Max, on why he enjoyed the role of Ming in 'Flash Gordon'
"No film like this can please everybody so in a sense it was a failure, but it was a very beautiful and a very moving failure."
Max, on 'The Greatest Story Ever Told'
"I'm very lucky. Lucky in my life and my work. Still, if I could live over again, I don't know if I'd want to be an actor. I think I used my profession for many years as some kind of therapy, to fill out whatever I lacked. Sometimes I get very tired of the big apparatus the actor must depend on. I really envy people who can do things all by themselves, like a painter or a writer."
Max, from the 'Hannah and Her Sisters' presspack
"There are two kinds of Swedes - nasty winter Swedes and happy summer Swedes"
Max on his countrymen
"If it is possible to describe a 'thinking face', then Max von Sydow has that...Sydow is, in many ways, a very modern actor: his moments of extreme emotion are when he believes himself to be observed by no one save, perhaps, God. Sydow was to go on through many films with Bergman, as much an icon to some - the intelligent actor - as Bergman's actresses became examples for modern women"
Melvyn Bragg, 'The Seventh Seal' - BFI Film Classics
Robin Williams on Max in 'What Dreams May Come'(1998);
Robin Williams lauds the good humour of all the 'Dreams' cast while making a film that tackles the heavy issues of eternity. He takes special delight in calling Max Von Sydow 'my friend Max'.
"You think Max Von Sydow's going to be this forbidding figure from all those Ingmar Bergman films, that he's going to pass judgment on everything that goes on and compare it all to an Ingmar Bergman set. And then he turns out to be warm, friendly and really very funny. And actually cuddly, too. In person, there's something cuddly about Max Von Sydow. He and his wife have become great friends with me and my wife.''
Liv Ullmann on Max in 'Private Confessions'(1998);
As for Max von Sydow, Ullmann at first found herself a little shy with him, because for years they had acted together (in films such as The Shame, The Passion of Anna, and The Emigrants), and she didn't know how he would feel about taking direction from her. "But I think that's what's so wonderful about good actors. They get their parts, and they do them, even if the part is 'Now I'm going to have a different relationship with somebody that I know very well in another way.' After the first or second day, I had always been his director, and he had always been my actor."
During a 12-minute take -- which is extraordinarily long by American standards -- von Sydow suddenly became too emotional to say anything for a full minute. Ullmann thinks it may have had something to do with his personal life rather than with his character, since his marriage was breaking up at the time.
"It was so right for the whole thing. He knew that I would not stop shooting. I knew that he would use the moment and translate it into the role of the priest. It's one of the most stunning close-up scenes I've ever watched."
An extract from an article on ‘Hawaii’ (1966);
The action was part of the conflict between Max and Richard-a dashing sea captain who was determined to recapture Julie's love. The man-eating shark, incidentally, was a wondrous mechanical creature made by a special effects technician. He operated the sea beast by sitting on a bicycle seat in its soft underbelly. As an avid Max Von Sydow fan, Julie Andrews reiterated: "I consider it a great privilege to work with this man." Despite years of international stardom on stage and screen, Sweden's top trouper admitted: "My face is still one of the best-kept secrets in show business and it doesn't bother me a bit. By hiding behind wigs and beards, it gives me a greater personal advantage over American actors. My anonymity, I think, is a tribute to my versatility as a performer. Actually, I can't imagine what I'd do if people came screaming at me the way they do Rock Hudson. I'd probably be afraid to go out of my house!"
From Charlton Heston's autobiography "In the Arena";
"There is no European actor so highly regarded as Max"
(For the following extract to be amusing, it must first be noted in advance that 1) Charlton Heston starred as John the Baptist alongside Max in 'The Greatest Story Ever Told', 2) Charlton's son Fraser was used as the baby Moses in 'The Ten Commandments' and 3) Fraser 'Fray' Heston directed 'Needful Things');
"Almost exactly thirty years after Greatest Story, Fray has grown into a writer-director of appropriately increasing reputation. He was in Vancouver, directing a film for Castle Rock based on a Stephen King novel, Needful Things, in which he'd cast Max von Sydow as the devil. [Bloody good he was, too.] I visited the set and stood chatting with another actor in the film, who knew Fraser had played the Infant Moses in Ten Commandments. As we stood on the sidelines watching Fray talking intensely to Max, thirty feet away, the actor observed wryly, "Now you don't see that often: there's Moses, telling Christ how to play the Devil".
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