Ingmar Bergman at 100: His Assistant Director Remembers the Details of Their Last Film Together

"I noticed that even after 45 films, he still couldn't sleep at night, anxious about ideas for the next one"

On the shoot of Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander), Ingmar Bergman's crew started at 8:30 in the morning, on the dot, and stopped at five in the afternoon, on the dot. If the cinematographer said a setup would take 15 minutes, it did not take a minute more. All 125 days of shooting ran in that order.

Talking about the making of Fanny and Alexander, first assistant director Peter Schildt kept coming back to how much he admired Bergman's handling of time and his thorough planning. He counts that habit among the reasons Bergman achieved what he did.

"This might sound boring, but [what impressed me most about Bergman] was how he organized and planned the filmmaking, how thoroughly he prepared," Schildt told QDaily. "It touched on a lot of things — the script, the daily schedule, how to work efficiently on set. This was one of the key reasons he became a great director, because if you don't organize things well, you end up in chaos."

This year marks 100 years since Bergman's birth. A legend of art cinema, he left behind The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona and other classics. His films looked hard at human nature while taking on death, religion and sex. His work is often called difficult and obscure, and that has never stopped people from counting him among the greatest directors who ever lived.

From the age of nine, when he traded a hundred tin soldiers for a film projector — the projector had been his older brother's Christmas present — Bergman's life was bound up with cinema. He grew up in a religious household and knew religion firsthand from an early age. His father was a pastor who could arrange everything in public life with perfect order, and who was a harsh figure at home. As a boy, Bergman was locked in a dark closet for things like wetting the bed.

In his memoir The Magic Lantern, Bergman wrote: "While my father preached from the pulpit and the congregation prayed, sang or listened, I sank into the mysterious world of the church: the low arches, the thick walls, the eternal smell, the sunlight trembling on the walls and on the medieval paintings and carvings on the ceiling. Everything a person's imagination could ask for was there — angels, saints, dragons, prophets, demons, human beings."

Bergman put much of his own life and thinking on screen. In Fanny and Alexander, the grandmother and the harsh, tyrannical father both carry traces of his childhood. The 1982 film was his last for cinemas. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and although it feels more worldly than his earlier work, this 45th film — a kind of final chapter — still carries the themes that run through everything he made: the line between the real and the imagined, family, religion.

Schildt was 31 when he worked with Bergman on Fanny and Alexander. He had known of him for years: they lived in the same city, both directed, and Schildt's father had once worked with Bergman at a theater. Fanny and Alexander has many scenes with children, and Schildt often worked with children in his own films. Bergman's producer came to him hoping he could help on that front. Schildt later found that Bergman needed no help at all — his work with the children went smoothly and happily.

Schildt did not like every Bergman film. He found Hour of the Wolf pretentious and could not warm to the much-praised The Seventh Seal. None of that shook his view of Bergman as a superb craftsman: a director who had every step of filmmaking planned out and an eye for telling what mattered from what did not.

Bergman stands for the "craftsman" strain in auteur cinema. Auteur theory came out of postwar Europe. Its advocates — Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut in France, among others — held that a film, like a book or a piece of music, belongs to its author, meaning the individual director. Auteur cinema puts the director in charge of the film; directors usually write their own scripts rather than adapt someone else's words. That director-centered model stood against Hollywood's producer-centered system.

Auteur cinema became one of the lines people drew between art films and commercial films. In the Europe where the theory took hold, art films showed a continent long ruled by Hollywood's commercial cinema that another form was possible. That soil, friendly to invention and experiment, produced a generation of directors with strong personal styles, Bergman and Federico Fellini among them. Audiences of the day were glad to go to the cinema for an art film.

"Back then he was a director inside mainstream commercial cinema, and European filmgoers loved him passionately. A new Bergman film opening was as big an occasion as a famous writer publishing a new book or a symphony orchestra giving a new performance," said Dai Jinhua, director of the Center for Film and Culture Studies at Peking University, at an event marking the centenary of Bergman's birth, "The Magic Lantern Still Glows: Bergman and the Fashion and Art He Influenced."

She added: "The one thing that saddens me a little is that these days everyone seems to prefer not to watch Bergman — why put ourselves through the hurt, why watch something so tiring, so painful. Which shows how much more fragile our age is than Bergman's."

One reason Bergman could work so fast was that he built a company of actors of his own. Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann each made more than ten films with him, and both appear in Persona and Scenes from a Marriage. "They [Bergman's actors] are completely different in every film, often playing completely opposite characters," said François Truffaut, the French New Wave director.

Bergman's shining reputation as a film director tends to hide the theater director. In fact his years in the theater shaped his film career deeply. "I am more a man of the theater than a filmmaker," he once said. In his films he sometimes borrowed the theater's methods; to get the closeness between actor and audience that the stage has, he had his film actors speak straight into the camera.

In The Magic Lantern, Bergman described the theater's effect on him this way: "The place where I rehearse must be orderly, clean, quiet and bright. Rehearsal is rigorous work, not a place for a director or an actor to vent private feelings." That is exactly the rigor Schildt saw on set.

August Strindberg was one of the people who shaped Bergman most. Bergman staged Strindberg's plays many times. "The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was very good at writing dialogue. He's one of our classics. His dialogue is outstanding. It isn't a natural way of speaking, but it's full of life," Schildt said. In his view Bergman was likewise a screenwriter who excelled at dialogue, and good dialogue is what guides an actor's performance.

Everything on the set of Fanny and Alexander ran in order, and still Schildt came to know Bergman's anxiety, the kind that kept him awake over his work. "But that's how it should be. The day you stop feeling anxious and start feeling comfortable, I think your career is finished. You should quit," Schildt said.

We also talked with Schildt about more Bergman topics

Q = QDaily

S = Peter Schildt

Q: In Fanny and Alexander, which scene do you like best, if any?

S: Honestly, it's been a long time since I last saw the film. There are many I like. I've been asked this before, and I answered: the scene with the grandmother and the old Jewish man, Isak. It's evening, and they sit together and talk. She looks back on her life and mentions what once passed between them. It's a very quiet scene, but there's a lot in it. The dialogue between the two of them is beautifully written, and both performances are wonderful.

Q: Working with children on set must be hard, isn't it?

S: No. Because they aren't children in the ordinary sense, they're actors. Before you shoot, you can already be sure they're up to the job. That's what the auditions are for. So in practice children and adults are no different on set. They may tire more easily, but they still have to learn their lines. They have to turn up early in the morning and work as required. And because they don't carry many fixed ideas about filmmaking, they learn very fast and easily turn into good actors.

Q: While Bergman was ill, you shot the funeral scene, which also seems to be one of the few in the film shot from above, outdoors, with many of the principals and a crowd of extras, cutting back and forth between wide shots and close-ups. What was hard about shooting it?

S: The only hard thing was the cold. It was the dead of winter, and there were a lot of people. I shot it because Mr. Bergman was ill at the time. But we had prepared thoroughly. We had gone there in the summer and the autumn to prepare. If I remember right, we used five cameras. So there was nothing special about shooting it. It was just a group of people working there. As long as it's organized, none of it is hard.

Q: Could you describe what you were responsible for on the film?

S: I was the first assistant director. My job was to help him. Before the shoot, I ran the auditions for all the young actors. My job was to be there and do whatever he needed. Sometimes, say after a full day's work, he'd be tired and there would still be two close-up setups left, so I'd shoot those and let him rest. On some of the winter scenes — not only the funeral — when he was ill, I'd take over the shooting.

Q: Could you give some examples of what you called the best solutions? When did you realize how good Bergman's ideas were?

S: This might sound boring, but what impressed me most about Bergman was how he organized and planned the filmmaking, how thoroughly he prepared. It touched on a lot of things — the script, the daily schedule, how to work efficiently on set. This was one of the key reasons he became a great director, because if you don't organize things well, you end up in chaos.

Q: Could you describe a typical day on this film?

S: A typical day started at 8:30 in the morning, on the dot. The camera would be rolling within about 15 minutes, because the night before everyone already knew where we'd be starting. If a new scene was coming up, we'd walk through it with the actors first. Mr. Bergman would tell an actor when to start, to come in through that door, sit down on the sofa, then start talking with the woman sitting there, and she'd get up on this line, walk out, walk back in, and stop. That way the actors knew how to move within the scene. Bergman would decide where the camera went and how it followed them. Then we'd carry on. All that took about five minutes. After that we might run the scene once. The cameraman could take a look. Bergman would ask Sven Vilhem Nykvist — he always worked with this cinematographer — how much time he needed to set the lights and the set, and he'd say 15 minutes. Bergman would say fine, and he and the actors would leave the set to let them work. The setup took exactly 15 minutes, no more, no less. He could have said 20 and that would have been fine too, but Sven Vilhem Nykvist knew how he wanted it, which lamp went where, so 15 minutes was enough. After 15 minutes, Bergman and the actors came back. They'd rehearse once. Then they'd shoot for real. A few takes to sort out the problems. Then on to the next scene. That was the process. At five in the afternoon exactly, the day's work ended. We shot Monday to Friday. Weekends off. No overtime. Because if you work more than eight hours you can't stay sharp, people get tired. It went on like that for 125 days. I think it's a good way to work. There were breaks for Christmas and New Year in between, and the working time came to 125 days.

Q: The shoot is said to have gone through one difficulty after another — the director and the cinematographer nearly dying, a crew member badly hurt, the production halted by illness. How did that affect the film's mood and atmosphere? (Note: Bergman himself gives this account in his memoir Images: My Life in Film)

S: That's not right. None of us nearly died. An electrician fell from a height and sprained his ankle, which wasn't good, and some of the crew got sick, because it was winter. But it wasn't that bad, and it didn't affect the shooting.

Q: How did the collaboration start? Was Fanny and Alexander the first time you worked together?

S: Yes. I didn't know much about him before that, I only knew of him. I was a director at the time. Bergman's producer came to me because he thought Bergman might need my help with the children, since I worked with children often in my own films. But the producer was wrong. Bergman had no trouble with children at all. They liked each other, and it was a happy experience.

Q: But you'd known of each other for a long time?

S: Yes. We lived in the same city and worked in the same field. My father had worked with him at a theater where Bergman was the director and the boss. So of course I knew of him, but I wasn't much of a fan. The first film of his I saw was Hour of the Wolf. I was 17, and I thought it was too pretentious, too childish. I didn't like it at all. This is a Bergman film? I thought he had more in him than that. But a few years later I saw Scenes from a Marriage. I loved it, and I began to understand him — I felt he could talk about things that struck a chord with me. Then his version of Mozart, The Magic Flute, was staggering. I loved it: so you can adapt an opera like that, how clever! So by the time we worked together I had deep respect for him as a craftsman, even if I hadn't liked every one of his earlier films.

Q: What do you mean by craftsman? Camera skills, handling technical problems, that kind of thing?

S: The technical side of film is simple and basic, anyone can learn it, it's only a tool, like the pen you write with. Making a film means cameras, sound, lights. When I call him a craftsman, it's first of all because he was an outstanding screenwriter. Start from the script and you get the performance, because one of his gifts as a writer was good dialogue, and good dialogue guides a performance. Bad dialogue can't be performed. Good dialogue is organic; in a sense it performs itself. You don't need to add anything to it. People think a director's job is to listen to all the actors' opinions and try different things. Not with Bergman. He knew everything he wanted, and it was all there in the script. The other thing, as I said, is the handling of time. It sounds boring, but it matters a lot. And then there's his ability to tell the good from the bad. Every frame you see is a choice. Everything you see is a yes, because the noes have been thrown out.

Q: There's a lot of dialogue in Fanny and Alexander, and some people complain there's too much. What do you think?

S: That's a director's personal taste. Some like plenty of dialogue, some use little. Some directors use a lot of dialogue, but the dialogue isn't good. Some avoid it because they think they can say it without dialogue, and it usually turns out they can't. Most films have dialogue, don't they? Can you name me a film with none? Of course there are exceptions. I happen to like dialogue.

Dialogue in a film is composed, it doesn't happen by itself. For Bergman, dialogue was written, a bit like literary dialogue, but it has a life of its own; it sounds as if it were happening naturally, though you also need performances able to carry it. That's hard to pull off.

Q: How do you write good dialogue?

S: Anyone who could teach you that would charge a very high price (laughs). I can't really say either. On my early films I worked with some fine screenwriters. What made them talented was their skill with dialogue. Actors can spot good dialogue at once. It's hard to say how to write it well. The Swedish playwright August Strindberg was very good at writing dialogue. He's one of our classics. His dialogue is outstanding. It isn't a natural way of speaking, but it's full of life.

Q: The film covers many subjects, including the line between dream and reality, family, personal inner struggle, religion.

S: Many of those themes were already in his earlier films. This was his last one for cinemas, a kind of final chapter to the 44 films before it, so you can see traces of all of them in it.

Q: Which Bergman film have you watched the most times?

S: Very few, actually. I haven't seen many of his films. One that stayed with me is The Magician. That's an old film from the 1950s. I liked it very much. I've tried three times to sit down properly with The Seventh Seal, but I don't like it. And I've said I don't like Hour of the Wolf. Though if I watched them now I might feel differently. Bergman is a good director, but not my favorite. I come from a different corner of Swedish cinema, a more naturalistic one.

Q: Did working with Bergman on Fanny and Alexander change anything for you?

S: Not much, I think. Because I had already made a lot of films. What I took from it, as I said, was mainly to work calmly and to prepare. I was already doing that. Bergman confirmed for me that it was right. I noticed that even after 45 films he still couldn't sleep at night, anxious about ideas for the next one, carrying a kind of insecurity about the work. That ran through his whole career. I feel it myself. So I became sure there's no need to get rid of that feeling, even once you're very good. It stays with you. It felt good to understand that.

Q: Could you feel his anxiety while shooting the film?

S: Yes. I learned about his sleepless nights and his nightmares in the mornings. But that's how it should be. The day you stop feeling anxious and start feeling comfortable, I think your career is finished. You should quit.

Q: Even after all those sleepless nights, would Bergman still start at 8:30 on the dot?

S: Absolutely. He'd take a nap at midday. That helped a little. I used to do the same, so I was surprised to find that he did too.

Q: Was Bergman harder on himself or on other people?

S: He demanded a lot of himself. He kept to the schedule. It mattered to him. It was really how he survived in a punishing profession. I never knew a time when he wasn't working. When he was writing a script he followed a strict timetable — when to work, rest, listen to music, sleep, all in order. His life may look a little boring, but that was his own choice. He had many children, but I think he saw very little of them. His own work interested him more than anything else. I don't agree with that, because I try to keep family and work in balance. Then again, he made a lot more films than I have. (Laughs.)

Q: The film cost $6 million. Where did most of it go?

S: Mostly the sets and the dressing. All the design and the costumes you see. I think there were about 100 costumes made new. The actresses didn't have just one outfit each; depending on the period and the setting, more like five. And you saw the group photograph of the cast — that cost money too. Back then, unlike now, a lot of things had to be made from scratch. At the time the film set a new record for the cost of a Swedish production.

Q: More than thirty years on, do Bergman's films still reflect the daily experience and inner life of Swedes today?

S: This one does. This year is the centenary of his birth, and Sweden is full of Bergman commemorations. Last Christmas they broadcast the full-length film on television, and the ratings were very high. It wasn't only his fans watching, ordinary people were watching too.

Not every Bergman film speaks to ordinary lives, but Fanny and Alexander is about exactly that. It has also made many people see that Bergman could make films that raise a knowing smile, that it isn't all as dark and oppressive as his other work.

Cover image and photographs in this article: Douban Movie