‘Bergman Island’: How Mia Hansen-Løve Found Herself (And Her Work) in Her Most Personal Film Yet

Every filmmaker keeps a couple of projects simmering on the back burner, the kind that can stay there for years until something heats them up. Mia Hansen-Løve had long wanted to write a script about two married film directors. She had personal insights, after all: she was married for 15 years to older French auteur Olivier Assayas, who first met her as a teenager when she acted in two of his films before going off to college and becoming a filmmaker (they had one child and divorced in 2017).But her idea wasn’t going anywhere until Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman died: Hansen-Løve just didn’t know that yet.“I spend so much time with an idea of a film,” she told me backstage at the New York Film Festival, where her seventh feature film “Bergman Island” was warmly embraced, just as it was at Cannes earlier in the year. “It evolves ...