“The director’s heyday had not yet come. Urban Gad certainly gave his best, conceiving all the scripts and providing me with all sorts of suggestions. I have much to be grateful to him for. But the film actress who really wanted to shape and carry a role, had to be a bit of a creator herself.

Often enough, my scenes had only vague directions. I remember one particular script in which all it said was: The child dies. Asta’s major scene.

One might well imagine that, along with the director, who was also the script writer, I worked towards a final result through joint discussions and rehearsals. But things were never like that. I played the scenes that demanded the greatest of concentration and gestural expression according to a system worked out, often in great detail, in my mind, and usually without previous rehearsals, just like my first scenes in Abgründe. Of course, that was only possible for solo scenes, but my films were just teeming with them. What the camera demands above all is authentic expression, and a scene based solely on feeling is, as a rule, most credible when it is played for the first time – assuming the actor is really in a position to experience the situation and has mastered all the means at his disposal. Feeling alone never creates art.

I entered into the world of the characters I was to play months in advance, thinking through all the external aspects, from the cut of the clothes to the respective details of the accessories and props, which play an even greater role in an art where the spoken word is not heard, than on the stage”. (Asta Nielsen, Die schweigende Muse (1945-1946); ed. ted., 1977)