It’s a factoid repeated so many times it might even be true: after Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage first aired on Swedish television in 1973, there was a huge spike in that nation’s divorce rate. It’s doubtful that the new version, debuting on HBO after a premiere at the Venice Film Festival, will have such an impact. But considering it stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain acting their brains out, it ought to at least inspire some passionate dialogue.
The modernized series is written and directed by Hagai Levi, creator of the Israeli series BeTipul, which was adapted stateside into In Treatment. Levi also co-created the ripped-from-the-headlines HBO series Our Boys, a rare collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers, and Showtime’s The Affair, which he surprisingly walked away from after its successful first season, telling Israel’s Ynet, “it started out as art, and there was a specific moment when I started to recognize that it was moving away from that.”
But there was never any danger of Scenes From a Marriage getting away from his control. At just five episodes, the series, which debuted September 12, is almost entirely set inside one house, and barely has any speaking parts beyond Isaac and Chastain. (When others do make brief appearances, it’s welcome faces like Corey Stoll, Nicole Beharie, and, as Isaac’s Jewish mother, Tovah Feldshuh.)
The story begins with Isaac and Chastain fronting like they’ve got matrimony down pat. They answer a graduate student’s survey (Isaac’s character Jonathan teaches at Tufts University)—but when they are alone, honesty pokes through the cracks. As with the original, or more recent Bergman-inspired work like Marriage Story, your allegiances may waver throughout the series. That’s by design.
I spoke to Levi from his home in Tel Aviv via Zoom about how one goes about adapting Bergman, and what it’s like to shoot during Covid. There are some light spoilers ahead—nothing too radical, especially if you are familiar with Bergman’s version—but if you want to remain totally pure until the show premieres, you may want to avoid temptation.
Vanity Fair: You are most known for In Treatment, which has been adapted well over a dozen times, everywhere from Argentina to Serbia. Did that make you a little more sensitive to adapting someone else’s work?
Hagai Levi: It was interesting to be on the other side!
Whenever there is an adaptation of In Treatment, I speak to the people making it, and encourage them to go further. Being too loyal to the original will, in a way, betray the original. You have to find local nuances, so this is what I did with Scenes From a Marriage.
I felt I could do it because I was approached by Ingmar Bergman’s son, Daniel Bergman, eight years ago, with the idea of remaking it. His concept was to do it from the kids’ perspective; this was his way to reclaim his place. In the original series you don’t even realize, sometimes, there are kids. I guess it wasn’t easy for him all these years. I didn’t do that in the end, but I did get the blessing to “go far.”
There’s another film out soon called Bergman Island. Ingmar is having a bit of a moment.
I have not seen it yet, but absolutely. And Marriage Story, recently. Scenes From a Marriage influenced so many directors, many of Woody Allen’s films; it’s in the consciousness.
In Treatment is people baring their souls in private moments. Scenes From a Marriage is how couples really act when no one is looking. What makes you so nosy?
Is there anything more interesting that people talking about their problems? What is Carl Th. Dreyer’s quote, about “there is no landscape as beautiful as a human face?” [“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring.”] For me, two people talking is that beautiful landscape.
You have seen a lot of shows and films about psychological treatment before In Treatment, and you have seen a lot of affairs before The Affair, but never has it been only about those things. It’s just my way, to want to go deep.
You grew up on a religious kibbutz. A lot of people may not know what that is. How would you define it?
Let me translate the famous phrase from Hebrew: “everyone has whatever he needs, and everyone give whatever they can.” So it’s common property, usually based on agriculture, so lots of fields and cows, owned by the commune. You are provided with everything: you don’t pay for food, for laundry, and you have no private property. It’s a simple Communist idea.
In Israel, this was something of a success, and there were hundreds of them around what were the borders. Among them were some that were religious, which you could say was a contradiction, with religion versus Marxism, but apparently it can work.
This communal aspect of the kibbutz—with everyone in everyone else’s business—maybe this sparked your interest in knowing what’s going on with private lives?
That is an interesting idea. But if you are looking for influence, look to the religious background, not the kibbutz background. In Yeshiva you learn Torah and Talmud all day. Fifteen hours a day, and most of the time you are paired with someone. It’s a dialogue between two people, for hours, interpreting a specific text. This is your whole life. Two people trying to get to the bottom of something.
One of the biggest changes from Bergman’s version to yours is the Jewish subtext. Not subtext—text! Oscar Isaac plays an ex-Orthodox Jew, and Jessica Chastain has an off-screen Israeli lover. Was this just a “write what you know” situation?
This was my way in, because I am coming from another culture. This way I had characters I felt intimate with. Also, when you grow up as a religious person, you have a lot of inhibitions, and you can over-intellectualize, and this damages their marriage. It’s one of the bigger differences in the two versions.
The other is [Jessica Chastain]’s character, who is strong, powerful, and independent. He’s a stay-home dad, more inhibited. I basically swapped the genders.
Right, now she is the one who is having the affair. Was that something you knew you would do from the beginning?
Depends what you mean by “the beginning.” I dabbled with this for seven years. I didn’t know what to do with it, or even if I should do it. Why remake it? It’s there already; you can go watch it.
Americans said “it’s only in Swedish, that’s reason enough.” But that wasn’t enough for me. I needed an angle. When I had [the reversal] idea, that’s when I started writing. It fell into place.
Another obstacle for me at first: these characters are assholes. Bergman didn’t care. [Erland Josephson] is a cold, chauvinistic cheater, and [Liv Ullman] is a dependent, “old school” family woman tied up with bourgeois conventions. She is someone I would not like to put on screen today and, frankly, not someone I like too much personally. Swapping it, I realized, okay, maybe I am a little like him, and the woman is someone I know and like.
It hasn’t aired yet, but I am sure you have showed it to people. Do men tend to find Oscar Isaac more sympathetic and women find Jessica Chastain more sympathetic? Or does it not fall along such neat gender lines?
Through writing, shooting, and editing this, 90 percent of the people I have worked with have been women. I knew my main challenge was to empathize with this woman, despite what she is doing. It’s easier to like Jonathan. He’s a victim, and he’s a nice, soft-spoken person. But the question is: can you like her?
When it comes to liking Jonathan, there’s also an edge in casting Oscar Isaac, the world’s most wonderful man.
That is an advantage. Oscar was interested in this project before, when it was a play, so when I met him he had a “let’s do it” attitude. He’s one of the smartest actors I ever met.
Then, when I made him a Jew, I felt even more that he could do it. It’s weird, because Oscar is a very masculine, alpha male type, so changing him into the more beta male, introvert, Jewish type, he still had Oscar Isaac’s charisma.
Jessica is someone I wanted from the beginning. She was at the top of the list for five years, but wasn’t available. Oscar wanted her, too, because they’ve been friends since Juilliard. Then, because of COVID, her schedule cleared up at the last moment.
You’ve just shared the good aspect of shooting during COVID, and how it freed people up, but what were some of the challenges?
It was difficult, but it contributed to the intensity. We were isolated on a small stage [in Mount Vernon, New York]. We couldn’t go anywhere. I was there without my family. It felt like being on another planet. We were one of the first productions to start up again, in August. We had a very big department of nurses and supervisors. The strangest thing was working for five months with people whose faces I never saw.
At the wrap, I had everyone gather, and asked everyone, one-by-one, to reveal their face. It was an ecstatic moment. I mean, you can always imagine how someone looks behind a mask, but you never really know.
One of the coolest things in the project is the introduction to each of the first four episodes, then something that happens in the fifth I won’t spoil. There’s a behind-the-scenes prologue, in which either Oscar or Jessica is arriving on the set, surrounded by the crew, and readies for the performance. My guess is that this is your acknowledgement of Bergman’s original, and the nature footage that concludes each episode.
Yeah, right, right. I had so many debates about what I should take directly from Bergman. He divided between three locations. I am almost exclusively in one house, in constant change. So this is how I wanted to explore the surroundings. Bergman also had an interesting way of beginning each episode with voiceover, similar to a “previously on,” but he narrated it in a very ironic way.
It all came late in the process; I had an instinct, a way to provide distance, and to remind that “this is not really about a specific couple from Boston, it is abstract, it is every couple everywhere.”
So here’s the big question. Were these sequences rehearsed and choreographed, or is this real cinéma vérité showing how Jessica Chastain gets out of her car meets up with the crew?
I will never answer this question.
Why does Oscar Isaac eat his pizza so weirdly in the fifth episode? He rips it in pieces. Was that your direction?
It was a vegan pizza, because Jessica is vegan, and he did not like the pizza at all. I think this may have been his way to ensure he didn’t have to eat too much.
The project walks a fine line between eroticism and sadness. How did you approach the sex scenes?
These scenes are specific to each episode. The first time, she wants him, and he’s holding her back, and the second, he’s more animalistic. The final one is lovesick; it’s more of a love scene than a sex scene. It was all very important, and we discussed it a lot.
When we shot that scene for episode three, it was the first moment where I really felt that they trusted me. It was very moving for me, because I am not that well known in America. It wasn’t obvious they would trust me so much, and they did. You know, my job is to give them a safe environment where they can do anything. They owned these characters, and knew them even better than I did.
It’s a serious series, and you are shooting during COVID, but these are funny people. Was there a lightness on the set?
There was. But it wasn’t easy, because you couldn’t see any smiles! Only Jessica and Oscar were allowed to go around without masks. But because they are longtime friends, they had private jokes. When we got to episode four it wasn’t fun anymore. There was tension between them; the atmosphere on the set got tense. Even if the camera wasn’t on them, they were shouting and crying. They went all the way.
An HBO series can often get a lot of attention online, and also criticism. Are you prepared for reactions?
Since I am a foreigner, it is hard to know what to expect. I guess I don’t know how I fit in to the politics of feminism. Or racial politics. So I’m not so sure about these things, since I am looking at it from far away. For me, this is more of a European series, like In Treatment was. In film school they say “don’t tell, show,” but here it’s always “don’t show, tell.”
What do you think, am I in danger?
I think Oscar Isaac will shield you from a lot of negativity. People who like to rant online usually love Oscar Isaac, so it may cancel out.
That’s good. But you must remember that Bergman was intentionally provocative. You can read it in his notes. He made this to make people angry. So, if it doesn’t provoke a reaction, then I won’t be pleased. I want a discussion, and a discourse.
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