Liv Ullmann likes watching The Apprentice. Or, rather, she likes it when Donald Trump goes in and out of rooms. “I find it tremendously interesting, his entrances and exits. I can’t believe someone is doing this and taking it so seriously! If you made a movie about such a man, you would tell them they were overacting.”
It is Trump, she thinks, who is a modern-day Miss Julie – the queen bitch in the August Strindberg play she’s just made into a movie. Both are snoots sneering down from a pedestal of their own construction. “Trump says no to refugees trying to get into US from Mexico. He says it’s all Obama’s fault and he’s given them too much freedom. And he blames him for Ebola coming in from Africa.” Ullmann smiles, gentle and appalled and vulnerable. “If you live in a tunnel, hiding, then people don’t like you and in the end they will come back and kill you. It’s not because he’s evil. It’s that it’s easier for him to be apart than to hold the hand of someone homeless and alone.”
Ullmann, the leading lady of Scandi cinema, former muse and partner to Ingmar Bergman, pinup to a generation, is having a cappuccino in the basement of a private members club in Toronto. She’s not the oldest director with a film screening in the festival, but she is the best preserved, the most dignified, an icon with clout.
Her film is a choking epic tracing relations between an imperious aristo (played by Jessica Chastain) and her social-climbing butler (Colin Farrell). They go to bed about halfway through. The earth moves, and brings all the social structures tumbling down with it. This, implies Strindberg, is a bad thing.
Ullmann wanted to reclaim the play from its author. “He was not very good in his thoughts towards women and that’s why it’s good a woman adapted it. I wanted to remind him about something. He probably knew it but he didn’t want to face it.”
This includes inserting a – discreet yet shocking – post-sex scene, in which Julie, legs splayed, examines herself. “She sees blood – maybe she’s a virgin, maybe it’s her period, and that explains everything, maybe it’s something from him. She’s thinking: I cross-bred with something. It’s ugly.”
At 75, Ullmann is moving, intense company. This is not a hardened star trotting out rote replies but a person speaking with feeling and abandon.
“That is the sadness of being human today. We still don’t realise that there is no “other”. We still think we are the audience to everything; we don’t understand we are not witnesses, we are participants. You cannot save the world, I cannot, even Donald Trump cannot. But if we do allow beauty, if we don’t kill movies and concerts and ballets and books we still have a chance.”
Ullmann has made about 50 films, some of which are among the most significant ever shot. Yet cinema, she thinks, is more important today than ever. “We are living in such a cruel world with so many lies. Probably politicians lied before, but not every day, all the time. And a lot of movies today are not movies – they are cartoons made with a green screen.”
Perhaps ideologically, too, such films are unhelpful? They allow people to relinquish responsibility to superheroes.
“Exactly. It is the worst of times. Now even the terrorists say: ‘We want to be evil’ and they pick people to recruit who have no belongings. Of course, if I were all alone I would want to have some kind of identity.”
Ullmann looks round the room. The people at other tables are all on phones or tables or laptops. She gestures at my dictaphone. She doesn’t understand how people are always on these things, she says. Why TV shows court the views of their audience to read out on the show.
“What is this chatting? And then they Twitter, and I understand the Twitter can be so mean and horrible and people are killing themselves because of what they’re reading about themselves. A lot of evilness comes when you are anonymous.”
Citizen journalism is not something that appeals. “The media don’t try to stop this,” she says. “Soon everyone will be a reporter and films will be like this, too.” She appears appalled at the prospect. It’s a false democracy, she thinks, a veneer behind which powerful groups can slip in and assume power.
She laughs: she’s just angry because she feels shut out. She’s scared it’s too late for her to pick up this new tech, that she’ll be left behind. Maybe being famous for 50 years also skews her view, I say. Maybe being famous means she can’t understand why others might want to be celebrities.
It’s true, she can’t fathom it – why people would set their self-worth by such a measure. “We should tell them what is really to be cared for. It’s not because you’re suddenly famous, it’s really when you’re sitting one person to another and you are listening to each other and the other person is seeing you and then you have maybe a strange thought and you say it and suddenly see some understanding in the other person. Or you go to a movie and things you didn’t have words for are there. That is the communication I prefer.”
Ullmann apologises. She’s gone off topic, she says. Her eyes are gleaming. She’s made this screamingly mean movie to try to show people how not to behave. People ought to feel bad more than they do, she says, to try to make amends. “If you have a row with your husband and you see them lying down trying to sleep and you see they’re so scared, instead of saying: ‘You have to change or I’ll leave’, you should say: ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’” When Jesus hung on the cross, he asked forgiveness of the brutes. There’s something that is better than violence. ‘Forgive me’, you should say, even if you have been wronged.”
