Objectively, it should be clear that what today's directors lack is not talent but the type of access to mainstream audiences that Bergman enjoyed. But Bergman seemed almost magisterial in his silence, aloof from the grubby concerns of commerce and celebrity; press interviews with the director, never plentiful to begin with, all but ceased some years ago. It was easy to imagine his movie career had been as unsullied.
The publication last month of a hagiographic profile in the Swedish magazine Expressen, however, prompts a necessary correction to that image. On the set of his theatrical production of Schiller's Maria Stuart, Bergman spoke with reporter Jan Lindström, repeating familiar pronouncements on some of his favorite subjects: art, women, actors. Less expected are a few startling comments on his quasi-former profession. "I have abandoned, after all, the branch of butchery and whoring," Bergman says early on. When Lindström asks for clarification, Bergman "firmly" replies, "Yes, filmmaking."
One readily expects this kind of bitter summation of the movie industry from battle-scarred Hollywood veterans ruefully contemplating their underutilized and overly compromised twilight careers. ("The saying is they can kill you but not eat you. That's nonsense. I've had them eating on me while I was still walking around"--Sam Peckinpah.) Coming from the dean of European auteurs, on the other hand, it comes as something of a shock. Though Bergman talks later on of keeping up with the state of Swedish film, viewing movies each afternoon in a private movie theater, the undeniable impression is that he's a better man for finally being free of that madhouse.
To some extent this is a manifestation of Bergman's long-standing romanticizing of the stage. (Bergman speaks in the interview of sharing a "mutual circulatory system" with the walls of his theater.) A less romanticized view of Bergman himself, however, might recall that the director knew quite a bit about "butchery and whoring" when he was making his films.
Consider Cries and Whispers, the director's most financially successful release in America. As Bergman tells it in his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, the film was having trouble finding U.S. distribution until finally, "in the end, a small firm specializing in horror films and soft porn took pity on us": a quintessential Bergman aside in its false modesty and the implied confession of depending upon others to do the dirty work. That small firm, given no further mention by Bergman, was Roger Corman's New World, and Corman has a somewhat different view of the events in his own memoir, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime: "[Bergman] had financed Cries and Whispers himself. I heard a story that he had divided up the world into its normal percentages of grosses. For example, Australia, he might have computed, was a 3 percent country--that's how much of world grosses came from there. And so he wanted all his money back from distributors in each country."
Such hard-nosed tactics, and the intransigency of demanding full payment, certainly don't sound like a hapless artist lured into whoring himself--more the brutal absolutism of a pimp. The stuffy diffidence of Bergman's account, his refusal to identify himself as such an astute and demanding businessman, contrasts tellingly with Corman's chipper admiration for the art of the deal. And it was precisely that love for money that led Corman to open Bergman's esoteric art film in drive-ins, to push it on theaters that never played foreign movies, to promote and proselytize and even bully until the movie had shown a nice profit and walked away with an Academy Award.
There are now, and there always will be, more than enough film artists who are the equal of Bergman. What we are desperately in need of these days are more money men with the vision and glamour of Corman.
