Barbara Sukowa

“For example, here I see 3 Women from Altman and I remember I absolutely loved that film, but the only thing I really remember was that there was the dress of the one woman, I think of Shelley Duvall, it was always caught in the car, in the door of the car, and that is all that I remember about this woman. So I take that definitely, I haven't seen it in a very long time.”

“Oh, and right next to it is Ingmar Bergman, Scenes from a Marriage. Fantastic film. And I have to say Ingmar Bergman is my greatest professional regret, because I met Ingmar Bergman in Munich. He saw me in the theater and he wanted to do a theater play with me and possibly a film, and I turned him down. I don't know why to this day. I think I was influenced by the man I was living with at the time, he discouraged me. I think he was afraid I might fall in love with him. But Liv Ullmann is just one of the greatest actresses ever.”

“Oh, here is The Leopard. I was doing a film with Cimino, The Sicilian, and so that's why I watched The Leopard. And Cimino had this weird idea, actually great idea, that all the actors in the film, they had to socialize with the people that they were playing. So I remember Joss Ackland had to go in some remote village in Sicily and socialize with the mafia, and I played an aristocrat and I socialized with the aristocrats in Sicily. And so The Leopard was wonderful to watch for that. Yeah, I take that. And Visconti is, of course, visually everything is so, so beautiful.”

“Oh, Husbands. I love that film. It was for me a whole new kind of film when I saw that for the first time. In fact, I used to show that to my students because I was teaching acting for a short time at a conservatory in Germany. I think our film acting in the '70s was still very much influenced by theater, and this was so new, this improvising and a bit gritty, and I really loved that and I wanted my students to see that. And I one day I when I came one of the first times to New York was in '84, I heard that Cassavetes was rehearsing, and a friend of mine here in New York said, "You can come, I can sneak you into the theater." And so I snuck myself into the theater and was sitting at the very end somewhere trying to hide, and I watched the rehearsal and I was really, was very excited. And then they had a break and all of a sudden Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes kind of moved in the direction where I was sitting, and I was saying, "Oh God, oh God, now they're going to discover me and they're going to say something why I'm here." And then Cassavetes said, "Hi, Barbara." And I thought, "What?" And they asked me if I wanted to have lunch with them. And then I had lunch with them, and he was like I imagined he would be, very personal with the actors, very, you know, gave them a lot of space. I liked the way he worked, and he said at the end he would like to work with me, but I think then he passed, you know.”

“Mike Leigh, Naked. That was also an experience that was very new for me, to see that kind of acting, that that kind of going really to the edge. And I met him later because I was with him in the jury in Berlin, he was the president of the jury in the film festival, and I heard and I was talking to him that he did these very, very long rehearsals, which was the opposite of Fassbinder with whom I worked.”

“And I see that there's Berlin Alexanderplatz, that is when I met Fassbinder for the first time. And yeah, he had this thing that he did only ever one take. There was a situation that I remember, I had a scene with Hanna Schygulla and we were in a car, and they had to rig the camera on the car so he couldn't be with us, and so we did the scene without him. I think we were sitting in the car reading a letter, laughing, something like that. And so then the scene was done and he asked us, "So how was it?" And we said, "Yeah." And he said, "You want to have another take?" And we were, "What, another take? We never have the chance to do another take." So we said, "Yeah, of course." We did another take and then we came back and then he said, "So which one do we print?" So we had to decide. It was a way of working that I loved, but very different, I think probably the opposite of Mike Leigh.”

“La strada. Fassbinder told me to watch before we did Berlin Alexanderplatz, and I think he wanted me to see Giulietta Masina and maybe her clownesque way of acting, that is something that he thought had something to do with the role that I was then playing in Alexanderplatz. What I love is the simplicity of this film, the simplicity of the story, the I you don't need any special effect, you don't need any fancy cameras, it's just to look into the eyes of this person and to see these people interact with each other. Yeah, Giulietta Masina, also one of the great ones.”