauty mark, is the letter that Peter writes but never mails. It doesn’t make sense psychologically. Only when dictating business letters can Peter formulate what he wants to say. With him, knowledge and the art of self-expression are unthinkable. Unfortunately, on this point I did not follow William Faulkner’s sound advice: kill your darlings. In other words, I should have cut it.

  Today I would have used my largest pair of scissors. Cutting the sequence would have made the movie ten minutes shorter and much better.

  One aspect of the film that came directly from my own life experience is what happens to Peter in the hospital; he cuts off all contact with the external world. I spent some time in a psychiatric clinic after the business about my taxes. I don’t remember if it was a painful time. I arose at five-thirty in the morning to be in the bathroom before everybody else — I looked after my physical condition scrupulously. My whole day was carefully divided. I received ten one-tenth-milligram tablets of Valium every day and and an extra dose whenever I needed more.

  Peter lives a similar existence. He sleeps with his worn teddy bear from childhood. He plays chess with a computer. For half an hour every morning he stands quietly smoothing his bed.

  Rita Russek before the catastrophe and Robert Aztorn in its aftermath.

  His wife, Katarina, still lives with him, but now they are distant. She tells her mother-in-law that she leads her life as usual. “But all the time I’m crying inside.”

  AFTER THE REHEARSAL WAS NOT made as a feature film either. Just like From the Life of the Marionettes, it was made for television.

  Originally, I imagined the film as a correspondence between an aging director and a young actress. I began writing it but found it boring before long; it would be more fun to see them.

  While I wrote, I must have hit a sore nerve or, if you like, an underground vein of water. From my watery unconscious, twisted vines and strange weeds shot up; everything grew into a witch’s porridge. Suddenly there appeared the director’s former mistress, who is the mother of the young actress. She has been dead for years, and yet she enters the play. On the dark, empty stage of a theater during the quiet hour between four and five in the afternoon, much can return to haunt you.

  The result of this brewing was a piece of dramatic television that is about life in the theater.

  There are young actors and actresses whom I, a bit absent-mindedly, regard as my children. It happens that they find it useful to have me as a father figure and adopt me. After a while they get angry with me because they don’t need a father anymore. I have always liked this role and never felt inhibited by it. Under certain circumstances it can be a safety net for young actors to have a father figure who can stand the rough treatment.

  After the Rehearsal was written expressly for the joy of materializing it together with Sven Nykvist, Erland Josephson, and Lena Olin. I have always followed Lena with tenderness and professional interest. Erland has been my friend for fifty years. Sven is Sven. If once in a while I miss working in film, it really is just the collaboration with Sven that I miss.

  So After the Rehearsal was meant to be a pleasant little episode on my road toward death. We planned to keep the team small. We would rehearse for three weeks, and Sven would film it. We would work in Filmhuset (Film House) and the set was to be simple.

  To my surprise, the shooting was completely joyless.

  Seeing After the Rehearsal now, I find it much better than I had remembered. When you have struggled with a bad shoot, the dispiritedness lingers. It makes you remember the film with greater distaste than necessary.

  One frustration I felt concerned a scene with Ingrid Thulin, truly one of the great movie actresses of our time. As a jealous colleague expressed it once: “she is married to the camera.” But in this film she couldn’t distance herself from her part. When she would say the line “Do you think that my instrument is destroyed forever?” she would begin to cry. I told her, “Please, don’t sentimentalize!” To me, it seemed natural for her to say the line with cool observance. Instead she burst out crying every time. Finally I gave up. Perhaps I was upset with Ingrid because I was angry with myself. "Is my instrument destroyed forever?" The question seemed to concern me more than it did her.

  Add to this the fact that Erland Josephson was
overworked. For the first time during our long collaboration, he was hit by what the Germans call Textangst (which literally means text anxiety — having trouble learning and remembering lines). The last and most important day brought short-circuiting and blackouts. We muddled through, but that was all.

  Lena Olin kept her presence of mind, and in spite of being relatively inexperienced, she managed gallantly without letting herself be disturbed by our turmoil.

  The discomfort of the shoot stuck like glue, and the editing was another wretched experience: there was so much cutting and pasting. After the Rehearsal, in the final edited version, ran one hour and twelve minutes. I had been forced to cut at least twenty minutes of the finished material.

  Today it is hard to believe that After the Rehearsal was actually written as a bit of a black comedy with dialogue in harsh yet comedic language. The film itself is lackluster, with none of the vitality of the original screenplay.

  So this was the end.* On March 22, 1983, I wrote in my diary:

  I don’t ever want to make films again. I want to quit, want peace. I don’t have the strength anymore, neither psychologically nor physically. And I hate the hoopla and the malice. Hell and damnation.

  March 25:

  A lousy night; I awoke at three-thirty, nauseous. Then I couldn’t get back to sleep. Worry, tension, and fatigue. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed. It’s a little better; I am almost functional. Today is overcast, and the thermometer reads zero centigrade. It will probably snow. In spite of the physical discomfort, it was rather fun to work again. But I don’t want to make films again. This will be the last time.