ngmar Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage is by far the piece of art that has most influenced me,” says Israeli writer-director Hagai Levi. “I watched it accidentally for the first time at 18-years-old, a young, religious Jewish boy in a remote village who knew nothing about cinema, relationships or sex. I remember thinking to myself, shocked, ‘So, this is art!’”

That is the kind of impact that Bergman’s iconic miniseries had on audiences when it first aired on Swedish television in 1973. Bergman, who was at the peak of his career when he directed the six-episode series, explores themes of jealousy, desire, passion, contempt and compromise in a way only an iconic filmmaker such as himself could. The TV series followed a married couple, Marianne (Liv Ulmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson) who initially seem happy and in love but as the story moves on, forensically exploring their marriage, audiences become aware of the fragility of their union. It gripped audiences, with a whopping 3.5 million people in Sweden – nearly half the nation – tuning into watch the final episode.

The relationship drama saw Marianne liberate herself from a cheating husband, even packing his suitcase for him after he announces he is leaving for Paris with his lover the next day, something that had a huge impact on audiences at a time society was questioning the status quo of domestic relationships.

“Its brutal honesty, its radical minimalism, its absolute reliance on text and performance have since been points of reference in all of my work,” notes Levi, who points to his show BeTipul, which later became HBO series In Treatment and also an inspiration for the show The Affair, as hugely inspired by Bergman’s miniseries. “But it wasn’t until Ingmar’s family approached me that I could ever have contemplated in my wildest dreams making Scenes From A Marriage.”

Indeed, four decades after Scenes From A Marriage first aired, Bergman’s son Daniel approached Levi with the idea of reimagining his father’s masterpiece for a modern audience. Daniel had just seen Levi’s In Treatment with Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist who, week by week, talks to his patients, eventually revealing an underlying trauma within himself.

“In Treatment is just two people talking to each other with no external drama and just one location and I thought Hagai had managed to manoeuvre the set up brilliantly,” says Daniel Bergman. “I knew he had to be the right person to do this.”

Both daunted and excited at the prospect, Levi continued to wrestle with the question of how he could make his own version of a piece of television that had such an impact on his career and how he approached his own work.

“It was something like in between a dream and a nightmare – I thought how can I touch this thing? What could I do with this? How can I stop trembling and make it my own?”

It took eight years for Levi, who continued working on other projects such as Our Boys and The Affair, to discover how to make Scenes From A Marriage work for a modern audience whilst also honoring the original.

Throughout the years, Levi contemplated how to remake the show and what kept cropping up for him when he rewatched the original was how Bergman’s version was reflective of a different time. Johan was the male chauvinist who cheated on his wife while Marianne was perceived as weak and dependent on her husband. Feeling a distance from these characters forced him to examine how gender roles have changed.

Everything clicked when Levi decided to reverse the traditional gender and marriage roles for the characters, making Mira, played by Jessica Chastain, the high-powered breadwinner of the family. Her husband Jonathan, played by Oscar Isaac, is a philosophy professor who mostly works from home so he can care for their daughter.

“I got to episode two and realized Hagai had switched the genders,” says Chastain upon her first read of Levi’s script. “It became incredibly interesting to me because it really depicts women, and my character, Mira, as a fully realized human being. I loved the idea of exploring a woman with complications and complexities.”

Isaac added, “Their story felt completely contemporary and definitely one of the ways that Hagai did that was swapping who had the affair. He is still exploring the idea of gender roles and marriage roles and how we see ourselves in a relationship and what we expect of each other and ourselves.”

Acclaimed playwright Amy Herzog joined Levi in some of the writing for the series and in addition to exploring how gender perceptions and roles have changed, Herzog was also acutely aware of how attitudes to marriage and, crucially, to divorce have changed since Bergman’s original work was aired.

Famously, after the series first aired in 1973, divorce rates in Sweden doubled. The program clearly had an impact in assisting people to confront issues in their own relationships.

“People were able to access something through art that allowed them to tell the truth about their own lives, to see something that they had been denying in their own lives,” says Herzog.

While divorce is much more commonplace in society today, Levi was interested in exploring the notion that the pendulum may have swung too far the other way and that the modern world, perhaps, takes divorce to lightly.

“I felt it was time to speak about the price of divorce,” he says. “In a narcissistic consumer-society era that encourages one to constantly look for self-actualization and shallow freedom, it’s also worth reminding how traumatic a separation is, usually, in the course of a human life.”

For Mira to leave Jonathan and her child is a something that is still frowned up by society today and as Jonathan uses her motherhood as a weapon to persuade her to stay and stick it out, the audience must decide for themselves what the best outcome is.

Herzog says, “We have to tell the truth about the flaws in our marriages and end that when the marriage is no longer providing more good than harm. But we also must tell the truth about the pain of divorce and not gloss over that.”

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