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Atmospherically it’s extraordinary. It does create the atmosphere of central Europe, very
much in its intrigue and its gossip and its sordidness. It’s not all that, sort of mushwa
acting, and snuff and lorgnettes and all that nonsense you’d usually see in eighteenth
century films done by Hollywood. It’s got a kind of reality about it, a smell and a
taste, and I think all that’s very, very good, and it’s got a roughness about it,
which I like a lot. I’m not so mad about my writing for it. I think that I made it,
in some ways, too simple, too simple-minded. I’m sorry that the end didn’t deal well
enough with the idea of a man imprisoned in his own fame. I wish we’d dealt with that
more, because it does seem to me that that would speak very pertinently, particularly
to America, which is a country where you can be a celebrity for being a celebrity. This
seems to me that it could be a healthy reproof of that attitude, but I don’t want to dwell
on the negative things. I think the positive things of the film. Its guts, its guttsiness,
its brightness, and its respect for the music, you know, that up to that time classical music
is usually lodged, as it is used in Elvira Madigan, where the same bars are repeated
over and over and over again, and we made it a principle that we would play whole stretches
of music, and not just “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” or the “G Minor Symphony” but the less
popular things, the concertos and masses and the “C Minor Mass,” for example, was used,
the whole seven minutes of the statue scene in Don Giovanni. I mean, Milos deeply respected
the music, and that’s terrific.