So yesterday Uma Thurman called to tell me Ingmar Bergman died. This is sad for me, right, because you can’t understand how influential he was on my earliest stuff. For example, his visual framing in Winter Light differs so much from how he shot Through A Glass Darkly that the films seem to simultaneously contrast and compliment each other kind of like two criminals—a black guy and a white guy, shooting it out in a small midwestern convenience store, right, but they respect each other even though they have different ways of doing business.
I always tried to get Ingmar to come to the screenings, but he always said he was doing something in Sweden or Germany. He was always nice about saying no anyway. He was always one polite motherfucker.
I mean all the way back to my earliest films I was trying to mimic Bergman’s technique, but more taken out of the post-modern European context and done instead in a neo-classic faux-Americana photographic style. If you pay attention to the scene in Reservoir Dogs where the cop gets his ear cut off, you’d see striking similarities to the flower-picking scenes in Viskningar och rop, right. In fact, I was worried some people might question my directorial tactics as outright plagiarism, but if you watch the two movies simultaneously (like we do at my house on the third Thursday of every month) it’s pretty obvious that the Reservoir Dogs scene is a simple homage, okay.
In tribute to Bergman’s passing, I think in my next movie I’ll probably have a gang-leader character named Ingmar who approaches his killing with the same passion, savagery, and avant-garde surrealism that Bergman sought in his films. I think I could convey this with a beautiful Swedish gun.