FILM 1955: BORDER

FILM 1955: BORDER

TRIVIA: Actress Aubrey Plaza, involved in no way with the film, was such a fan of it that the filmmakers offered to allow her to host a screening. She arranged this at a theater in Los Angeles and invited 60 people to attend. Ten minutes before it was to begin she was informed that the film had not arrived in the theater. She went into the lobby to announce this, but mid-announcement was told the film had arrived. Everyone was seated and then forty minutes went by. She asked friends Fred Armisen and Nick Kroll, who were in the audience, to go on stage and entertain everyone. Armisen pretended to be the film's director while Kroll took questions from the audience. This lasted another twenty minutes. Ultimately the theater management said the film never arrived, but offered to show the crowd the film Suspiria instead. Then, an hour into showing Suspiria, they cut the film off abruptly and began to play Border, which had finally arrived. Plaza relayed this story on The Conan O'Brien Show.

Official submission of Sweden for the 'Best Foreign Language Film' category of the 91st Academy Awards in 2019.

http://www.myscandinavianhome.com/2017/06/a-beautiful-swedish-apartment-in-attic.html

http://honestlywtf.com/home/swedish-dolce-vita/

FILM 1476: FANNY AND ALEXANDER

TRIVIA: The part of Bishop Edvard Vergérus was written by Ingmar Bergman with Max von Sydow in mind. When the screenplay was completed, von Sydow was contacted about playing the role, which would have been his first in a Bergman film since The Touch (1971). Von Sydow was willing and, in fact, very excited about playing the role. However, Bergman was not aware of this, since von Sydow was in Los Angeles at the time, and could only be reached through his agent who, acting in what he perceived as von Sydow's interest, told Bergman and his producers that von Sydow would only play the role if he could have a percentage of the film's profits, in addition to his salary. The producers, already stretched to their financial limits, of course balked, and told the agent that, sadly, there could be no such compromise, and began looking for other actors to play the pivotal part. By the time von Sydow had learned why his beloved role had been taken from him, Jan Malmsjö had already been cast as the Bishop, and von Sydow lost his chance to star in what would later be known to be Bergman's "last film" (although he would play key roles in The Best Intentions (1992) and Private Confessions (1996), both written by Bergman). Von Sydow was furious about the incident, and, by certain accounts, still harbours a bitter grudge about it to this day.

Ingmar Bergman's first draft of the script, completed in 1979, consisted of about 1,000 handwritten pages.

At the time, the largest film ever made in Sweden (with 60 speaking parts and over 1200 extras) and the most expensive, with a budget of $6 million.

Famous Swedish song-and-dance man Jan Malmsjö, who is playing the evil bishop Vergerus, thought it was strange that director Ingmar Bergman approached him for a role very much different from anything he had done. He asked Bergman about it, who replied: "Well, I sense some hidden dark and evil streaks inside you, Jan. You have it, I have it, all of us have."

After playing Alexander, Bertil Guve decided not to pursue a career in acting. He is now a doctor of economics.

Director Ingmar Bergman suffered serious bouts of hypochondria during shooting, and imagined he had gotten both testicular and stomach cancer at the same time.

Although she is an eponymous character, Fanny isn't mentioned in the theatrical version of the film until nearly an hour into its running time. Conversely, in the television version, her name is the first word spoken.

Peter Stormare makes an uncredited appearance as one of the men helping Isak with the trunk.

FILM 1459: WILD STRAWBERRIES

TRIVIA: Ingmar Bergman has described in the interview how he came up with the idea while driving from Stockholm to Dalarna, stopping in Uppsala where he had been born and raised, and driving by outside his grandmother's old house, when he suddenly began to think about how it would be if he could open the door and inside it would be just as it had been during his childhood. "So it struck me - what if you could make a film about this; that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door, and then you walk into your childhood, and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives. That was actually the idea behind Wild Strawberries (1957)"

Cinematographer Gunnar Fischer says that several scenes had to be shot indoors due to Victor Sjöström's poor health. "We had to make some very bad back-projection in the car because we never knew if Victor would come back alive the next day." Nevertheless, as long as Victor was home by 5:15 P.M. each day, "and had his whiskey punctually, all went well."

The dummy that Isak Borg mistakes for a pedestrian during the dream sequence was constructed from a balloon and a silk stocking.

FILM 1335: PERSONA

TRIVIA: According to himself, Ingmar Bergman fell in love with Liv Ullmann during the making of the movie.

Susan Sontag wrote that she considered Persona the greatest film ever made.

The name of Bibi Andersson's character "Alma" is Spanish and Portuguese for "soul".