Reimagining Bergman
How do you take on the work of Ingmar Bergman? Director Tomas Alfredson and writer Sara Johnsen tell DQ how they reimagined the influential Swedish filmmaker’s work by adapting his 2000 feature Trolösa (Faithless) into a six-part series.
For more than 20 years, Swedish director Tomas Alfredson has carried with him the dream of reimagining Ingmar Bergman film script Trolösa (Faithless) as a series.
Originally made as a 2000 feature directed by Liv Ullmann, Faithless is considered a semi-autobiographical project based on seminal Swedish filmmaker Bergman’s life. It tells the story of an ageing director who imagines a character called Marianne and asks her to recall the story of her life-changing love triangle involving her husband Markus and their friend David.
Alfredson even pitched the series to Bergman 2001. But as Alfredson recalls, the man behind celebrated works such as The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1963) told him it sounded like “a bloody drunken idea.” Eventually, however, Bergman was won round by what he would later describe as a “terribly exciting” proposal.
As is so often the case in the television industry, nothing came of the idea at first. But fast-forward two decades and Alfredson – who has directed critically acclaimed films including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Let the Right One In – has partnered with writer Sara Johnsen (July 22) for a six-part drama series also called Trolösa (Faithless).
Backed by Swedish broadcaster SVT and Franco-German network Arte, the story centres on a famous director called David Howard, who reunites with his former love, actress Marianne Vogler. Now both in their 70s, the pair’s meeting forces them to confront the consequences of their past relationship, which caused both themselves and their beloved immense pain.
In a second timeline that forms the main part of the series, set 40 years earlier, young David and Marianne fall in love with each other and begin a passionate love affair that they are forced to keep secret – because Marianne is married to David’s best friend Markus Vogler.
“It’s been quite intense for several years and in different parts of the production, but it’s been a long and interesting journey,” Alfredson tells DQ ahead of the drama’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival tomorrow. “When I try to look at it sober now, I think we’ve done a pretty good job.
“Even though this is a very free interpretation of the original material, it is still very true to the DNA of it and to the original intentions of it. There are several versions of this: this, the feature film that was made 20 years or so ago and there’s also a prose version of it that Bergman wrote previous to that, which is also a bit different. But I think the old man would be proud of it.”
One can only imagine what Bergman might make of it, as the revered and influential filmmaker died in 2007, aged 89. However, that didn’t make the idea of adapting his work any less daunting for Norwegian Johnsen, who sought to interrogate the original material and find what was hidden underneath the surface – most notably themes of guilt, betrayal, infidelity, love and lust, and the consequences of our actions.
“In Bergman’s version, there are a lot of plot points and it’s shorter, and he spends a lot of time discussing what’s driving the characters, so I’ve also been interested in what he has been trying to explore and maybe not being so explicit about,” she says. “Reading Bergman and talking about Bergman with Tomas, we didn’t always understand it in the same way.”
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Establishing the perspective of the central trio was a key part of the development process, with the biggest change coming in the perception of Marianne and “how to make her into a human being,” Johnsen says. “Not only was she a ghost and a fantasy [in the film], but she was also very innocent in Bergman’s text. We had a lot of interesting discussions about what is love, what is lust, what are the ambitions these people have and how are they connected to feelings like envy and loneliness?”
Those conversations spanned two years across the Covid pandemic, and the series has undoubtedly become as personal for Johnsen as it has been for Alfredson, years after he first had the idea of expanding the story and themes of the original film.
Back then, “I was 20 years younger and I was in a totally different position in my life,” the director explains. “At that particular moment, I was very tormented. I had a relationship where I became very jealous, which I had never experienced before. The jealousy theme [in the film] was something that really struck me very hard. Now many long years after that, I think I maybe have more of the older David’s perspective on it.”
Another character, Markus and Marianne’s young daughter Isabelle, also has a more important role in the series. While Isabelle was “very much in the shadows” in Bergman’s work, Alfredson and Johnsen wanted to examine how the David and Marianne’s actions affect other people, particularly those closest to them.
“I wouldn’t like to call this a remake. It’s more of a reinterpretation,” Alfredson says, “and it’s fascinating what you could do with it. If you take a piece of music as an example, you can do a jazz version, you can do an orchestral version and you can do it with the harmonica as well. It all has the same tones, but affects you in a totally different way. So that has been a fantastic journey to do, and Sara has made an autonomous piece of work from this bass chord.”
Adapting Bergman certainly doesn’t seem like a task for the faint-hearted, and Johnsen admits that “my first thoughts were, ‘I don’t want to do anything that’s not from this time [period]’, so I was very skeptical.”
However, her concerns were soon alleviated. “I was asked to read the prose text and somehow it felt very relevant to me,” she continues. “It’s relevant for everyone because everyone’s fallen in love, everyone’s been deceitful and everyone’s been a child, being a victim of your parents’ way of doing things, so it felt very relevant.
“Then I became very interested – and when I’m interested, I’m not scared until it’s over. Then you can get scared [about the reaction]. Tomas was interesting to talk to, and we were interested in Bergman. Because Bergman’s text is not so much a psychological drama, there’s not so much that’s explained. So we also had to talk about our own lives, and there are a lot of lines and things in our story that are actually from Tomas’s and my life or people we know. We had two years of discussion about what is love, what is passion, what is infidelity? How do people cope with it? Who do we harm? All those kinds of questions made this fear go away.”
Early on, the pair decided to keep all the plot points from the original story. But pacing it out over six 45-minute episodes meant Johnsen had plenty of time to turn the series into a character study of David, Marianne and Markus in what is a slow-burning, emotional and often tension-filled drama as Marianne and David weigh up their emerging attraction to one another.
“Television is a fantastic medium in the sense that you can really go in depth and spend time on the characters [in a way that] a feature film wouldn’t allow you to do,” Alfredson says. “Television can allow you to change perspectives and you can have a much more playful attitude with [the characters], but you can also get really close to them, which is fantastic.”
At one point, they even considered making seven episodes, such was the amount of material they created. “But no one else was interested,” the director jokes. “I think we ended up in a place where it doesn’t feel as if it’s too slow or that there’s not enough going on. In fact, there’s so much to pay attention to with a drama like this – what’s happening in people’s faces and how they move their hands or how long a pause is or how long a gaze is. It’s a macro universe of human behaviour, and television is fantastic to be able to explore that.”
Produced by Miso Film Sweden and distributed by Fremantle, Faithless isn’t Alfredson’s first venture into television. He previously directed series including Soldater i månsken (Soldiers in Moonlight) and Offer och gärningsmän (Victims & Perpetrators), as well as numerous TV movies alongside his storied feature film work. But working on material by the illustrious Bergman, did he feel beholden to film the series in the auteur’s style?
“Making images is an intuitive thing,” he says. “There are hundreds of small references to his world, when it comes to colours and textures and even addresses and certain streets where we’ve shot things. But you also have to do something of your own. It’s not interesting to try to replicate something, but it’s worth paying attention and knowing who the creator is, and trying to be at least attentive to that. I think we have created something contemporary and something that has our own trademark, but within this Bergman-esque DNA.”
Leading the cast are Gustav Lindh (Love Me), who plays young David, and Frida Gustavsson (Vikings) as young Marianne. August Wittgenstein (Das Boot) is Markus and Jesper Christensen (Exit) is older David, while Lena Endre plays older Marianne, having also portrayed the character in the original film version.
For Alfredson, it was the first time he had ever shot something with four actors playing two parts. And because the characters appear at two different stages of their lives, the director proved to be the connecting link between the performances in each timeline. ‘That was quite kaleidoscopically complicated,” he says. “It wasn’t about finding someone to be a replica of someone else; it was about finding someone who carries the same soul.
“Lena has been very open-minded towards this task. She has never spoken about the older version. I’ve asked her a few things, but she has really considered this as a new task. Here in Scandinavia, she is one of the greatest actors we have, and it just felt very congenial to ask her to do it again – and I’m very happy she did. Having two actors playing one part, you have to be very self-confident as a storyteller that this is the older version and this is the younger version and not try to fiddle too much, but also to trust the actors, and we have very intelligent and strong performances here.”
As a director herself, Johnsen is also used to stepping behind the camera and working with actors. But with Alfredson directing all six episodes of Faithless, “I wasn’t too happy, actually,” she admits, “but that was the deal from the start.”
“I would have hated it myself,” Alfredson agrees.
“It’s hard to give away the script, but that was the agreement,” Johnsen continues. “But I’m very pleased Tomas made it into such a visual story. That’s amazing. The way he’s working with the images, trusting the image to tell the story, that’s really great to see.”
Alfredson adds: “It’s almost an impossible thing. It’s a contradiction that the writer could embrace another filmmaker, however talented they are, because it’s never going to be the images he or she has written. It usually gets better when time passes by, but it’s a hard thing for a writer to experience, to suddenly see and hear and having to accept what it becomes. Sara has been very patient and supportive.”
Writing the scripts, Johnsen found the opportunity to pick apart some of Bergman’s own lines was “one of the most fun things I’ve done.” But in the series – which will also air on DR (Denmark), NRK (Norway), YLE (Finland) and RUV (Iceland) – so much of the dialogue isn’t actually spoken but said with a gesture, a look or a glance.
“Sara is very explicit,” Alfredson says. “She writes the feelings, the breathing, the pauses and the small actions that are fantastic to use when setting up the blocking in the scenes, and you notice that she is a very skilled director. She knows what stuff would travel into an image. I think I’ve done her script [as it was written]. I understand if she doesn’t think so.”
“To be honest, we worked very closely on the scripts,” Johnsen says. “If Thomas was wondering about something, he would say so. He would maybe tell me a story from his life, and I would merge it with a story from my life, and it felt like a very close way to work creatively. But then, of course, when he starts to direct the series, he will make some choices that surprise me, not because I disagree, but because I visualise something else. I see things differently.
“There are also quite a few difficult things in the script that I knew were going to be difficult. Tomas always said, ‘No, I’ll fix it.’ He always said, ‘Don’t worry about that.’ That was freedom for me to know I didn’t have to worry about how, for example, to make viewers believe that old Marianne is young Marianne and stuff like that. He was just like, ‘Leave it to me.’”
Yet Alfredson couldn’t have made Faithless – which is set to air on SVT in spring 2025 – without Johnsen. “A very important thing here is to have a female gaze on this. I could never have done what we have ended up with, with a male writer,” he adds. “I think it’s very important here. The original story was also told from a strictly male perspective, and Sara has brought a very strong voice to this Marianne character in particular but also in how to interpret this in general.”
tagged in: Arte, Faithless, Fremantle, Ingmar Bergman, Miso Film Sweden, Sara Johnsen, SVT, Tomas Alfredson, Trolösa