When we were shooting Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1986, the end scene, where the Lena Olin character, Sabina, has emigrated to the United States, and she is a painter, and she's painting in this house, visiting... Visited by two older people who seemingly are her benefactors or supporting her in some way, the house that was chosen for this is the house that we live in in Bolinas. It's my family house. Because it was there, and it was... Phil [Kaufman] liked it, and it seemed to fit. It looks vaguely New England-y, even though it's a California house. And the actor who played the older man in the scene is a... or was a screenwriter named Niven Busch, who was also a novelist, who wrote The Postman Always Rings Twice and some other classic films, Westerns and other things. And Phil had met him at a party. He lived around the San Francisco area, and Phil met him at a party and casually said, 'Do you want to be in a movie?' 'Yes.' So they... Niven Busch was cast as this... The protector of Lena Olin.
And when we were shooting the scene, in between takes, he was sitting at the kitchen table. And Aggie, my wife, was serving tea. And he didn't want tea, but he wanted a nice dollop of sherry in a teacup, because this was... That was his predilection. And he asked, 'What's the name of this film anyway?' And I was passing through the room, and I said, 'It's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.' And he took a sip of sherry and said, 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The only thing worse than that on a marquee of the theatre would be: closed for repairs.' So, I mean, I still... Whenever I say the words, 'This film is The Unbearable Lightness of Being', it kind of trips off my mouth, but I always... in my corner of my mind, I see Niven Busch sipping his teacup of sherry, saying, 'closed for repairs.' It's a very challenging name for a theatrical motion picture, but it's the name of the novel upon which the film is based.
