Image My Life in Film Read online

  The grip survived the accident. The filming of Crisis dragged on, but the increasing hostility between me and the crew grew greater with each passing day. There were arguments and disputes over everything. How would I ever learn this profession?

  In addition to the friendly Victor Sjöström, who insisted on treating me as a fellow director, I gained one ally after the long shooting was ended, the film’s editor, Oscar Rosander.

  When I went to his house after the shooting was completed, and I was disappointed, bleeding, and furious, he treated me with abrupt and friendly objectivity. Mercilessly he pointed out what was bad, terrible, or unacceptable in my film. But he praised me for what he liked. He also initiated me into the secrets of editing — among other things, a basic truth: that editing occurs during the filming itself, the rhythm is created in the script. I know that many directors hold the opposite view. For me, Oscar Rosander’s teaching has been fundamental.

  Crisis opened in February of 1946 and was a bona fide fiasco. By then I was back at the theater in Helsingborg. From the Company, not a peep was heard. The studio head, Harald Molander, had publicly stated that if Bergman returned to the studio, he would resign. The defeat was total.

  Then Lorens Marmstedt came into the picture. I had met him a few times with Alf Sjöberg. At one time or another, he had said, “I nibble with pleasure on talented people. You are going to come to me and make movies.” That was after the success of Torment.

  A few days after the premiere of Crisis, the telephone rang. It was Lorens, saying: “Dear Ingmar. That was an awful film! Hard to imagine anything worse! I suppose your phone is ringing off the hook with offers.”

  Lorens Marmstedt was an independent producer with a small but well-regarded production company, Terrafilm. He had just been asked by Karl Kilbom, of Sweden’s Folkbiografer Company,* to produce two films. The first project was a Norwegian play called Good People by Oscar Braathen. Herbert Grevenius had written a screenplay that Lorens wanted me to read.

  Herbert Grevenius was the foremost theater critic of the 1940s, and we were good friends. He was the driving force behind the decision to make me the head of Helsingborg’s City Theater. He was also the one who, in 1946, through his connections with Torsten Hammarén, opened the doors for me to Gothenburg’s City Theater.

  Lorens Marmstedt with Mauritz Stiller on the wall. Stina Bergman with Hjalmar.

  I read Herbert’s screenplay and found it rather tedious. Lorens Marmstedt agreed and asked me how much time it would take me to rewrite it. I promised to do it over the weekend if I was provided with a secretary.

  During the next thirty-six hours I was sitting with a rather spunky beauty, dictating a new screenplay. Perhaps it wasn’t any better, but at least the everyday pepper-and-salt tone was broken, which might have been an advantage.

  For Lorens, it wasn’t a great gamble this time. My apprenticeship would be paid for by Sweden’s Folkbiografer. Three weeks after the script was approved, we were already shooting. The actors had been hired by Marmstedt, and the time schedule was set: the filming had to be completed in four weeks.

  Lorens was a harsh teacher. He was ruthlessly critical and forced me to reshoot scenes he found poor. He could say: “I’ve been speaking with Hasse Ekman, who has seen the rushes, and I’ve spoken to Kilbom. I must keep things open! It may well be that you won’t even be allowed to finish shooting. Bear in mind that Birger Malmsten is no Jean Gabin and most of all that you’re no Marcel Carné."

  Lamely I tried to defend myself by pointing out some scenes I thought were pretty good. Then Lorens looked at me with his icy light-blue eyes and said: “I don’t understand how you can wallow in this simmering self-satisfaction!”

  I raged; I was desperate and humiliated; but I had to admit he was right. Every day he took the trouble to sit through the rushes. Even though he criticized and insulted me in front of the staff, I had to take it, since he was participating passionately in the birth and development of the film. I cannot remember that he praised me even once during It Rains on Our Love for anything I had done.

  It Rains on Our Love. The bad one and the good one: Ludde Gentzel with Barbro Kollberg and Gösta Cederlund with Birger Malmsten.

  Barbro Kollberg and Birger Malmsten.

  What he did do was give me a lesson. He said: “When you and your pals see the dailies, you’re in a state of emotional chaos. No matter what, you want everything to be good. That’s the reason you have a natural tendency to make excuses for your failures and overestimate what you’re seeing. All of you are supporting one another. This is normal, but it’s also dangerous. Submit yourself to a psychological exercise. Don’t be enthusiastic. Don’t be critical either. Put yourself at point zero. Don’t let your emotions get involved in what you’re seeing. Then you’ll see everything.”

  This piece of advice has been invaluable to me throughout my professional life.

  The movie opened that same year, in November 1946, and was a modest critical success. Those who had totally lambasted Crisis now adopted a more positive wait-and-see attitude, and Lorens Marmstedt came back with another project, again for Sweden’s Folkbiografer: a play by the Finnish-Swedish author Martin Söderhjelm, A Ship Bound for India.

  The author had written his own screenplay, but it was unusable. Lorens suggested that he and I go to Cannes. I would write the screenplay, and he would play roulette. In between we could eat and drink well and meet ladies suitable to the purpose.

  We had a good time. I lived in a small room on the top floor of the Hotel Majestic with a view of the railway and two fire walls and wrote like one obsessed. In less than two weeks the screenplay was finished. There were not many words left of Martin Söderhjelm’s play.

  Before we had time to reflect, we were in production. This time I had, against Marmstedt’s wishes, insisted that Gertrud Fridh play the female lead. She was highly talented but not a conventional beauty by any means. Lorens became alarmed when he saw her screen test and demanded that her makeup be redone. The result was that she looked like a cheap whore in some French melodrama.

  Just as in Crisis, there are some parts that show strength and vitality. The camera stands where it should stand; the people behave as they ought to behave. For a few brief moments I am really making a film.

  When I had finished A Ship Bound for India, I was swimming in euphoria. I was great. I thought I was terrific, just as good as the French directors who were my idols. At first Lorens Marmstedt was rather positive. But then he went to the Cannes Film Festival to present the movie. He called me in a panic and urged me to cut more than a thousand feet, to avoid a complete fiasco. In high dudgeon, despite a somewhat faltering egomania, I informed him that I had no intention of cutting even one foot from this masterpiece.

  The Swedish premiere turned out to be a bizarre event. The print had not been checked, owing to lack of time. It was transported directly from the laboratory to the projectionist’s booth at the Royal Theater. At the time no preview screenings for critics were held, so they were there en masse for the opening. I was also present, along with the actors Gertrud Fridh and Birger Malmsten. Quickly we became aware that there had been an accident involving the sound track of the print. You could not hear the dialogue. I called up to the projectionist and told him to turn up the volume. The result: you could hear even less. As if this wasn’t enough, the third and fourth acts had been mixed up when they packed the reels. So the fourth act went first. When the mix-up of the acts became evident, I hammered on the door of the projectionist’s booth, but that man had locked himself in. After lengthy negotiations through the closed iron door, I managed to convince him to stop the film in the middle of the fourth act and to start over the third.

  Party afterward at the Gondolen Restaurant. It is the only time in my life when I got so drunk I passed out.

  I woke up in the staircase of an apartment building on Artillerigatan. That same morning I was supposed to take a plane to Gothenburg to get ready for the dress rehearsal at the
City Theater. Somehow I got myself to Bromma airport in what I can only describe as a lamentable condition. In the waiting room sat Hasse Ekman, fresh and sweet-smelling with an unbelievably gorgeous Eva Henning at his side. He was reading the reviews of my film.

  He consoled me as best he could, quoting his father, the famous actor Gösta Ekman, who used to say after one of his many fiascos: “There will be other newspapers tomorrow!”

  A Ship Bound for India was a major disaster. What had happened to the print at the premiere nonetheless served as a useful lesson to me. When I returned to Svensk Filmindustri to make Port of Call, I occupied the sound department and the laboratory every free moment I had and learned everything I could about sound, film developing, and copying. I learned also about the camera and the various camera lenses. No technician would ever walk all over me again. I began to learn how I wanted things to be done.

  In spite of all that had happened, Lorens Marmstedt did not throw me out. With great diplomacy he pointed out that now would be the perfect time for at least one modest audience success. Otherwise my days as a movie director might be numbered.

  A Ship Bound for India as well as It Rains on Our Love had been made for Sweden’s Folkbiografer. Now Marmstedt suggested that I make a film for his own company, Terrafilm. It must be noted that Lorens was a passionate gambler, able to put his money on the same number a whole evening.

  A Ship Bound for India: Gertrud Fridh with Birger Malmsten and Holger Löwenadler.

  He had bought the movie rights to a novel by Dagmar Edqvist called Music in Darkness, which told the story of a blind musician. For the time being I would have to stuff my demons into an old sack. Here I was not going to have any use for them.

  I read the novel; I hated it and decided to tell Lorens how I felt. He declared that he had no intention of coming up with any other offer. Finally we agreed that we would go and see Dagmar Edqvist together. She turned out to be an adorable woman, funny, warm, and intelligent. Also very feminine and pretty. I caved in. She and I would write the screenplay together.

  The film was shot during the fall of 1947. My only memory of the filming is that I kept thinking: Make sure there are no tedious parts. Keep it entertaining. That was my only ambition.

  Music in Darkness (known in the United States as Night Is My Future) became a respectable product in the style of director Gustaf Molander. It was generally well received and was a modest box-office success to boot.

  Lorens Marmstedt had bet on the right number. I thanked him by leaving for Svensk Filmindustri, where Gustaf Molander had meanwhile made a film out of my original screenplay, Woman without a Face, which became a considerable success. Furthermore, the studio executives had figured out how much Music in Darkness had brought in at the box office. So my summons to return home was not exactly an unselfish gesture.

  “For the time being I would have to stuff my demons into an old sack.” Mai Zetterling and Birger Malmsten in Music in Darkness.

  Lorens, however, showed no bitterness and would, before long, be back in my professional life.

  Port of Call [Bergman’s next film] was not a remarkable story. To me, it was a question of piecing together a suitable movie out of Olle Länsberg’s voluminous material. Before we knew what hit us, we were already shooting the film.

  Strongly influenced by Rossellini and the Italian neorealists, I tried to include as many exteriors as possible. What went wrong was that, in spite of my good intentions, too much of the film was shot in the studio for people to say that I had made a clean break with the Swedish film tradition of shooting films in the studio.

  Neorealism and the studio in Port of Call.

  PORT OF CALL OPENED in October 1948 and was a relative success. At about the same time Ellen, my wife then, and I went to the summer cottage in Dalecarlia where I had spent my childhood. There I wrote the screenplay for

  The Devil’s Wanton (Prison).

  It was late autumn, and we were in great spirits. We burned fires in the tiled stoves in the two main rooms as well as in the kitchen stove. Ellen occupied the living room, working on her choreography, while I reigned in the bedroom, where I wrote what would be the first film of my own. There was peace and good feelings between us. When not working, we went for long walks. The success of Port of Call was beneficial. It was an altogether good time.

  During the previous summer I had written the story of Birgitta Carolina as a long short story with the title “True Story,” alluding to a very popular genre in weekly magazines at the time that was called “true stories from life.” I wanted my story to be that way: with inhibited swings between unabashed sentimentality and genuine feelings. I was extremely pleased with the title of the film, finding it suitably ironic.

  But my producer Lorens Marmstedt, who knew everything there was to know about Swedish movie audiences, said that people didn’t understand irony; they’d just get mad as hell. He asked me to find another title. First I came up with The Prison and then simply Prison, which was typical for the 1940s and, actually, a much worse title than True Story.

  I hesitated when I handed the screenplay to Lorens Marmstedt and said something like, “You don’t have to bother with this. But if you have the time and inclination at some point, take a look at it.” I did not even give Svensk Filmindustri a chance to consider it, fully realizing that it would be futile.

  Two days later Lorens called me and said in his roundabout way, “Very touching … I don’t know … perhaps … after all. Touching but not moving! One can’t tell. Possibly? How fast can you work?”

  “Eighteen days. Not less than eighteen days,” I said. Then we discussed actors, and he called around and told each one, “Don’t count on getting your regular salary because this is an artistic film and one has to sacrifice something for Art!” I myself did not receive a penny, just 10 percent of the profit. There never was any profit!

  Prison came to be seen, through no fault of its own, as a film typifying the 1940s. This had to do not only with the title but with the fact that because Tomas, played by Birger Malmsten, is a journalist and author, he is presumed to be active in the literary circles of that decade. But this inference is a superficial one. I had no contact whatsoever with Sweden’s literary culture, and its authors had no contact with me. If they thought of me at all, they might have expressed themselves in somewhat the same way as Gunnar Ollén did when, as the person responsible for selecting plays for the Swedish Radio, he rejected my play To My Terror: “Unfortunately you will probably never become a real writer, Ingmar, but keep going! And good luck!”

  In the end, the conditions for getting Prison made were that it would be a low-budget movie. Lorens Marmstedt gave me free rein as long as I promised to keep the costs far below normal. We also had to deal with the rationing of film stock: eight thousand meters — twenty-five thousand feet — and no more! The problems stimulated me, and I wrote an article that reported on the economical and practical prerequisites for making a low-budget film:

  Make a cheap film, make the cheapest film that has ever been made in a Swedish studio, and you will be given great freedom to create according to your own conscience and as you think best.

  For this reason I set out to cut every cost across the line in my budgetary calculations. The regimen went as follows: Cut down the number of shooting days. Limit the building of sets. No extras. No music (or only sparingly used). Ban overtime. Limit use of raw film. Film exteriors without sound or lighting. Conduct all rehearsals outside of the actual shooting time. Begin early in the morning. See to it that the shooting of excessive material is stopped. Trim the screenplay meticulously.

  The procedure does not sound remarkable. You do long scenes, but you do long scenes where the length is not noticeable.

  Through this arrangement, the director gains time, continuity, and concentration. However, he loses opportunities to cut out something that doesn’t work, decrease a pause, or cheat on the rhythm. The editing is already taking place mainly in the camera.

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sp; Of course the whole idea of long takes was dangerous in the extreme. I was far from being technically mature enough for such adventures, but it was, in all probability, the only way Prison could have been made.

  We had to save on absolutely everything. We managed to borrow one set for free from another movie. The scenes in the attic and the passage up the attic stairs were shot in Novilla in Djurgården. But most of the film was shot in the studio at Gärdet. We kept using three walls that had their wallpaper changed over and over. Doors and windows swapped places.

  One important scene that exists both in the prose version and in the final screenplay did not find its way into the finished film. I made a strong effort to incorporate it but somehow failed. Birgitta Carolina meets a painter at the boardinghouse, and in the original story, the episode is described as follows:

  Mrs. Bolin’s salon was filled with old-fashioned furniture. There were thick carpets on the floor, many paintings with Italian motifs on the walls, small statuettes, a tall tiled stove that stood sleeping in a corner, enormous sofas and armchairs, a crystal chandelier on the ceiling, and three windows, framed by heavily draped curtains and facing a street edged with linden trees. On one wall a black clock was ticking majestically; on a big-bellied chest of drawers stood a small ornamental French clock with quick, tinkling pulse beats; and on the tiled stove ledge were mementos, shells, and photographs of Mrs. Bolin’s relatives from the past hundred years artfully arranged.