One is used to seeing adaptations from the page to the screen, yet there is a less common phenomenon that seems to operate in the opposite direction: film directors who later go on to explore the realm of letters. In this essay, Iona Tait looks at the works of two notable filmmakers and their written works, tracing the discernible ideas that flow from image to text.
After a life of working with the screen, a particular type of filmmaker has historically turned to writing fiction. Last year, at the age of seventy-nine, Michael Mann published his first novel: a prequel and sequel based on his 1995 film, Heat. Quentin Tarantino announced in 2009 that he would retire from cinema once he had made ten features, to “write novels and write cinema literature, and stuff like that.” Ingmar Bergman wrote an autobiography and three novels in quick succession after he had ostensibly bid farewell to cinema with his 1982 film, Fanny and Alexander. And in 2021, the debut novel of then-seventy-nine-year-old Werner Herzog was published in German—with its English translation following one year later. While some filmmakers have forayed into novelistic ventures earlier in life, a pattern nonetheless seems to emerge, and the latecomers’ attempts are often viewed with suspicion. Similar to Bergman’s confession that he wants to “go down with flag flying high,” Tarantino has been lambasted for displaying the narcissistic urge to not have a “late career”—and this seemingly selfish desire has been set against the more generous, total embrace of cinema endorsed by Martin Scorsese, who had admitted before the release of his twenty-seventh feature that he “want[s] to tell stories, and there’s no more time.” Since writing a book grants the creative agent more autonomy, such endeavors by famed directors might appear at first as nothing but an alternative expression of megalomania.
The theory of the director as a controlling agent harkens back to the auteur theory. Established by the film theorist André Bazin in 1951, the concept of the auteur filmmaker likened the filmmaker to the author, describing both as being completely in charge of the creative process; in doing so, the theory upheld a hierarchy of the arts in which the written word triumphed. Whilst critics have challenged whether the auteur theory is convincing in light of the creative roles played by cinematographers, producers, editors, and actors, many filmmakers have indeed been characterized, by others as well as themselves, as controlling agents. In a 1983 interview, Bergman admitted he was “authoritarian by nature,” adding that his “democratic qualities aren’t that well developed, due in large part to my profession.” Herzog’s unrelenting vision, often to the detriment of his crew and actors, has been recorded most notoriously in Les Blank’s documentary, Burden of Dreams, on the making of Fitzcarraldo. In addition to dominion, the theory also postulates that the filmmaker can resemble the author in other ways, such as in maintaining a coherent style and theme across their body of work.
It is in both of these senses—of both control and singular style—that a filmmaker’s turn to writing should be understood; the novel, after all, offers additional avenues to explore the styles and themes that have occupied a creator throughout their career. The literary works of Bergman and Herzog serve as but two potent examples of both the narrative possibilities and creative autonomy granted by the written word, which holds its own sway over cinematic auteurs.
Both Bergman and Herzog have had a fluid approach to their medium. Bergman’s true love was arguably the theater, whilst Herzog has spent most of his career oscillating between narrative film and documentary. Before deciding to write, both filmmakers had been confronted with an idea or a story that articulated questions they had grappled with throughout their careers. In an interview about the inspiration for Fanny and Alexander, Bergman stated that he “started to write mostly for the fun of it,” not giving “the slightest thought to what might come of it, whether it would become a film, a novel, or something for TV.” For Bergman, the memory of his grandma’s apartment prompted a re-creation of the home as the backdrop to the family drama of Fanny and Alexander, and provided ample material for his subsequent written works; for Herzog, it was the life of a Japanese WWII soldier, Hiroo Onoda, who fought a lonely war in the jungle until 1974. The strange tale of Onoda evoked the continual thread of man’s delusion in the face of an all-powerful nature—familiar to Herzog fans—from Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo, and Aguirre, The Wrath of God. Whilst Herzog’s career has been built on making films (they are his “voyage out in the world,” as he phrased in a New Yorker interview), he believes that his “writing is home.”
The image of Bergman’s grandmother’s apartment kept coming back to him in his later years. “Sometimes when falling asleep . . . I step into Grandma’s apartment and walk through the rooms . . . I can recall all the sounds from that time. Even the smells,” he reflected in a 1984 interview with Nils Petter Sundgren. This apartment then appears as the home of the harmonious and joyous extended Ekdahl family in Fanny and Alexander, whose lives are turned upside down when the mother of the eponymous children remarries an abusive Lutheran bishop. Bergman’s own childhood stood somewhere between the warmth of the Ekdahl family and the sternness of the bishop’s household—but ultimately, it was shaped by the Lutheranism of his pastor father. It is no surprise, then, that questions of punishment, guilt, and confession permeate his films in various ways, and continue to maintain a prime position in his novels.
These books, however, differ in being explicitly situated in their author’s upbringing: Best Intentions about the early days of his parents’ relationship and their subsequent strained marriage; Sunday’s Children about a young imaginative boy’s confrontation with his stern father; and Private Confessions consisting of a series of confessions surrounding an affair by his fictionalized mother. And what unites them, aside from their common source, is the weight of Lutheranism. In Private Confessions, these feelings of guilt, shame, and sin drive the narrative, overwhelming the mother protagonist. This emotional onslaught is further deepened by the stark confrontations between her and her various interlocutors—her mother, her husband, and her lover—which, through Bergman’s cinematic language, automatically remind the reader of those almost iconographical shots that the director was so famous for. Throwing away the shot-reverse-shot, which had become a commonplace device for filmmakers, Bergman had preferred in his films to hold the camera and dwell on the actors’ precision of movements, their presence, and their dialogue. For Bergman, the faces were landscapes; we get the same precision in Private Confessions.
Despite Bergman’s mastery of dialogue being at the forefront of Private Confessions, it had taken the filmmaker some time to ease into this technique. In his first novel, Best Intentions, dialogue is not integrated into the narrative, reading instead like a screenplay or a play in the present tense, accompanied by prose that seem like stage directions. Even Bergman himself seemed to pre-empt this criticism, writing in the prologue that, “I wrote as I have been used to writing for fifty years, in cinematic, dramatic form.” Still, remarking that the book “had to remain as it was written,” Bergman seemed to experiment with the form; the execution might be somewhat awkward, but he recreates his parents’ relationship with a remarkable amount of empathy. This portrayal led Karl Ove Knausgaard to write in his collection of essays, Land of Cyclops: “it wasn’t until I read The Best Intentions that a work of Bergman moved me.” Perhaps it is Knausgaard’s proximity to the topic that made the novel particularly moving for him (the author’s first volume of My Struggle deals with the death of his alcoholic and distant father), but it nonetheless goes to show that Bergman had written the interactions between his characters with great sensitivity.
In Sunday’s Children, his second novel, Bergman’s ability to merge storytelling with empathy flourishes. As in Fanny and Alexander, the novel’s principal theme is the conflict between youthful creativity and the strictness of Lutheranism, and like the film’s Alexander, who appears as a sort of stand-in for the young Bergman, the protagonist of Sunday’s Children, Pu, feels constrained by the strict demands of his father. Where young Pu relishes in creating worlds far removed from reality—an act that would be diagnosed as an inability to distinguish fact from fiction by the antagonists to the imagination—the bishop in Fanny and Alexander punishes Alexander because the young boy “can’t distinguish lies from truth.”
The narrative alternates between Pu’s various discoveries—of his tense relationship with his father during a trip, his parents’ failed marriage, and his own sexual desire—and glimpses of the future, where an older Bergman visits his father on the latter’s deathbed. This structure imbues the fraught relationship between father and son with a sense of resolution, enabling Bergman to mend his real-life relationship with his father through fiction. In fact, throughout the trilogy, the narrator—who can be understood as Bergman himself—continuously confesses his imperfect knowledge of events; so it is through the novel that Bergman empathetically recreates his family members, as if the text’s imaginative powers can let him tend to his memories. Fanny and Alexander operates similarly, with Alexander’s dead father reappearing as a ghost to the young Alexander at various intervals. Both of the paternal figures in the film—Alexander’s father who embodies paternal guidance and the bishop’s stern authoritarianism—contain elements of Bergman’s real father, hinting at Bergman’s attempts to rewrite reality.
Additionally, Fanny and Alexander and Sunday’s Child can be understood as odes to the imaginative powers that can give relationships a sense of wholeness. In its representation of the supernatural and the other dimensions of reality, the film draws heavily on the nineteenth-century novels of E. T. A. Hoffmann and Charles Dickens; the resulting, distinct literary quality, with a vivid characterization and a wealth of dramatic action, is then a celebration of cinema-adjacent artforms, like literature and theater, and their imaginative capacity. The film concludes with a line from the Swedish playwright August Strindberg: “On a flimsy framework of reality, the imagination spins, weaving new patterns.” As Bergman has illustrated, a new pattern is woven—no matter the form.
The mixture of narrative perspectives and the passing of time in Bergman’s novels thus permit the director to explore not only the lingering effects of guilt and confession, but also to give a sense of resolution to his fraught relationships—for film is not the best medium to convey a sense of time, nor what can change with its passing. Herzog, too, turned to writing a novel for this very reason. “The passage of time is one of the reasons why the story became a book and not a film,” he had stated.
Time seems to be the central character in Twilight World. Onoda is barely a protagonist; we do not enter his head, but rather observe the emptiness of his struggles in the jungle. Herzog conveys the nothingness that passes over thirty years of no action, with sentences that merely consist of “Darkness,” and “Night,” which one can read in the serious, restrained, and by-now iconic tone of his film narration. The chapter headings, such as “Lubang Airfield. December 1944,” read as equivalent to the opening shots of a film, similarly calling to mind Herzog’s directorial technique.
Onoda’s jungle is a place where “all . . . are outside history.” The events are “of no meaning for the cosmos, for history, for the course of the war.” In this way, the novel recalls Herzog’s interest in nature’s total disregard for humanity, which he has thoroughly explored in his filmography, and particularly his monologue in Burden of Dreams (almost a meme by now), in which he states how mankind “only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel” in the face of “the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle.” Nature’s “sublime indifference,” as he writes in Twilight World—citing his own words from Grizzly Man in which he comments on the “overwhelming indifference of nature”—makes a mockery of man’s attempts to find meaning. As the backdrop, or arguably the protagonist in the novel and many of his films, the jungle has particular resonance for Herzog. It is, for the director, a landscape of utter chaos. No place is better suited for a staging of man’s folly and delusions.
Herzog is no David Attenborough. His interest in the jungle or the wildness of nature does not stem from any romantic sentiment; instead, he regards nature as a setting to delve into the depths of human nature. In Grizzly Man, this involved the interrogation of one man, Timothy Treadwell, and his close, ill-advised relationship with bears. As Herzog himself states at the film’s end: “It is not so much a look into wild nature, as it is a look into ourselves, our nature.”
And from this interest in Treadwell, one can see why Herzog would be similarly drawn to Onoda, who is depicted as sharing Treadwell’s delusions and his self-mythologization. This is notably articulated in Twilight World by one of Onoda’s companions, who writes about wanting to see “Onoda, Yeti, Panda.” Onoda is part of the landscape; he feels more at home in the wild, almost protected from the threats of outsiders, and remains headstrong in his denial of facts. He is completely certain that he must remain in the wilderness.
Because Herzog is a cynic, he does not refrain from showing Onoda’s delusions. Like in Grizzly Man, where Herzog stages a dialogue between his own skeptical attitudes and the naïve romanticism of Treadwell, Herzog positions himself in Twilight World from the outset. The novel opens with the director/writer himself, who makes “a faux pas, so awful, so catastrophic” by admitting to a room full of people that he has no desire to speak to the Emperor about “banalities,” and would instead like to meet Onoda. This opening chapter is directly about Herzog’s interest in Onoda—and it is this personal interest, this certainty that he shares with Onoda a familiarity with the jungle—that goes on to propel the novel.
Herzog and Bergman are two examples of how authorial and directorial presence can dictate the material, but crucially, for both, this personal material also dictates the form. For Herzog, it might be fact, fiction, or, as in Twilight World, somewhere in between: “Most details are factually correct; some are not. What was important to the author was . . . some essence he thought he glimpsed when he encountered the protagonist of this story,” Herzog prefaces in the book. With Bergman, the form is similarly dictated by the stories he wants to tell. He chose the written word for his most personal works, using fiction as a way to repair intimate fractures, and to re-imagine himself as an older observer, more removed from the events—perhaps with the intention to heal from them. In their continuance along lifelong ideas and preoccupations, these late-career books do not merely articulate a desire for total creative autonomy; instead, the turn to writing illustrates a filmmaker’s search for further exploration of their ideas—a way to keep them alive.
Iona Tait is a writer based in New York and senior executive assistant at Asymptote. She recently graduated with a dual MA and MSc in history from Columbia University and the London School of Economics, where she specialized in early twentieth-century European intellectual and cultural history.
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