Imagine having Ingmar Bergman not only defend your movie from bad press but praise it using the words "highest artistic level". That may be one of the highest compliments a filmmaker can receieve from an old master.
One can imagine that Scorsese was over the moon about Bergman saying that about his film. Especially so early on in Scorsese's career. Scorsese has adored Bergman plenty over the years, as well. The feeling was mutual.
@dkelly26666 There's a video of Orson Welles praising Scorsese for his work on film preservation and David Lean did so also. He also earned the respect of Kurosawa. I dont see how one could top getting praises from Welles, Lean, Bergman, and Kurosawa in the film making world.
Yes, that was a very sensible answer and a great compliment from him. Bergman was generous about acknowledging good film-making when he saw it, and he could be very clear about admitting his *own* shortcomings (the brllliant 1970 interview book "Bergman on Bergman" is packed with examples of both of these, its an extremely funny, sharp and illuminating book with three insightful and alert film critics grilling the Master about his career and his movies, and Bergman opening up about what he tried for, his experiences on set, where he thinks he failed, his actors and so on). He became more guarded with interviewers as he grew older.
@@schizvoid8774 I've been a reporter for two decades. Sometimes you ask a question the way she did to provoke the subject. If you ask an even-handed question, you get an even-handed (and often less truthful) response. If you ask a question that seems to take a side, or if you adopt the position of someone else and phrase it that way, it can provoke the subject into a more interesting and honest answer. There are different interviewing strategies.
@@schizvoid8774 Honey, I'm just trying to help you out here. It's a perfectly legitimate question to ask Bergman, no matter your views. We've both wasted to much time on this already.
I didn't realize before that this had even been a discussion topic in the US over the movie, though I know some people have claimed that Jodie Fosters breakthrough role was a bit problematic (her eight years older sister body doubled for her in the most charged scenes)
Betty published her memoir, 'Talking to the Stars: Bobbie Wygant's Seventy Years in Television' in 2019 and is still with us (in 2023). Started her career in 1948 on Dallas-Fort Worth’s Channel 5 when it first went live -- one year before Betty White made her first TV appearance -- and has continued in various roles there ever since. She's a true television pioneer!
Bergman was so naturally himself, while many filmmakers in his time were pretentious, he always had a warmth about him and he always spoke truth if he didn’t care for a movie or filmmaker also if he loved the film never held back on his enthusiasm.
Very true - I think he became more guarded with the media and with journalists in his older years though. By the 1990s he was seen as a somewhat difficult and controlling person to interview, much less open and exuberant than he had used to be. I think the accusations of dodgy accounting and tax evasion that hit him in 1976 and which actually led to him going into professional exile, mostly, for the next five years, and the media circus around that, hit him badly and made him much more suspicious of journalists (he was ultimately cleared of all allegations of tax evasion). After that point, he was less willing to engage in open interviews at ease - though instead he wrote a very outspoken book of memoirs.
The greatest director of all times talking about one of the top 5 most greatest directors of all times. Ingmar is 1st and Scorsese is one of the top 5.
@@999titu My top 10 would be my favourite directors, not the best directors, which might not even add Bergman. So it’s pointless. But if you wanna know 10 greater directors objectively than Scorsese then there are many! Well there's obviously Bergman, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergei Eisenstein, Billy Wilder, Akira Kurosawa, Yasijiro Ozu, Satyajit Ray, Andrei Tarkovosky, Stanley Kubrick. And that's just from top of my head right now. You can find many more directors who are considered greater than Scorsese objectively. But yes, Scorsese is one of the greatest directors too. But not in that high spot.
I second Mr. Bergman's opinion, but curious if he'd still consider it high art, how violence is so often wielded within Scorsese's later work such as Goodfellas, The Departed, etc
Yeah, the violence in those movies are more "pornographic", in the sense it´s there to look cool, to please some primitive fascination we humans have with it.
@@comedyriff5231It's hard to say when the stuff is supposed to be non fiction. A head in a vice seems like pornographic violence but if it really did happen maybe it is necessary to shove it in the viewer's face. Pesci's death in Casino was also pretty brutal, but maybe it was of artistic importance to show the brutal consequences of living that life. That being said, I really don't know where you draw the line. The Saw films definitely felt like pornographic violence. Or 'gore porn' as they call it.
I think the difference is that an artistic point of view of violence has a purpose, a meaning. While pornographic violence is violence for violence's sake, it has no end other than that, there is no meaning or purpose, it is banal, empty.
@@InFramesCinema Agreed, I think when he says pornographic violence he means perverted violence made to glorify violence or create gore/disgust. Artistic violence would rather be used as a mean to expose a problem, explain a characters actions or reveal something important to the story arc etc
As a linguistics student from Sweden, this is interesting from another perspective. The syntax of Swedish really shines through in Bergman’s speech. I don’t know whether Bergman was originally schooled in English. It wasn’t the primary foreign language during the time of his upbringing, and surely he was very fluent in German.
Yes, his first foreign language at school was German, it was standard in Sweden at the time, and he was fully fluent in it - he actually worked as a director in Munich for several years in the late 1970s and early 1980s, both a film director and stage theatre director. But it's true that his syntax here is coloured by Swedish, you can tell he is thinking in his mother tongue and then translating it bit by bit into English. At 1:00 he's saying "because I think it has nothing with artistic work to do" - this is a Swedish construction, with "nothing --- to do" (inget --- att göra) placed as brackets around the "excluded area" reference - the entire phrase is a translation from Swedish and a native Brit or American most likely wouldn't have said it like that.
Amazingly, there is a 19th century puritanical nature to Virgin Spring, in which Sydow gets revenge then begs God for forgiveness. On the other hand, one of the most shocking scenes of true violence in Cries & Whispers...I guess Bergman was being more tuned into the bloodier times ✌🏼✌🏼