Decoding Ingmar Bergman’s hesitation to making a Hollywood movie: “It could be very difficult”
Cinema has always been a global phenomenon, but the divides between nations used to be a lot clearer and more well-defined than they are now, even if that wasn’t the reason behind Ingmar Bergman never crossing the pond to try his hand at cracking America.
Not that he needed to, when he’s remembered as one of the most innovative and influential auteurs to ever step behind the camera, but it’s not as if he was entirely against the idea. These days, filmmakers from all walks of life can make a movie in any country that allows them to, but it wasn’t quite as straightforward when the Swedish icon was reinventing the medium.
In the broadest sense, Hollywood existed as its own entity, and it was the place where the biggest and splashiest films were made. Everything else tended to get lumped into the ‘international’ bracket, whether it was Bergman’s native country, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, or anywhere else.
A rather unfair generalisation, but the success enjoyed by Bergman and Akira Kurosawa to name just two of the all-time greats displayed beyond doubt that to become one of the most respected directors in the history of the moving image, a detour to Los Angeles wasn’t a requirement.
He did flirt with the idea, though, which made sense for somebody who admitted they were a great deal more enamoured with ‘New Hollywood’ than they were the ‘French New Wave’. It would have been quite the sight to see Bergman, of all people, pitching up in the sunny climes of California to make a picture, but he never took the plunge.
Sure, he didn’t have to, but he had a deeply ingrained love of American cinema that dated back to his earliest days, with Stateside megaphone-wielders having been instrumental in his filmic upbringing. “I very much admire the American way of filmmaking,” Bergman admitted to William Wolf. “It’s very vital and extremely stimulating, and American directors have taught me a lot.”
In the 1930s, Bergman revealed he’d go and watch “two or three movies a day,” naming Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and George Cukor as inspirations. That’s especially interesting because the first two of that trio were born in Austria and Germany, respectively, with the third born in Manhattan to Hungarian immigrant parents.
And yet, they ended up becoming about as Hollywood as it gets. Wilder mastered the screwball comedy, Lubitsch specialised in romance and light-hearted comedy, while Cukor worked with the biggest stars of the ‘Golden Age’ and helmed arguably the definitive Tinseltown epic in Gone with the Wind.
All three of them were of European descent, they ended up in America, and conquered the cinematic landscape. Bergman could have joined them if he wanted to, but the way he explained his reluctance, it certainly makes it sound as though he was concerned he’d end up doing his immaculate filmography a disservice by taking on something completely brand new and wildly different from anything he’d done before.
“To go to America, to live there, to make a picture with American actors and in American studios could be a marvellous, exciting experience, but just an experience,” he mused. “It could be very difficult, like going to Japan and trying to make a samurai picture.” There was absolutely nothing stopping him from giving it the old college try, except maybe his own self-consciousness.
Furthering that point, he then pointed to Woody Allen’s Interiors as an example of what can happen when “an American director tries to make a picture in European style” before running into “great difficulties” when they do. Not to try and put words into the mouth of one of the best to ever do it, but was he a little scared?
Of course, it’s borderline blasphemy to say such things about the mastermind behind The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Persona, and many more, but it may well carry a bit of weight. After all, he was Ingmar Bergman and that would be more than enough to have Hollywood welcome him with open arms, but it can’t be overlooked that he used the word “difficult” more than once.
