76th Cannes Film Festival: How Liv Ullmann became documentary filmmaker Dheeraj Akolkar’s muse

Legendary Norwegian actor-director-activist Liv Ullmann at 76th Cannes Film Festival (left); documentary filmmaker Dheeraj Akolkar.

"Have you interviewed him?" asks Liv Ullmann as she arrives in the hotel lobby to leave for one of her many appearances at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. The iconic Norwegian actor, director and activist is alluding to Indian-origin filmmaker Dheeraj Akolkar, who has made a new documentary on her life and works. The interview is in the intermission period, I tell her. "It surely takes a long time to complete it," she responds before stepping into her car.

Ullmann must know because it has taken the London-based filmmaker almost his entire career in filmmaking so far to direct two documentaries on her in the past one decade. The first, Liv & Ingmar, about the artistic and personal relationship between Ullmann and Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, came in 2012. The second, Liv Ullmann — A Road Less Travelled, has just had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes festival, which began on May 16.

"We have great actors in India, but Liv Ullmann is a different kind," says Akolkar, 42. "She is very real, authentic and rooted. She is very aware and sensitive to the surroundings," he adds. "Liv is not very fond of her image. She is so much more than the person she is."

Liv Ullmann — A Road Less Travelled, which is part of the Cannes Classics section of the festival, recreates the persona of the actor-director on the screen through interviews with her close collaborators like actors Cate Blanchett, Jessica Chastain, John Lithgow, Jeremy Irons and Sam Waterston. Reading from her books, Changing (1977) and Choices (1984), Ullmann appears in the film to talk about her more than six-decade-long career as a celebrated actor on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Liv was very much Bergman's muse," says Lithgow in the film. "What she did with Bergman changed the film industry," he adds. When he met Ullmann for the first time, Bergman famously asked her: 'Do you want to be in one of my movies?' She went on to act in many movies Bergman directed, like Persona (1966), Autumn Sonata (1978), Scenes From a Marriage (1974) and Cries and Whispers (1972).

"I got introduced to Ingmar Bergman's films through Liv Ullmann," confesses Akolkar, a trained architect, who became a filmmaker. "I had not seen any of their works and I had no exposure to world cinema because I didn't go to a film school in India. For example, in a film institute you are shown all these classics. I didn't see them, I am an architect," recalls the director, who found Ullmann's book, Changing, in the house of a family friend in Pune. "I met Liv Ullmann for the first time as a human being, as a girl who had lost her father at the age of six, through her book," he says. "She fell in love with this incredible human being called Ingmar Bergman, had a volatile relationship with him and went to Hollywood."

"I didn't have any preconceived imagination of who Ullmann was or who Bergman was. In 2006 when I came to London to study cinema at the Goldsmiths' College, the first films I picked out were Ullmann and Bergman's movies. Their first film I saw was Shame (1968) directed by Bergman in which Ullmann acts. It is still my favourite film of the Liv Ullmann-Ingmar Bergman collaboration," he says. "Then I started watching their films voraciously, I hadn't seen anything like that before."

Akolkar, a university topper in architecture (he studied at Pune University's Marathwada Mitra Mandal's College of Architecture), didn't set out to become a filmmaker. "In my first year at college, one of my first architect teachers was (filmmaker) Nachiket Patwardhan. I was very inspired by him. Then in my fourth year, I went to do an internship in Mumbai with art director and production designer Nitin Desai (Lagaan, Devdas, Jodhaa Akbar). He gave me an opportunity and my first experience was on December 12, 1998 on the sets of Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam at the Mehboob Studio in Mumbai," he says.

"It was the first day of production of Hum Dil de Chuke Sanam and the set was going to be built. I was working on it as a trainee assistant art director," says Akolkar. "I have done everything, cut thermocol, painted floors and sat and had lots of beautiful meals with painters, moulders and carpenters. Mehboob Studio had a lot of energy. It was the studio's floor number three where sets of Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Pakeezah (1972) were filmed."

"I walked on to that empty floor and that was the moment I knew I was going to be a filmmaker. I always wanted to make films, but it took a little time to gather the courage to say, 'Oh, I want to direct'. That happened slowly.  Two months after Hum Dil... the screenplay of Lagaan had come to our office. Desai involved me in Lagaan. I worked in the pre-production of the film, travelled to find locations and did design and research. After Lagaan, I went back to my college to complete my architecture course."

Akolkar topped the University of Pune in architecture. "Even before the results were out, I came back to Desai because he said, 'Come on, don't waste time, I have a big film and you can start working," he says. That big film turned out to be Devdas, which premiered in Cannes in 2002. "My father wanted to be a filmmaker, but became a doctor. Both my parents are doctors," he says. In 2012, when Liv & Ingmar, Akolkar's first movie, premiered in Oslo, Norway, his parents were present along with Ullmann.

When Liv Ullmann — A Road Less Travelled premiered in Cannes on Friday night, Akolkar's mother was there, a fact mentioned by Ullmann in her speech before the screening. "This is my first Cannes official selection. The movie was completed a week back like any other Cannes premieres," he laughs. Liv Ullmann — A Road Less Travelled will release on Nordic streaming platform, Viaplay, as a three-part docu series today.