Liv Ullmann, the recipient of the Sarasota Film Festival’s 2008 Master of Cinema Award and the star or director of a dozen films on the Festival schedule, sat down with Sony Pictures Classics president Michael Barker last night for a chat before a packed and fawning crowd.
Dressed in a low-cut black pantsuit bracketed by diamond earrings and killer heels, quick with self-deprecating quips and eager to offer candid, perfectly paced anecdotes, her faded Noweigian accent occasionally taking on the lilting cadences of a woman a third her age (she’s a big fan of the word “whatever”), Ullmann came off as loquaciously eccentric and yet completely clear-eyed about past, present and future. Paying special attention to Ullmann’s triumphs with Ingmar Bergman and failures in 70s Hollywood, Barker and Ullmann traced the actress/directors career from the making of Persona to the psychic impulse that led her to visit Bergman on his death bed. Highlights after the jump.
On her pre-Bergman acting career: When Ullmann was 18, she was up for a part as a “woman of the streets” in a a Norweigan film. The director asked if she was a virgin, and she lied and said she wasn’t in order to get the job. Though her family objected to the film’s scandalous content, Ullmann says it wasn’t that racy. “You could see just a little half of the Ullmann breast.”
On Persona: Ullmann says she didn’t understand her first film for Bergman until she watched it again twenty years after it was made. “I think if I had spoken, it wasn’t going to be so good.”
On Shame: “One of the greatest anti-war films ever made…I wish it could be shown now, when we are very occupied with a war.”
On her brief sojourn in Hollywood: “My career in Hollywood was kind of strange. They thought [I] was the new Greta Garbo. But I did something Greta Garbo could never do.” After the one-two punch of the epic disaster Lost Horizon (a Capra remake fashioned as a sci-fi musical with songs by Burt Bacharach) and the equally unpopular sex comedy 40 Carats, Ullmann says, “All the executives at Columbia had to leave after those two movies!”
Next came two films at Warner Brothers: Zandy’s Wedding and The Abdication. It was the latter that ended Ullmann’s Hollywood run. “They chose to say it was the worst film ever made, because it came out in the States the same day as Scenes From A Marriage and that was so successful. [So] there was two for Warner Brothers, and all those executives had to leave. So I went home.”
On shooting Saraband, Bergman’s last film, a vague sequel to Scenes From a Marriage, and his only foray into digital production: “He didn’t understand [the digital process] at all. Usually Ingmar would be sitting by the camera, so you’d play to the camera and you’d be playing to him, and it was the greatest audience of your life. But because of the new system, he had to be across the room [watching on a monitor]…but because we were so close, it was like there were smoke signals between us.”
On the one Bergman film she wishes she had been in: “I did one big mistake in my life: saying no to Fanny & Alexander. I’m not good at reading scripts, as you can see.”
On her last visit with Bergman: “I suddenly knew…I don’t normally do that, and I knew I had to [see him] immediately. As it happened, it was his last day, and it was incredible because I managed to say, ‘Thank you for everything you have done for my life.’”
On Bergman’s unproduced works: “There are scripts that Ingmar made that haven’t been done, but no one would be able to get the rights. And for other reasons, I wouldn’t produce them. They really belong to Ingmar.”
Originally posted on:
SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth