Read Online Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert by Roger Ebert - Free Book Online

be Bergman. She isn't supposed to be giving an interview; Bergman is very concerned about the scene coming up, and he wants her to think about nothing else. Ullmann smiles; it will help her, she says, to think of anything but the scene. Every actress approaches these things in her own way.
    Elsewhere in Film House, people seem able to think and speak of nothing else but Bergman. He is the greatest Swedish artist, they agreean artist of world importance. And yet he was not much loved until recently in his native land. His two best markets are the United States and France. In Sweden, he was accused of dealing only with the bourgeoisie, of not facing social problems, of being concerned only with himself and not with society. These are charges he more or less agrees with, but they do not bother him.
    In the bar of Film House, drinking aquavit and a beer, the Finnish director Jorn Donner waits to talk to Bergman about a documentary he's making for television: Three Scenes with Ingmar Bergman. Donner elaborates on Bergman's problem. "He is known all over the world, and yet he can't afford a single failure," he says. "Up until Cries and Whispers, each film was paying off the debts of the last. For Cries and Whispers, there was so little money that the actors were asked to work for three thousand dollars each and ten percent of the profits. He gave ten percent to Liv, Harriet, Sven, Ingrid Thulin, and thirty percent for himself-and this was a film he totally produced himself!
    "Harriet asked me if she should work for three thousand dollars. I said, certainly, to work for Ingmar-and if that's all the money there is. After the film was made, it was turned down by every major distributor. And then look what an enormous success it was! And followed by a bigger success, Scenes from a Marriage. And now The Magic Flute. But no one suspects how close he came to not being able to raise the money for Cries and Whispers."

    It's true; until Cries and Whispers in 1973, Bergman hadn't had a financial success since Persona, released in 1966. There were great picturesA Passion of Anna and Shame-and interesting failures like Hour of the Wolf and a movie that no one liked much, The Touch, with Elliot Gould, but they all lost money.
    Then the tide turned. Not since the days of Smiles o fa Summer Night, Wild Strawberries, and The Seventh Seal, in the late 195os, has Bergman found more success with audiences than in the last few years. And Scenes from a Marriage found him an audience, at last, in Scandinavia, too: his neighbors on the Baltic island of Faro, where he lives as much of the year as possible, saw it on television and understood at last what it was that he did. Then Bergman's version of Mozart's The Magic Flute played on Swedish television on the first day of 1975, and one of every three Swedes saw it. "It's as if he's in harmony with himself," says Bengt Forslund, a Swedish producer. "All those years of films about suffering and death, and suddenly Ingmar's found all of this joy to draw on."
    The red light is still on over the door to Bergman's soundstage. When it goes off, that means Bergman is not actually shooting-but entry is still forbidden except to the favored, like his wife, Ingrid. She slips through the door with some letters that need to be answered. And then it's time for the afternoon tea break. The hostess has set up tea and cakes and Bergman at last acknowledges the interviewer.
    He has a little room, long, dim, and cool, like a monk's cell. It's across from the soundstage and down the way from the dressing rooms, and is furnished simply, with two chairs, a cot, and a table (on which rest two apples, a banana, a box of Danish chocolates, and a copy of the script). When he is concerned about the direction a scene is taking, he will declare a break, come into this room, lock the door, and lie down on the cot until the scene is clear in his head.
    "So it is thirty years since I directed my first picture," he said. "It's strange,