Shame

“So I’ve just been given the best gift ever. This– I thought the Pasolini box set was going to do it for me. This is it! This is the complete Bergman. Wow. This is the filmmaker that, if you are interested in the interior landscape of our psyche and the fullest exploration of where that can take you in the cinema form, this is the crown jewel. This is the best. So here I am, I’m just gonna walk out with… I’m just gonna finish with these two things. Two box sets by… I’m kind of overwhelmed. Thank you.”

“Bergman. Bergman. Come on, come on. It’s all about humanity’s condition. It’s all about being in a psychiatric ward.”

“This immense collection. Quite fantastic and really heavy. And you could use it in your workout. Bergman also was one of the greats for anybody who felt that film was art. And, in particular, Hour of the Wolf, a very, very dark, depressing film, which was great, had a special meaning for me because, when I was making my film The Fly, there was a moment when the Jeff Goldblum character, who has now sort of fused with the fly DNA and has strange physical capabilities, could climb up onto a wall and hang from a ceiling. And I remembered that Bergman had done that in Hour of the Wolf, a scene with a man who is experiencing such anguish that his anguish allows him to walk up a wall and onto a ceiling. And I was wondering, “How did he do that physically?” because now I was going to do the same thing in a science-fiction movie with quite a different tone. And so I watched Hour of the Wolf again. And so I felt a kinship with Bergman and I think John Landis told me when he went to Bergman’s house on his island, his special Swedish island, that amongst his collection of DVDs there was a DVD of The Fly. So I thought, “Okay, Bergman and I, we are… we are blood brothers. We are connected.” So this huge, immense collection will go into this quite small bag.”

“Okay, do we have… Ingmar Bergman? This is too much. This is very great. This is… The Seventh Seal I liked. I remember that. The Magician… Virgin Spring. You can’t go wrong with this. All of them. Persona was a big hit. Look at the body of work that he did. I look forward to sitting at home watching that on a rainy night or whatever. Or a hot night. Whatever night. Be special. Well, I can’t thank you enough.”

“But I want to make sure I get the Bergman set because also he is a huge inspiration to me and all the women in his films. Oh, wait. I can have this? I love Persona. I watch Persona a lot. I love that kind of transference. And the– so beautifully shot.”

“Okay, I will say, I did, I feel incredibly special, and I did not just pull this off of the shelf at random. This is like a kind of a comprehensive Bergman collection. I think when I was like maybe 18, somebody gifted me the Fanny and Alexander Box Set, and it was one of those experiences where sometimes you watch a movie and you immediately love it, like All That Jazz, where you go, this is like someone's looking inside my brain, and that was not that experience, but it was something challenging, like it was something that touched a part of me that was untouched, or that was too sensitive to touch. I remember even watching interviews with him where he would talk about, late in his life, talk about how he still was terrified of death and had not resolved that, and particularly as someone who was like a teenager at the time, that was very unsettling to hear, 'cause you want to hear that people, as they get older, become okay and accepting of death. And it's like even in his interviews, and certainly in his art, it's like he's incapable of telling lies to keep himself comfortable, and certainly to keep you comfortable. And it sent me down this journey, and now he is one of, if not my favorite directors. I think Winter Light is probably my favorite Bergman film, if I had to choose. I also particularly adore Cries and Whispers. The production design, the performance are wonderful, but there's this scene where these two sisters have this kind of come to Jesus, and then at the end of the trip, as they're departing, one of the sisters is like, I'm so glad that we had that moment and we've kind of had this breakthrough, and the other sister goes, I mean I'm translating from Swedish so it's not this, she's like, oh God, I know, that was so silly, that was ridiculous, anyway, it was so good to see you. And it's just, it makes you want to never speak to another human being, and then it also makes you realize that that's the only thing worth doing, like to curl up in a ball out of that fear of being distanced and rejected is not a way to live. I just, I love this man, I love this man, and I love you guys so much for pulling this out for me.”

“The Bergman here. I come across with Bergman at a very young age, at 16 years old. Like I saw his The Silence in Cinematheque in Istanbul. It was just a surprise because like the films I saw before, before The Silence, the cinema just like an entertainment for me. But with this movie I, I understood that the cinema is something else. You can put all your problems, all your sicknesses, everything in, in a movie. And after that, I watched all Bergman movies one by one. I searched for them. But in those days, it was not easy. And there was no videotapes and there was no Cinematheque, it's closed after the I watched it. And, but somehow I went New York and sometimes London to watch the other movies of Bergman.”

“Which, which would you rather have? This is not, no, no, I think the Bergman. Okay, we can decide later. I'm just your sherpa then. Yeah.”

“[Translated] And, well, there you go. I have the complete Bergman in my hands, as I completely owe him my entire career, because without him, I would've never become a filmmaker.”

“Now one thing that is interesting when I saw this Bergman stuff here, which I'm going to take, I'm going to open. Oh, this may break my back, I, but I'm going to put it in here because it's important to put in there. We'll sort out the transportation later. But when I made Brothers Grimm, and there was Bergman, one of my great heroes. Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, they all were wondrous films that I'd hoped one day to be able to make something even a fraction as good as that. But making Brothers Grimm, Peter Stormare, who plays a main character in the film, had worked with Bergman. He knew him really well. In fact, Bergman had directed, redirected him in Hamlet on stage. And he said to me as we worked on Brothers Grimm, "This is like working with Ingmar." Which is funny because everybody assumes Ingmar Bergman is a very serious, solemn man. And Peter said, "No, Ingmar, we laughed the whole time." And that, I thought, there's moments like that when you realize, oh, maybe I, I can do some, this kind of work. I don't have to be as serious as I thought you had to be. You can have fun and direct.”

“To get back a little bit on to the lighter side and, oddly, Ingmar Bergman, the majority of Bergman’s movies are really actually of lighter character. There is one that I specifically like, and it’s in this heavy and hefty collection: The Devil’s Eye. The devil has an eye infection and he always gets a stye if there is a… a virgin on Earth who shouldn’t be a virgin. So he employs Don Juan, who is in hell, and he says, “Go and seduce her.” The way this woman or this girl, rather, played by Bibi Andersson, resists Don Juan’s approaches and resists Don Juan’s seduction is extraordinary, because she does it out of conviction, out of joy. So Don Juan is actually completely desperate because it’s the first failure that he had to suffer through. And so I recommend it for the joyful private resistance of the leading lady.”

“To let people know that we have seen a foreign film we’ll both pick Bergman’s collection. One of my favorites, though, is Through a Glass Darkly, a terrifying and dark film about a woman who has mental illness, and it’s tragic, but it’s beautiful. Ooh. And it’s just… There’s not a lot of films, to me, that are about mental illness that are from that era, I guess, but even now, that just lay things so bare and uncomfortable things in it, for sure. But I think that discomfort is part of it. The Seventh Seal is in this, and that’s my mom’s favorite movie. Really? Yeah. She used to describe it to me when I was a kid. Do we get to keep this? Ooh. Oh, wow. Man, that is awesome. I’m so happy about that. Thank you.”

“So I was handed this just now because I came in and very selfishly asked if I could have a box set of all of Bergman’s classics. Almost all of them, I hear. Almost all of them. But my first love, from afar, was Liv Ullmann. And so she, in a way, turned me on to… indirectly turned me on to Ingmar Bergman’s films. I’ve… I will never forget seeing her act for the first time, and I remember thinking, “I wonder if I could ever get away with the kind of acting that she’s getting away with,” in these films, being directed by Bergman. That led me to the rest of his movies, which I’m sure you all know out there. They’re incredible. So, this is now mine. Thank you very much.”