Gender roles and definitions of partnerships have changed significantly in the half-century since the original. How important was it to you to make the story contemporary, and, without spoiling things, how you endeavored to do that?
It was a big question. For Americans sometimes, the answer is because it’s in Swedish. That wasn’t good enough for me. I needed a good reason to give myself to do this now. It was ultimately to modernize it but that still wasn’t enough. So I had the idea of the gender swap and felt like this was a good reason. It’s also, for me, a very interesting experiment in gender. I didn’t change much when I swapped but, then again, it changes everything, you know? So I think a lot of it has to do with how much can you feel empathy for the woman? I remembered originally that you didn’t feel any empathy for the man, he was just an asshole, the villain, and Bergman didn’t care about me not liking him. When swapping it, I had to make sure—that was most of my work—that you feel for her. And that is the modern idea about the fact that she’s doing what she’s doing, but you feel that he deserves it somehow.
Viewers are going to want to take sides. What would you say to them?
I can’t put on the screen a villain. It’s something I don’t know how to do. I’ve never done it, so maybe it’s a problem with me. So it’s hard. It’s obvious that he’s the victim, so you feel for him, and it’s harder to feel for her. But I have to say that I’m so much with her. I like her so much. I understand exactly what she’s doing and how it’s bigger than her. She had to do what she had to do in order to come back to her senses, so to speak, after five years. So I think what I try to do is that you can not actually pick a side. Of course, you will personally, but it won’t be easy.
How much did you refer back to the source material? How common was on set and with the actors?
It was common in rehearsal. It was less common in shooting. When I started writing, I never watched it again. I felt I didn’t want to see it. I have a script and it’s not right. Especially Oscar, he really liked to watch it again and again to take whatever he could from there and get inspiration. Sometimes they said it felt to me like a sort of Frankenstein experiment, where I’m changing the rules but keeping the original story. It’s sometimes created very weird moments. To understand why I did that, we would go back to the original. But once we started shooting, it was quite rare. I didn’t allow it.
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