"Carl Th." "Dreyer and Gertrud" "With Gertrud, from the beginning" "I strove for simplification." "Particularly with the dialogue." "I sought the most concise form possible." "Also I attached a certain importance to the characters." "I wanted to bring out a statuesque quality in them in order to achieve something closer to the style of tragedy." "In 1964, when Carl Theodor Dreyer filmed Gertrud the great Danish director was 75 years old." "It was to be his last film." "Dreyer, who had become famous in 1928 with The Passion of Joan of Arc, had only made 14 films in a career that spanned almost half a century." "Gertrud a play by the Swedish writer Hjalmar Söderberg, had fascinated Dreyer as early as the 1920s." "In 1962, a book and a newspaper article provided the perfect motivation to make a film of the play." "Dreyer's film was set at the turn of the century amongst the upper classes." "It tells of a woman's quest for true love." "Gertrud demands of men an acknowledgement of women and love as the most important things in life and that they take priority over work and career." "The impossibility of satisfying this demand sows the seeds for Gertrud's tragic downfall." "Dreyer's film is characterised by classical simplicity and a stripping back to the bare essentials." "There are very few long takes and scenes." "The decor is simple and the acting restrained." "Each detail, each gesture is significant." "There is nothing spare in the very deliberate style of language." "At its premiere in Paris on 18 December 1964, the film received mixed reviews." "Although slated by the press, it was regarded by cinephiles and many directors as a masterpiece." "Dreyer's world is a spiritual one." "It is governed by love." "Through the drama unfolding on the screen, we can detect another drama which happens behind the screen which is the world of good and evil, a world of grace and tolerance." "The following is an exchange between two film technicians:" ""Have you heard that guy Dreyer is coming here to film?"" ""You don't say!" ""Then we must have real water in the glasses."" "In its indirect way, the exchange says something precise about Dreyer's quite unorthodox relationship with naturalism, or should we say his occasional brushes with one of its close relatives." "He was a perfectionist." "Like Ingmar Bergman." "He wanted every detail to be right." "He worried about every detail." "We immersed ourselves in research and preparation for almost nine months." "Casting, for example, is always important, but more so for Dreyer." "We did screen tests." "He studied the newspapers to find particular characters." "He cut out photographs of well-known personalities, or people who were, for example, in line for awards." "He found every possible type there." "Before filming could begin, the set obviously had to be built." "For some scenes we had already chosen the background." "Then we had to build studio sets." "We started with the apartment." "So the set designer spent almost as much time with Dreyer as I did." "It was quite clear how the apartment and the furniture would be arranged." "The set designer, Kai Rasch, found furniture of that period that corresponded to what we wanted." "When the set was ready," "I immediately felt it was too cluttered." "There were too many objects in the decor, too many ornaments and trinkets." "I said to Dreyer, "Isn't that too much?"" ""Don't worry, Bendtsen."" ""When the designer has finished" ""we'll just remove anything we don't want."" "A strange thing happened." "Once the apartment was fully furnished," "Dreyer came along, looked around him and started chucking things out." "Get rid of that piece of furniture, get rid of that, and that." "At the end, he was left with only the bare essentials:" "that console table, that sofa, that chair." "The same thing with the paintings, until he knew that with the dialogue in a particular scene he wanted an Edvard Munch painting in the background." "He threw everything else out." "He achieved a simplicity and purity through this style of decor." "The first thing Dreyer always spoke of, the starting point, was the style of the film." "This quiet style, the simplicity and simple beauty of these black and white interiors, were what he usually worked with." "What struck me about Dreyer was his determination to get to the truth." "He was passionate about making things authentic, having absolute authenticity in the here and now." "I can remember a point in the dialogue where I had to say to Nina Pens, who had a headache," ""I have two pills here from Romania." ""They're good, Romanian pills."" "While we were filming, I decided to look and see if there really were any pills in the pillbox." "And there really were two pills." "Dreyer asked, "Are they the right ones?"" "I had a look and they looked real." ""But are they from Romania?" ""Have a look." "Yes, they are."" "When I came to say, "Here are two pills from Romania,"" "the two pills really were from Romania." "In Dreyer's films, everything that was said was true." "He brings pictures with him." "He sits at home and snips and snips from newspapers, magazines, revues." "A person's features or their expression caught his eye." "Or the way something was lit or a certain grouping." "Yesterday, he was particularly pleased with his findings." "We were to shoot the first major scene between Gertrud and Gabriel." "The folder with the pictures inside was laid out on the table, and with an inscrutable expression, as if this were some highly official matter, he took out a newspaper cutting that was meant to inspire and stimulate us." "The picture was of two figures in subdued light standing close to one another but looking in opposite directions." "They were two gorillas." "Thank you, Mr Dreyer." "Dreyer's relationship with his actors was such, that he was once asked," ""What do you do with your actors, Mr Dreyer," ""to make them so good?"" "Dreyer replied, "Nothing." "They do it themselves."" "And that was the deciding factor in any collaboration with Dreyer." "He had this unbelievable confidence in the actors he chose." "When we read through the scenes he never doubted that what the actors made of a scene was exactly what was required." "He came to me and said," ""Here you have the décor." ""I'm no actor," he said." ""Wouldn't you like to block this scene?"" ""Yes," I said." ""Yes, yes." "Of course." "I can try."" "Then he left us alone, Nina Pens and I." "For two hours." "And we blocked the scene." "After two hours, he came back with Bendtsen and asked us to show him what we'd done." ""Bendtsen," he then said," ""There's the décor there are the actors," ""how do you want to film it?"" "Bendtsen wandered around while we went through the scene." "And Dreyer took everything on board!" "In other words, there was not that much Dreyer in it." "It all came from us." "But when we watched the film later and watched what we had done," "it bore all the marks of Dreyer's style, almost unbearably so." "He used to say that the actors' performance belonged to them." "You can't force a particular expression out of them." "What an actor brought to a scene was his or her own." "As a director, he saw himself almost as a midwife, as someone who assists at a birth." "So he was very gentle, unlike so many directors, who force actors to portray a character in a way that is not their own." "Dreyer knew that he only got simplicity and truth when he appealed to the imagination of the individual actors." "He came up to me before this scene." "He came up to me with a picture, a picture out of a cheap novel, a chocolate-box style picture." "There was a man and a woman with a moon between them and a romantic landscape." "It was really kitsch." ""I'd like," he said and showed me the picture," ""the scene to be like that."" ""But in this scene he says he doesn't want to be with her anymore."" ""Oh," he said. "Really."" "And then he went away." "What that was meant to be about, what he was trying to say," "I really don't know." "I can only guess." "He reminded me of a shaman." "The cameraman Henning Bendtsen had worked with Dreyer in 1955 on his penultimate film Order." "One characteristic of this film was its long, complicated camera movements." "He wanted to develop this technique in the film Gertrud, with even longer tracking shots." "I'm not so sure now, but I think I'm right in saying that four or five scenes in the film took up a complete roll of film, in other words, 11 minutes for each can." "You'd think this way of working would take more time but the opposite was true." "We only filmed what we needed." "There were no crosscuts, no close-ups, which you usually need in filming for editing purposes." "Mind you, that eliminated the option of shortening the scenes that Dreyer felt were too long." "We were compelled to use the take in its entirety." "The most important thing was to create quiet around the characters." "When the characters were standing still or sitting down, there should be no distraction in the background." "The attention had to be concentrated on the faces." "We worked with little spotlights, that would be fixed to the set, and with dimmers." "So when the actor turned round, the light was wrong." "Then one of the electricians would lower the light with a pulley so that we could introduce another light if the head was turned during a scene." "Those were Dreyer's two basic requirements as far as the cinematography was concerned:" "stillness in the picture, stillness around the characters, a simple composition, as simple as possible, and the characters lit so that it worked whatever position they were in, whether they were still or moving." "Here is an example of what was important to me and what Dreyer appreciated." "We have the main light with the shadow there, and the shaded side is turned toward the camera." "Here is one of the rare cuts in the film where we change direction." "This side of him is not so interesting, so the main light is on Gertrud." "Poor Nina." "The other day, they had to do ten takes of her extended dialogue." "It was a light that failed, not her." "The light should have been secured long before the shooting began." "It would be understandable if she had made a mistake, if her nerves had failed." "My nerves did." "With the rather inarticulate and demonstrative chivalry which I'm afraid is typical of me," "I exclaimed, "That light must be secured." ""This is about people, too." ""We'll do the scene one more time, that's it."" "A long silence." "Very long." "Then, very softly, the erect, pale person in the director's chair said," ""When all is said and done, I'm the one who decides that, Mr Rode."" "One thing that has always struck me is the tremendous passion that is present in every scene in all his work." "But it wasn't the kind of passion that was very obvious." "It was as if he was..." "Dreyer was a complex man." "It was as if he was knotted up inside." "One could imagine that if you were to take a cubic metre of Dreyer, he would weigh more like three tonnes." "It seemed to me that he contained a great deal of emotion, something that he needed to release in all his relationships, but which he could not show." "He exuded an almost macabre stillness that somehow could appear almost threatening." "He had this ability, which made a huge impression on me, the ability to creep into your soul and to invade your thoughts in an almost sinister way with his personality, his depth," "his wishes and desires." "He didn't need to say anything." "We automatically did what he wanted." "I don't understand it, but that's the way it was." "That was his so-called iron touch." "It was soft as velvet." "I remember once, during filming he quietly asked a stagehand if he could wave a couple of beech twigs in front of the light." "It would breathe some life into it." "The stagehand replied rudely," ""Oh, Dreyer, who cares about that." "We don't need that."" "Dreyer went silent and then repeated quietly that he'd really like those leaves in front of the light to introduce some life." "I could see that Dreyer, when he was contradicted, had an anger inside," "like a hurricane measuring wind force 12." "But he wouldn't let it show." "When he repeated his request, he was in total control." "But he was like a pressure cooker." "This calm, almost inhuman man, whose most guarded secret may have been that although he did nothing to counter the legend about him," "he doubted deep down that it was justified." "This man has always challenged us and in time, we have come to love him forever."