23/05/2023 - CANNES 2023: The celebrated Norwegian cinema legend is the main subject of an elaborate documentary about her life and work

When Liv Ullmann, regarded as one of the great European cinema names on both sides of the camera, recently got an honorary Oscar, she called up “her” director Dheeraj Akolkar with the words “This is great for our film!” The result, an elaborate and personal documentary called Liv Ullmann – A Road Less Travelled [+see also:
trailer
interview: Liv Ullmann
film profile] has its world premiere in Cannes’ Cannes Classics section. The celebrated namesake of the film herself also had time for an enlightening little talk during her Croisette visit.

Cineuropa: The film brings many interesting aspects of your journey through work and life. One is that your earliest work on the screen – well before Ingmar Bergman – was with female directors, especially Edith Carlmar from Norway – and at a time when this was a highly male domain. Did this in any way affect your choice to direct yourself many years later?
Liv Ullmann: Even at my first stage job, playing Anne Frank, I had a female director. They were wonderful, it felt like they could read a woman’s mind. And as I started out with female directors and didn’t know of any difference, I just said “Yes, this is just right.” But after that I hardly ever worked with female directors. But I’ve become one myself, and I learned so much from those I met way back then. Me and Edith were close friends for the rest of her life.

We also get great footage and stories from your days in Hollywood, where you went through your work with Ingmar Bergman in Persona and Cries and Whispers and with Jan Troell in The Emigrants. Through the legendary agent Paul Kohner, you were given parts in some big productions, co-starring with Gene Kelly, John Gielgud and Gene Hackman to name a few…
…and I almost put Columbia Pictures out of business with some of those films. They put me in a musical even though I couldn’t sing nor dance, Lost Horizon – which is on the list of the 50 worst films ever. But I mean, working with Gielgud and Charles Boyer… I was proud to do it – and even getting a toilet seat the size of a throne in my house on the set. I’m so grateful to Paul and his wife for taking care of this young Norwegian girl with a strong accent doing some wrong choices. It was fun, I got great friends and could go home and do movies with Bergman or theatre in London. It was a good life.

You also mention a part you decided not to choose, the part of Emilie, the mother in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. What happened there?
Yes, what happened? And Max von Sydow turned down the bishop part and I don’t know why. Ingmar told me he was writing this new film, full of comedy that I would love. Then the script arrived – and she’s just sad. And then I wanted to show him my independence, these things that women do sometimes, and said no. He got so upset. He phoned me up and informed me that I had foregone my thespian birth-rights. Then we became friends again. The two of us saw the film before the premiere in a screening room in Sweden. I held his hand and cried. Yeah, that was a stupid choice I made. But she was lovely, the one he got instead, beautiful. He rewrote the part because she was younger than me. But in the script that is now in the Bergman Foundation archives, there are notes to be seen in the margin, saying things like “Dammit, Liv – why aren’t you here for this?!”

A few years ago, there were attempts to place a #metoo label on Bergman, a powerful and demonic director who had relationships with several of “his” actresses, of which you have been one. What would you say to this?
He was never demonic. I did twelve movies with him as an actress, I directed three of his scripts. I lived with him, had a daughter with him and was with him when he died. I knew all “his” actresses, we were friends. I’ve never heard a Metoo story about him. I even think he was too shy to do any Metoo. I do think, though, that he would fall in love with some of the people he worked with. Who wouldn’t? You would too, if you were working very close with somebody, and maybe that somebody would also fall in love with you. But that’s not Metoo.