Face to Face: Liv Ull­mann on her life with Ing­mar Bergman

Hav­ing starred in 10 of his films and direct­ed two of his screen­plays, the career of Nor­we­gian actor Liv Ull­mann is indeli­bly syn­ony­mous with the films of Ing­mar Bergman. His lover and muse for what was arguably his great­est run of films, Ull­mann first worked with the Swedish mae­stro on his island home of Farö in 1966.

The result­ing film, Per­sona, might just be his crown­ing achieve­ment, but theirs was a work­ing rela­tion­ship that last­ed long after the romance kin­dled that sum­mer end­ed, right up to his final film in 2003. With a com­plete, three month ret­ro­spec­tive of Bergman’s cin­e­ma cur­rent­ly under­way at London’s BFI South­bank, in his cen­te­nary year, we sat down with one of the great­est liv­ing actors in world cin­e­ma to dis­cuss­es their fruit­ful yet com­pli­cat­ed kinship.

LWLies: You must have been inter­viewed about your time with Bergman hun­dreds of times over the years.

Ull­mann: I real­ly don’t mind because some­times you do hear new things. It helps me to con­tin­ue to under­stand what won­der­ful lug­gage he gave me, espe­cial­ly now that I’m start­ing to look more at his writ­ing than his movies. I’m find­ing this new Bergman who shouldn’t be new for me, but still is. Just this incred­i­ble writ­ing and recog­ni­tion of peo­ple. Even when I’m being inter­viewed about some­thing that has noth­ing to do with Bergman, it always seems to come back to him. I did com­plain about that to him, and he said those famous words, ​‘You are my Stradivarius!’

What have you found to be the most com­mon mis­con­cep­tions through the years about your pro­fes­sion­al and per­son­al relationship?

I wouldn’t know about mis­con­cep­tions, but I’m sure there are many. I’m often asked how I feel about hav­ing to talk for him, but I feel I’m a very nat­ur­al per­son to do that. When he was alive and used to can­cel engage­ments at the very last minute, it was always me that end­ed up going there. He real­ly didn’t mind because I worked so close­ly with him as a direc­tor and as an actor, and because I knew him so well as a friend and, for some years, as a lover. When you know some­one as a lover, you get to know things about the per­son that oth­ers don’t know. So I like doing it.

When it comes to him, he liked to fol­low what I did. With Bibi Ander­s­son and Har­ri­et Ander­s­son – these incred­i­ble genius­es that he worked with – he did not like it when they went abroad. Even if they did good things. He said to Max von Sydow, ​‘Max, why are you ruin­ing your career?’ But for some rea­son he liked when I did it. I think he recog­nised the same shy­ness in meet­ing peo­ple that he felt him­self. He would get so excit­ed, trav­el­ling to New York for just one night when I was on stage there, hap­py for me to do the things he per­haps wished he could do too.

Has your mem­o­ry of that time been affect­ed by the telling of it over 50-odd years? You said once that you have to be selec­tive with your memories…

When did I say that?

In an inter­view a few years back.

I think that was because my daugh­ter came out with a book. She’s a won­der­ful writer, but she’s very selec­tive in her mem­o­ries of her child­hood. At first I was very upset about it, but her mem­o­ries are not my mem­o­ries. My mem­o­ries are also selec­tive in the way I would like things to be and the way they prob­a­bly were. Also, the way they nev­er were. Maybe I should say that too because that would explain more about my feelings.

In your sec­ond mem­oir, Choic­es, you write about a lover describ­ing your time with Bergman to you, describ­ing your own expe­ri­ence to you. He called you a ​‘fairy tale princess locked in a cas­tle.’ It must be a strange feel­ing, hav­ing a lived expe­ri­ence roman­ti­cised or mythol­o­gised by oth­er peo­ple who weren’t a part of it.

I think we have a ten­den­cy to do that our­selves, not only to be able to write about it, but to be able to live with those mem­o­ries. Writ­ing is about get­ting your soul down on paper, and once it’s there, it real­ly is you because it comes from your soul. That’s what Ing­mar real­ly believed in, that if you can get it down on paper, then on film, that film comes clos­er to your soul than, for exam­ple, you and I talk­ing now. It has recog­ni­tion from the souls of the audi­ence. I didn’t always see how incred­i­ble he was as a writer until I start­ed to work with his writ­ing myself, as a direc­tor. It wasn’t until I adapt­ed Pri­vate Con­fes­sions for the stage that I realised how good the writ­ing was, even after hav­ing already made the film.

I don’t even know what our rela­tion­ship is any more. It was 45 years ago that we were roman­ti­cal­ly involved, but I do know that it was against every­thing that I thought I knew was right. I got divorced, I had a child out of wed­lock, my Chris­t­ian fam­i­ly didn’t want to see me any more. I was on this island that was his safe­ty but didn’t real­ly feel like mine. But I also knew incred­i­ble times where I’d nev­er felt so safe, and so real, look­ing into someone’s eyes and know­ing that I was recog­nised. Not just that he recog­nised me, but that when we looked into each other’s eyes, he knew that he was recog­nised too.

I knew that what­ev­er hap­pened to us, even when I left and knew I wasn’t com­ing back, that it would be for the rest of my life. I do feel that the friend­ship we kept, that was there until he died, was built on a romance that was prob­a­bly dif­fer­ent to how I remem­ber it now. I see pic­tures that I have no mem­o­ry of being tak­en, where I’m asleep in a chair and he just pass­es by and soft­ly touch­es me. I know that we real­ly were entwined. Obvi­ous­ly oth­er peo­ple could say the same, but it doesn’t cut into mine.

Dheer­aj Akolkar’s 2012 doc­u­men­tary, Liv & Ing­mar, cuts togeth­er sequences from the films with your rec­ol­lec­tions of that time. It makes the films appear explic­it­ly auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal. Do you see them the same way?

I real­ly like that movie, and I like the young direc­tor, but I do not agree with peo­ple hear­ing my sto­ry and see­ing the vio­lence [from Scenes from a Mar­riage]. Ing­mar was not vio­lent. He had a lot of stuff, I’m sure, but he was not vio­lent. I didn’t under­stand how it could look like that until I saw the fin­ished movie. The vio­lence is hap­pen­ing with­in you, and it’s awful, but there’s no kick­ing and screaming.

When you hate some­one, your anger or your dis­sat­is­fac­tion with that per­son is far worse than the vio­lence of some­one kick­ing you. It’s so hor­ri­ble because it’s so dif­fi­cult to get rid of. The strange thing about this movie is that when­ev­er I’m trav­el­ling with a film, audi­ences always ask about Ing­mar. With this one, an incred­i­ble thing hap­pened. No one got up and asked about Ing­mar, no one got up and asked about me. They all got up and talked about them­selves. Even with all that vio­lence that looks like it could be Ing­mar and me, it opened up some­thing in them and they talked about themselves.

Read­ing your two mem­oirs, the way you write about the end of your rela­tion­ship with both Ing­mar and the lat­er lover real­ly brought to mind the end­ing of A Doll’s House. It’s clear­ly a play that’s meant a lot to you through the years. Were there ever any plans to film it?

I had the film. I had a great script. I had Cate Blanchett for more than a year, and we had Amer­i­can mon­ey. Then she couldn’t do it because she was hav­ing a baby, so I had Kate Winslet who stayed with it for almost two years. I had all the loca­tions, but in the end I just got real­ly angry that it was going in so many dif­fer­ent direc­tions, so I just jumped off.

Could it ever come back?

I don’t think I’ll ever direct again. I love work­ing with actors, I real­ly do, but it’s tough to be a woman direc­tor. It’s tough to be my age and a woman direc­tor. Not with the actors but with the tech­ni­cal peo­ple. With the line pro­duc­er, with the cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er. No, I’ve decid­ed I won’t do that.

The play has real polit­i­cal res­o­nance now espe­cial­ly. It’s sad to think that it was writ­ten some 140 years ago and so lit­tle has changed.

It’s anoth­er rea­son why I don’t want to direct again. I have to dance around. Not danc­ing in and out of hotel rooms, but danc­ing around to sat­is­fy men so they don’t get angry. As a woman, I think I have to try to be nice and pleas­ant to get respect from men. Oth­er­wise, I might get angry and ruin it for myself. I was brought up to be old-fash­ioned, and then came women’s lib­er­a­tion. My gen­er­a­tion was in the mid­dle, and a lot of won­der­ful women are hap­py to stay there. I try so hard not to dance, but I still dance. It’s impor­tant for me to say that a lot of women are so hor­ri­bly treat­ed in dif­fer­ent African coun­tries. It’s easy to for­get that it’s not just us priv­i­leged women that have been abused, there are so many more in much poor­er coun­tries that under­go dai­ly abuse for their family’s sur­vival. I think it needs to be more on the agen­da than it is.

You have a long­stand­ing rela­tion­ship with Haiti espe­cial­ly. The com­ments from the man in charge about ​“shit­hole” coun­tries last week must have hurt.

The man in charge is fill­ing every­one with such hate. Even going on an air­plane, it feels like every­one is much more aggres­sive. You can’t talk with such hate with­out it affect­ing a coun­try soon­er or lat­er. Of course it hurts inside the Unit­ed States, but it hurts the peo­ple he’s talk­ing about a lot more. It’s real­ly scary, this mes­sage of hate he’s sending.

The Emi­grants should be manda­to­ry view­ing for his administration.

Well yeah, espe­cial­ly now that’s he’s so into Nor­way. Actu­al­ly, that was Swedish, but still. We’ve talked about anger in Ingmar’s films and that doc­u­men­tary, but Mr Trump’s anger is just anger at peo­ple and frus­tra­tion at who he is himself.

There’s a line that Bergman wrote for Hour of the Wolf that goes, ​“When a woman lives long enough with a man, she becomes like him.” Do you agree with that? In what ways did you and Bergman become like each other?

I think we were alike, which is very strange because we were also so dif­fer­ent. He’s nev­er acknowl­edged this, but I nev­er took parts from Har­ri­et or Bibi. I was him. Not in Scenes from a Mar­riage, per­haps, but I was very much him. We were twin souls. It was the safe­ty of a hand. We always end­ed our let­ters with, ​‘My Hand.’ We both had a grand­moth­er that we loved dear­ly. Ingmar’s used to take him to these incred­i­ble won­der­lands, and he’d describe them to me in the evenings. He always said, ​‘My whole life was about try­ing to get back to those won­der­lands that my grand­moth­er would tell me about.’ That’s what he did. That’s what his images are about, images that you’ll nev­er forget.

Your char­ac­ters always feel so deeply inhab­it­ed. Do you find it easy let­ting them go? Do you ever think about their lives once you’ve left them?

They were nev­er hard to let go because they were just char­ac­ters. Ing­mar would nev­er explain what they were about or jump into your fan­ta­sy. You’d read the script, then you’d cre­ate some­thing and he’d say, ​‘Lit­tle more, lit­tle less.’ What I do remem­ber are mag­i­cal moments where he didn’t say very much. I remem­ber a scene where I had to com­mit sui­cide and him just watch­ing. The only thing I heard him say to some­one was, ​‘You did remem­ber to switch the pills for sug­ar pills?’ He knew what he did, but it added to the ten­sion when the cam­era was rolling hav­ing that in my mind. It was exciting!

Was there ever any con­flict between his idea of a char­ac­ter while he was writ­ing and your inter­pre­ta­tion, or was he com­plete­ly open to what­ev­er you’d give?

No, he wouldn’t allow a dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tion, but I didn’t have those con­flicts with him some­how. He knew who he was writ­ing for. The only time I real­ly expe­ri­enced it was with Ingrid Bergman, and that was pret­ty tough. They hat­ed each oth­er on Autumn Sonata. I had this three page mono­logue of all the awful things she’d done to me as a moth­er. Incred­i­ble lines. Obvi­ous­ly, I had some idea of how to do it, as an actress. I had to do all my lines first while she just stood there, tak­ing it. I did it, and it came out pret­ty good, but Ingrid was shocked, even though the cam­era wasn’t on her.

When it turned around, she said, ​‘I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to say those lines. I want to smack her.’ She screamed, and he screamed, and they screamed at each oth­er. They went out to the cor­ri­dor and screamed some more, and we thought, ​‘The movie’s over!’ That’s when you protest. They were his lines, and they had to be his lines. Final­ly they came in, genius and actress, genius hav­ing won. She did the scene, but if you look at her face, that hatred – at hav­ing to say the lines – is real. No won­der she was nom­i­nat­ed for an Oscar. He loved it. It wasn’t what he want­ed, but it was what he got, and was bet­ter than he’d imagined.

He trust­ed his words, and that’s what was excit­ing. If you’re hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with some­one, and you’re expect­ing an cer­tain answer said a cer­tain way, it’s no fun. It’s more excit­ing to say ​‘I love you’ to some­one when you don’t know know what the answer back will be. Ing­mar would nev­er say, ​‘Your inter­pre­ta­tion was wrong.’ You don’t give an inter­pre­ta­tion, you give from the heart.

Ibsen wasn’t quite so lucky. He was told to change the entire end­ing of A Doll’s House when his actress complained…

And he did it! But Ing­mar nev­er changed a word. Truth is who­ev­er is say­ing it, and he knew that. My biggest mis­take in my life was turn­ing down Fan­ny and Alexan­der. I said no because he told me it was a com­e­dy. Max did the same. He re-wrote my part, which was prob­a­bly the best part I could have had from him. For almost a year while he was shoot­ing and edit­ing the movie, it was the first and only time we were not friends. He wrote me let­ters call­ing me ​“Miss Ull­mann.” It was ter­ri­ble. He asked me to come and see it when it was fin­ished, and I sat at his side cry­ing and cry­ing. I heard from the Stock­holm Archive that in his man­u­script from that time, he’d writ­ten in sev­er­al places, ​“I’m so angry at you Liv!”

I’ve always thought of you as one of cinema’s great lis­ten­ers. Some of the strongest moments in the Bergman films come from you just lis­ten­ing. At the piano in Autumn Sonata. When Erland Joseph­son tells you of his affair in Scenes From a Mar­riage. That incred­i­ble shot in Pas­sion of Anna. You write in your book about not using your own per­son­al mem­o­ries to access emo­tion, so can you talk a lit­tle about your process?

I’m not a char­ac­ter actress. I can’t just put on a nose or be Richard III. I’m still using Liv and my expe­ri­ences, allow­ing them to come out through me. Some­how. I can’t explain it. Oth­er actors have meth­ods. I had an inter­view­er years ago who seemed to like me as an actress, but he said I wasn’t an actress but just this human emo­tion walk­ing around. Maybe I am, I don’t know, but that’s also what being an actor is. It’s the only place where I feel safe and good.

Those char­ac­ters couldn’t be more different.

It’s the words, and what’s hap­pen­ing through them. I have that in me. I have a lot of anger, a lot of bad stuff in me. A lot of stuff that I nev­er get to use. A lot of things are hap­pen­ing in my soul when I’m by myself. I read a lot and I meet a lot of peo­ple, see movies that have noth­ing to do with me. Two men lov­ing each oth­er, I know what that’s all about when I see it, even if it’s nev­er been my expe­ri­ence. If you ask me to do that, I can do it because I recog­nise it. Once I recog­nise it with­in me, it some­how comes out. In Pas­sion of Anna, where I’m lying all the time, I told Ing­mar that I nev­er lied. Of course I do, but that’s not what I told him. So he makes this movie about Anna, who lies a lot. There’s that long close-up, he longest he ever did at that point, I think – eight min­utes or some­thing – I had no idea that I’m blush­ing because she knows she’s lying. He just kept the cam­era going, kept the close-up when it was sup­posed to go some­where else. I’m a sieve, and a lot of actors are like that. It’s hard to explain.

Which must make it espe­cial­ly hard when you don’t have Bergman’s words, but still need to find the char­ac­ter. Sor­ry to bring it up, but I just saw Lost Horizon…

Haha. That wasn’t act­ing! I was in Hol­ly­wood! The same for the oth­er actors there too. It wasn’t act­ing, I don’t know what it was, but it was fun. I was the only one who just had fun, I think. I know Burt Bacharach had a ner­vous break­down. For me it was just an adven­ture. I was 30 years old and in Hol­ly­wood. Same with that 40 Carats. How can I act that? I was 30 and could bare­ly speak Eng­lish, but was sup­posed to be a 40 year old, sophis­ti­cat­ed New York­er, falling in love with a 20 year old, but they gave me this won­der­ful actor the same age as me.

Every­thing was wrong. It was Liv try­ing to be an actor in a Hol­ly­wood movie, but I was so hor­ri­bly mis­cast, there was no truth there. But then the same year, I got a won­der­ful script with Gene Hack­man and maybe I was bad but I had a great time. That was act­ing, it was a char­ac­ter. It only counts when your soul is part of it, and what­ev­er soul I had with Lost Hori­zon, I was in a Hol­ly­wood movie and got to dance with Gene Kel­ly, and it was nobody’s fault but my own.

It’s sur­pris­ing you nev­er worked with Woody Allen dur­ing that peri­od. Weren’t you guys dat­ing at one point?

He only dat­ed me to get to Ing­mar, to hear about Ing­mar Bergman. We didn’t date, we just went for din­ner. To him, every­thing Ing­mar was Ing­mar. I was Ing­mar! Have you heard about their meeting?

I have, but I’d love to hear it from you.

This is 100 per cent the truth. We went for din­ner, and he didn’t drink alco­hol at the time, but I did. It was always, ​‘Ing­mar, Ing­mar, Ing­mar.’ I said, ​‘Ing­mar wants to come and see me in A Doll’s House,’ and he was all, ​‘Oh my god, do you think I can meet him?’ So I phoned Ing­mar on his island and said, ​‘Woody Allen would like to meet you, do you want me to arrange it?’ He came to see the mat­inée of A Doll’s House and was leav­ing the next day. He was stay­ing at the Pierre Hotel and came with his wife and agreed to the meet­ing. So my next din­ner with Woody, I said, ​‘Oh, Ing­mar would real­ly like to meet you.’ So after the play, Woody wait­ed out­side the the­atre and took me in his lim­ou­sine to the hotel. He was so ner­vous he was shak­ing. This was his idol, real­ly his idol. Woody was prob­a­bly Ingmar’s idol too, but Ing­mar would nev­er say that out loud. We take the ele­va­tor up, knock on the door, and Woody and Ing­mar just look at each other.

We go in to the table where some­one is serv­ing us food, and I swear to god, they did not talk. Bergman’s wife and I didn’t have much in com­mon, so we spoke about food, while the men just stared at each oth­er. At the end of the meal, Woody says, ​‘Thank you Mr Bergman,’ and we left. Out­side, Woody says to me, ​‘Thank you Liv, what an hon­our!’ When I got home, I called Ing­mar, who said, ​‘Thank you Liv, what an hon­our!’ As far as I know, they nev­er spoke again. Genius­es are very care­ful around each oth­er. When two meet, you have to be very careful.

The Ing­mar Bergman cen­te­nary ret­ro­spec­tive runs at BFI South­bank until the end of March.