So the spirits are very capricious, and I’m wondering if Quentin’s had this same experience, had to switch to, like, the flip side of the Steely Dan or Stealer’s Wheel album or single to get the right alchemical fit.

BLUEFAT: The juxtaposition of images and sound can create something very powerful. I think of the video you did for Sparklehorse’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.” For some reason just the sight of the chimpanzee is chilling and thrilling, almost mystical.

MADDIN: Yeah, these are things that you don’t know till you try them.

BLUEFAT: Re your collaboration with Sparks on The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman, what was your vision of Bergman as an artist and human being? Were you guided by what you thought you knew about him?

MADDIN: I’ve never been one for doing research, finding out things too much. I like the idea that movies are a mythic medium and that myths just evolve on their own, almost like some sort of communal effort, that myths come out of not one person but out of generations of people. I felt that conducting research would be counterintuitive. So in many ways I’m dealing with impressions that have wafted my way about Bergman, through watching the movies and just through biographical snippets I picked up in the pre-internet age. You know, where you found out about things very slowly and more erroneously.

Ingmar Bergman is kind of a myth, then, and so something kind of related to clichés, I suppose. I'm fond of clichés and stereotypes if they’re psychologically honest or, say, actually happen to be kind of true. Fairy tales are full of clichéd scenarios, but they can still be psychologically fresh and shocking. But if they’re just hurtful or boring clichés they’re not of interest to me.

BLUEFAT: There’s a character in The Saddest Music in the World who says something that resonates: “Sadness is just happiness turned on its ass –– it’s all showbiz.”

MADDIN: I think of this whenever I’m confronted by a person using emotions to manipulate me: [laughs] It’s just show business, and if there is some other emotion that would get the effect faster, then that would be deployed even more readily.

In storytelling we all experience happiness and sadness, ultimately more sadness than happiness. It’s the great stuff of narrative, and something we can all relate to. It’s a matter of using it, whether you’re going to use it right side up or upside down on its ass. You’re just using all the different colors on your palette.

BLUEFAT: I’m told that Luis Buñuel's L’âge d’Or made quite the impact on you.

MADDIN: I sure watched it a lot. I loved that movie because it was made with non-actors, and it was made with very primitive execution of really sophisticated, mysterious ideas. It was made by inexperienced filmmakers, which I like the idea of, yet it’s very smart and provocative to this day, 80 years after it was made. To me it was exciting because it seemed to encourage me. Even though at the time I first started watching it I had yet to make a movie, it seemed to imply that I could come at filmmaking myself without any experience, just some ideas, without worrying about finding or directing experienced actors, if I just approached it more like a writer. And since I was a frustrated writer I felt that that movie gave me permission to make movies not as a filmmaker but as a writer. And then once I actually started making movies I realized I had started making movies not as a writer or filmmaker but as a kind of visual artist.

So L’âge d’Or opened the door for me into the world of filmmaking and continues to give me inspiration the way Buñuel collages ideas together. I thought he was giving me permission to enter the world of filmmaking as a writer, but he was really giving me permission to enter the world of visual art as a writer pretending to be a filmmaker. [laughs]

And I like it ‘cause it’s primitive, yet eternally mysterious and funny and cynical and psychologically plausible no matter how bizarre it gets.

BLUEFAT: Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty was inspiring in a similar way, for the way it defined its own hyperlinear shape. It gives one permission to seek another, very personal way.

MADDIN: Isn’t the first line in the movie “I hate symmetry”?

BLUEFAT: Yes, it is! So let’s end this now.

A similar curiosity about the provocative juxtaposition of time/sense/image is what Sparks had in mind when they thrust Ingmar Bergman straight into the pointy-toothed jaws of Tinseltown, USA.

“We placed him in Hollywood because of the contrasts between his and our worlds,” says Ron Mael. “But we noticed along the way that the cartoony aspects of how we were portraying Hollywood were kind of realistic. You always try to avoid caricatures, but in this case the Hollywood folks are already sort of caricatures, in that sunny, upbeat but maybe a little bit insincere personality of a typical American. We wanted a foil for Bergman.”

BLUEFAT: The very idea of “Hollywood” remains fascinating and horrifying and of course seductive. You two grew up here, too, though as outsiders, so Bergman’s story is your story as well.

RON MAEL: There was a kinship with Bergman, because we too have an ambivalence toward the whole Hollywood thing. I mean, we did grow up watching Hollywood films, and I still love them. But once you started going to university and saw films from other countries, you realized there’s a whole other system. And the way that our band has always had to work was more in a European style, generally, where you’re always battling against the commercial pressures that are put upon you. And it isn’t always a choice, in our situation. We’ve never had a huge choice to make the decision that we’re gonna go one way or another way. We just kind of said, This is what we do.

I think Bergman was in that situation as well. I’m not making a comparison in the quality of the work, but just as far as people being in a certain situation creatively goes, I don’t know how much of a choice he did have where he could change what he was doing. He cast Elliott Gould in The Touch, but that was about it. He had met with some producers and he had a choice of three different actors –– the others were Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford –– and for some reason he chose Elliott Gould.

Now, the situation where someone’s put in a position where it’s outside of his comfort level but it may work out to have a positive effect if you just swallow your pride a little bit ­­­­–– that’s something that’s always intrigued us, and we’ve had certain situations like that; but in the end we always went in the way Bergman went in this story, when you say, I really don’t want to put myself in that position. The kind of extremes of what those pressures are reaches an absurd point in The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman…We wanted to get it as ludicrous as possible.

BLUEFAT: With Bergman films, actual content aside, the heavy sense of mood or ambience burns itself into the mind. Hollywood does the same thing, in a way. The stories are largely secondary.

RUSSELL MAEL: It’s true. When we got the commission to do this production, we went back and watched as many Bergman films as we could, and after a while they started to blend into each other; there’s an atmosphere that’s pervasive in most of them and they do become almost one continuous thing. Obviously there’re certain exceptions, like Smiles of a Summer Night, which was a comedy, but he’s got that trilogy Through a Glass Darkly, where sometimes you take that atmosphere away more than a specific plot.

BLUEFAT: While many great European directors did eventually work in Hollywood, and made great films here, it’s probably fortunate that Bergman didn’t get sucked into the Hollywood system. He didn’t get the opportunity to be corrupted.

RON: There was an interview that Bergman did with Dick Cavett, who asked Bergman, If producers or directors or any Hollywood showbiz people came up to you and gave you some kind of advice, what would you do? He said, I’d tell them to go to hell!

BLUEFAT: Cinema hovers over everything you do. It’s not that big a leap for you as musicians.

RUSSELL: It’s not at all. Everyone has always said, Your music is so cinematic and conjures up so much stuff. Even a song like “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us,” where its using movie clichés as part of the lyrics. We always use the analogy that in a song you can create something that’s as big and expansive as you want and make something be like it's a movie even though you can’t afford to make a big Hollywood movie. You can create visually and aurally a movie within a song, and it doesn’t cost you any more to do so; it costs you the brain power and musical ability to do that, but it’s no more expensive to make your own little movie as part of the song.