Ingmar Bergman will be eighty-four years old this summer, but there is no perceptible let-up in his energy or creativity. After the success of Ibsen's Ghosts, which he directed for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, he has turned his attention to another giant of Scandinavian drama, August Strindberg. Bergman has done an experimental radio adaptation of the playwright's "chamber play," The Pelican, which includes fragments from an unfinished play that Strindberg was inspired to write by the Arnold Böcklin picture Der Toteninsel. Next there follows an important TV project, with Bergman, as writer and director, returning to the couple who featured in his celebrated TV series of thirty years ago, Scenes from a Marriage: Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann will once again take up their roles as Johan and Marianne. As he agrees on the telephone to meet me for an interview for Positif, Bergman speaks with infectious enthusiasm about the opportunities this sequel offers him, in particular the use of a new kind of digital video camera. Scheduled for September 2002, the filming is expected to take eight weeks.

He meets me in the foyer of the "Dramaten," as the Royal Dramatic Theatre is familiarly known. He ran this respected institution between 1963 and 1966, and has returned there many times to direct acclaimed productions. As he guides me along the corridors and stairs towards the rehearsal room and the office he still has on the third floor of this impressive building, he asks me if I've read Doktor Romand, the Swedish translation of the short novel by Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary. When I tell him that it was one of the most unpleasant reading experiences I've ever had, he laughs and says, "Sure, it gets under your skin in a very unpleasant way, but it's terribly well written!"

During the preparation of the Ibsen play, Bergman gave each member of the cast a copy of the Carrère book, and they discussed it during the rehearsals. Bergman felt that the story of the criminal doctor, Romand, had an important point in common with Ghosts in that Ibsen's characters also live a destructive lie. "It's about a deceit that takes over an entire life; the façade, the disguise, the lie which eats up a human being from the inside. In this respect Romand's story really helped us. A fantastic, intriguing book, but at the same time awful and unpleasant to read. When I read it, I thought it was crying out to be made into a film." Bergman was not familiar with the films based on the Romand tragedy that Laurent Cantet and Nicole Garcia had directed; when I mentioned them, he showed enormous interest and said that he couldn't wait to see them. What impresses one talking to Bergman, even now, is the way he still finds the cinema so exciting to talk about. He mentions films with a boyish enthusiasm; old films, new films, old and young directors, his favourite directors and, not least, his own collection of videos and 35mm prints. It's the mark of a curiosity and love for the cinema that seems to have continued unbroken ever since he first started going to the cinema as a young boy. I have never met a director, particularly one as old as Bergman, with such a keen appetite to see films.

He tells me that every spring, in accordance with a special decision taken by the governing body of the Swedish Film Institute, he sends a list of 150 films which he would like to see held by the institute's film archive, the Swedish equivalent of the Cinémathèque Française. At the beginning of June each year, these films are delivered by lorry to his house on the island of Fårö, so he can view them in his own fully equipped viewing theatre. There, Bergman has established an unbreakable ritual: he sees a film at three o'clock every weekday through the summer, often in the company of his children and grandchildren on their holidays. On the Monday he gives them a list of the week's films.

Besides these 150 titles, there is another list made up of the most interesting or most talked about films to have been released in the last months, which the various distributors kindly make available to him. In this way, albeit with a small time lag, he keeps up with current production, both Swedish and international. If you mention to him François Ozon's Sous le sable, he'll tell you that it's a fantastic work which made such an impression on him that he's seen it several times.

More than that, Bergman has lovingly looked after a private collection of 400 prints and a video library of some 4,500 titles supplied to him by a London company that has had a first-class stock list ever since films began to appear on video; these films are projected on to a giant television screen. No surprise then quickly to discover when talking to Bergman that he has an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema history, both artistic and technical. Little matter if his opinions on various film-makers and their work seems unorthodox and rather contrary to conventional opinion. For example, his attitude to Orson Welles: "For me, Welles is a phoney," says Bergman. "He is greatly overrated. He is shallow, not interesting. Citizen Kane, which by the way I have in my collection, is, of course, the favourite of all the critics, always put at the top of the best films of all time lists. But I don't understand why at all. Take the performances: they're terrible. Welles walks about in a mask, as he plays a tycoon who's supposed to be William Randolph Hearst, but all the time you can see the joins between the mask and his own skin. Terrible! No, it's a bad film which bores me to death. The Magnificent Ambersons? No! Equally annoying. And I don't like Welles any more as an actor. In Hollywood, there are two types: actors and personalities. It's a very useful distinction. Welles was beyond compare as a personality. But in the part of Othello...I won't even bother to tell you what I think–it's unprintable." With only two exceptions, Bergman has nothing good to say about Michelangelo Antonioni: "I've never much liked his films, except for two which are totally different from the others: La Notte and Blow Up. I have Il Grido on video; my God, it's dull! It bores you stiff. You see, Antonioni has never properly learnt his craft. He's an aesthete. If, for example, he needs a certain kind of road for The Red Desert, then he gets the houses repainted on the damned street. That is the attitude of an aesthete. He took great care over a single shot, but didn't understand that a film is a rhythmic stream of images, a living, moving process; for him, on the contrary, it was such a shot, then another shot, then yet another. So, sure, there are some brilliant bits in his films. But Blow Up is marvellously well put together. The same is true of La Notte, which I also have and look at every now and then with great admiration and pleasure; a marvellous film in which the young Jeanne Moreau has something to contribute. But the much praised L'Avventura! No, thank you! I have no regard for it at all. Only indifference. I can't understand why Antonioni is held in such high esteem. And as for Monica Vitti! I've always thought she was a lousy actress.

"I feel very differently about Fellini and his films. He used to call me 'fratello mio.' Once we were supposed to make a film together, with another one of my favourite directors, Akira Kurosawa. The idea was that we would each make a love story which would be a part of a film produced by Dino De Laurentiis. I wrote my story and I flew to Rome, where Fellini was finishing Satyricon. For three weeks we had a great time together while we waited for Kurosawa, who had just had a severe attack of pneumonia. Finally, De Laurentiis gave up and said that there would be no film. To be completely honest, it was difficult to get Federico to decide what story he wanted to tell. I had written and brought along a very detailed script, while Fellini had a three-page synopsis which he wanted to develop into a script with one of his regular collaborators. For all I remember, maybe they did actually write something, but everything fell through because Kurosawa couldn't travel because of his health. While we waited for him, I spent some time with Fellini at the studio watching him work on Satyricon. I'm very sorry that this project involving the three of us never saw the light of day. I liked Fellini a lot. I visited him and Giulietta Masina on the coast, and I had a memorable Easter dinner. We liked each other a lot. And I certainly continue to look at his films. I love La Strada and, most of all, Amarcord.

"If we're talking of those film-makers whose work has really affected me and inspired me, we have to begin with Victor Sjöström, him first and foremost. Then there's Marcel Carné and Kurosawa, and Fellini. In no particular order. I just have a particular regard for them. I make an effort to see Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage at least once a year. It's become a tradition to begin my cinema season with The Phantom Carriage and to end it with A Girl from the Marsh Croft. I'm enormously attached to these two films. To see them again and again has become, in a way, a tradition. A drug. Or, if you like, a vice. When it comes to Victor's Hollywood films, people tend to mention The Wind first, which is certainly a marvellous work. But personally I find He Who Gets Slapped even more remarkable. Isn't it incredible how he could adapt to Hollywood yet still be innovative?"

Later, Sjöström became artistic adviser to Svensk Filmindustri (or SF, the big production company behind most of Bergman's features up to A Passion in I969), when his then twenty-eight-year-old admirer directed his first film, Crisis, in the company's studios at Rasunda, near Stockholm.

"He was such a wonderful man," Bergman continues, "generous with his advice, simple but wise. 'Don't make unnecessary trouble when you direct,' he used to tell me. 'Don't create too many problems for yourself and your crew. Elaborate camera movements–you don't know yet how to control such things, so don't bother yourself with them. Don't complicate things for the actors. Keep the sets simple and spare.' Invaluable advice for a young iconoclast longing to experiment!

"I suppose I must have a particular weakness for silent films from the second half of the twenties, before the cinema was taken over by sound. At that time, the cinema was in the process of creating its own language. There was Murnau and The Last Laugh, with Jannings, a film told solely in images with a fantastic suppleness; then his Faust, and finally his masterpiece, Sunrise. Three astonishing works that tell us that Murnau, at the same time as Stroheim in Hollywood, was well on the way to creating a magnificently original and distinct language. I have many favourites among the German films of this period.

"I must confess a great weakness for the UFA films made after the First World War. But, when I began to work at SF as an assistant in the script department (this was 1942, I was twenty-four), the main task for me and my five or six colleagues was to apply American dramatic principles to our material. On the floor beneath us there were three projection rooms that belonged to the distribution department, where they ran films non-stop, and whenever I had the time I used to go down there to watch. We had unlimited access to American films, and the result was that we became so used to the American approach to drama that it was impossible to write or to revise a script using different rules from Hollywood. When I directed my first films, I was pleased to have such strong foundations on which to stand. Later, of course, I got rid of them; but, at first, it was a firm and solid support.

"As far as American dramaturgy is concerned, none of its exponents mean more to me than that old Viennese, Billy Wilder. I can see the greatness of John Ford as a film-maker, but his films have nothing to say to me. With Wilder, it's the opposite. He has a genius when it comes to actors. He always makes the perfect choice, even in the case of Marilyn Monroe. I met him when he was filming Fedora in Bavaria; I was in Germany to prepare From the Life of the Marionettes. I've always loved his films."

As a child and through his adolescence, Bergman went to the cinema as often as he could, particularly to Sunday matinees. He often used to watch the two afternoon programmes, the first at one o'clock, and the second at three.

"I'd have to beg, borrow or steal to get the money for a ticket, for after a while the price climbed well beyond my weekly allowance. But an even more difficult problem was that at home, after having listened to the Sunday sermon of our father, the pastor Eric Bergman, we children had to face the weekly ritual of 'church coffee.' It was understood that we would help out and be on our best behaviour. The trick was to slip off quietly in time for the first afternoon showing. If the second programme was too long, I'd run the risk of being late for another obligatory family ritual, Sunday dinner, which was at five o'clock. So, as a young film buff, I used to spend a lot of my time running. Luckily, at that time in Stockholm there were a lot of small cinemas relatively close to where we lived and that made it just possible."

Did your passion for films bother your parents?

"Not at all. They both went to the cinema and loved it. I remember my mother getting cross with me only once. I must have been eighteen. It was because I had seen Julien Duvivier's last film. I told her: 'You must go and see it!' My parents remembered my enthusiastic recommendation and went off to see Pépé le Moko. Afterwards, my mother was furious with me: Duvivier's film was not a suitable entertainment for the pastor Eric Bergman and his wife. How could you like such terrible, immoral filth? After that, I stopped recommending films to them.

"This memory, which is still very fresh in my mind, reminds me of a little episode at a film festival in France during the sixties. I was there for some reason I no longer remember, and someone in an audience of critics wanted to know what films had most mattered to me. I replied very honestly that Carné and Duvivier were decisive influences in my wanting to become a film-maker. It was between 1936 and 1939 when seeing Carné's Quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord and Le jour se lève, and Duvivier's Pépé le Moko and Un carnet de bal had a huge impact on me. I told myself that, if I ever managed to become a director, that was how I wanted to make films, like Carné! Those films affected me enormously. But when I mentioned Carné and Duvivier at this French festival, the audience reacted with sniggers of scorn and disdain. I could read what they were thinking in the expressions on their faces: what a fool, a bit dense, this Bergman! If I had said Jean Renoir, it would have been OK. But how could someone who had really thought about it believe that Carné or Duvivier were any good?

"If I'm not mistaken, the supposed 'politique des auteurs' was in vogue at the time, and the most influential of the French critics, following the path shown them by François Truffaut, had rejected what they called 'le cinéma de papa.' Jean-Luc Godard was worshipped as the new idol of the cinema and so on. So it was a terrible faux pas of mine to pay tribute to these two old clowns! But I still enjoy seeing their films. I watch them with enormous pleasure, find them extremely good. They possess a sadness, a tenderness and a sensuality that I find simply marvellous."

As far as Truffaut and Godard are concerned, Bergman's Monika was a revelation for some of the young Cahiers du cinéma writers when they saw the film again some years after its initially hostile reception in 1953. Afterwards, it became a sort of model for these writers, which they studied on their way to becoming directors themselves, as Antoine de Baecque points out in his book La Nouvelle Vague: portrait d'une jeunesse (1998). Godard wrote admiringly of Monika. Now, years later, the director of Monika adds: "There's a symbolic scene in Les Quatre cents coups where the boys steal the film still of Harriet outside the cinema. I liked Truffaut enormously, I admired him. His way of relating with an audience, of telling a story, is both fascinating and tremendously appealing. It's not my style of storytelling, but it works wonderfully well in relation to the film medium. La Nuit américaine is a magical film. I can see some of Truffaut's films again and again without growing tired of them. Like L'Enfant sauvage. Its humanism made a huge impression on me."

On the other hand, Bergman expresses an intense dislike of Godard and his avant-garde tendencies.

"I've never been able to appreciate any of his films, nor even understand them. Truffaut and I used to meet on several occasions at film festivals. We had an instant understanding that extended to his films. But Godard: I find his films affected, intellectual, self-obsessed and, as cinema, without interest and frankly dull.

"Endless and tiresome. Godard is a desperate bore. I've always thought that he made films for critics. He made one here in Sweden, Masculin, Féminin, so boring that my hair stood on end. No, I'd prefer to speak of the third of those directors from the peak of the New Wave, the one who specialized in crime dramas, Claude Chabrol. A marvelous storyteller in a specific genre. I've always had a weakness for his thrillers, just as I have for Jean-Pierre Melville, whose stylized approach to the crime drama accompanies an excellent sense of lighting a scene. I love seeing his films. He was also one of the first directors really to understand how to use Cinemascope in an intelligent and sensitive way.

"A French critic wrote, with regards to my film Autumn Sonata, that 'Monsieur Bergman has begun to make Bergman films.' It wasn't meant to be a compliment. But I still think it was a very intelligent and perceptive comment, which I really took note of because I knew exactly what he meant. He was absolutely right. And it's what a director must make an effort to avoid at all costs. Fellini made a few Fellini films, not many, mind you, he wasn't allowed to live long enough for that, just a few. But this was nothing compared to Andrei Tarkovsky. By that I mean, for him, leaving the Soviet Union was really an artistic disaster. Take The Sacrifice: it's a hopeless mess. Erland Josephson, his leading actor, wrote a marvellously funny radio play about a summer night on which Tarkovsky and his crew were filming exterior shots: funny and very revealing. In the end, it became a theatre play.

"But Tarkovsky gave me one of the greatest and most forgettable cinema experiences in my life. Late one day in 1971 I was watching a film with Kjell Grede (a Swedish director) in a viewing room at SF. Afterwards, we looked in a cupboard which contained a pile of film cans. 'What's that?' I asked the projectionist. 'Oh, some crappy Russian film.' But then I saw Tarkovsky's name and I said to Grede, 'Listen, I've read something about this film. We must see what it's about.' So we bribed the projectionist to show it to us–and it was Andrei Rublev. So, at about two-thirty in the morning, the two of us staggered out of the viewing room, with bloodshot eyes, completely stunned and shaken. I'll never forget it. And what was extraordinary was that it didn't have any Swedish subtitles! We didn't understand a word of dialogue, but we were still bowled over. Tarkovsky made another film which I like a lot, The Mirror. Erland Josephson was in two of his films, and he and Tarkovsky talked a lot to each other. I understand from Erland that Tarkovsky had a strange attitude towards actors: he didn't want them to act at all. Even so I think he was a wonderful human being. But I'll tell you something strange about my relationship with him. He was in Gotland filming the exteriors for Sacrifice. It would have taken only twenty minutes for me to go and visit him but I didn't. I've thought about that several times: here was someone who meant so much to me, who was such an important influence, perhaps even more in his attitude to life than as a filmmaker, so why didn't I visit him when he was so close? I think it was a matter of language. He spoke neither English nor German, the two foreign languages in which I feel relatively at ease. He spoke a little French, a little Italian, and so we would have had to communicate through an interpreter. But for the sort of things I needed to talk to him about, an interpreter would have been useless. So we never met. To my profound regret, more so because he died so soon afterwards."

When he was still making films, how did Bergman react to what the critics wrote? Did he ever worry about how his films would be received? He interrupted, waving his finger at me: "You've had a go at me more than once! I thought of you as one of my enemies!" He then burst out laughing. "But don't worry about it. You've kept a close eye on me over many years, which is good."

But in the past there were some critics that Bergman recalled with less good humour and forgiveness, critics who caused some painful wounds.

"I had a very difficult start. No one appreciates it now. It was very hard. I can still recall some reviews word for word. Of Sawdust and Tinsel a respected critic on a daily paper commented: 'I will not lower myself to consider the last bit of vomit by Mr Bergman.' And then there was an influential literary critic, who had a big name in cultural debates, who deigned to go and see Smiles of a Summer Night and then warned his readers that it amounted to 'the disgusting fantasies of a pimply young man. I'm ashamed to have seen this film.' To see such responses in print wasn't exactly my idea of fun or encouragement. I've had to put up with many similar comments."

Critics from other countries seem to have been more perceptive than their Swedish colleagues in their evaluation of your films.

"Perhaps that's true. But at the same time you must understand something: this supposed celebrity attached to my name as a film director is completely and fundamentally alien to me. It's as if people were writing or talking about a distant cousin, about someone I had hardly anything to do with. For example, I hardly ever see any of my old films."

Because you don't like them?

"No, that's not why. It's because they disturb me too much. I'm swept away by a torrent of often very sad memories connected with their production. There's something wonderful about being a theatre director: you direct a play, it's shown to an audience so many times, and then it's gone. But films stay for ever. And that's sometimes very painful. Sometimes you discover that they've been cut to pieces by insensitive hands. As you know, each copy of a film begins with a length of leader and on this strip, in the case of Persona, I put an erect penis. Just three or four frames. As the film passes through the projector at twenty-four frames a second, you can work out how long this penis was visible on the screen–a sixth of a second! It was a subliminal image. But it was discovered. The film caused a lot of interest outside Sweden and was shown just about everywhere–but, everywhere, this erect penis was cut! So I checked the Swedish negative and, believe it or not, the penis was no longer there either! Luckily, I was able to find a copy of the film where the leader was still intact with the three or four frames, and so I made a new negative from which new copies could be made. But this discovery really shook me.

"It's important for me, when people see a performance in the theatre here, at the Dramaten, for example, that they are completely aware that they are sitting in a theatre. Likewise, when they see a film, it's vital that they appreciate the great miracle of cinema, its unique quality, the human face. To arrange a scene so that it has maximum effect, so that it works in the most perfect way, is a very hard task for the director. The cinema is a fantastic medium because, just like music, it passes through your intellect and goes straight to your emotions. So the right close-up at the right moment can have an enormous effect. If a close-up is sensibly shot, well composed, adequately lit and focused on a good actor or actress, you can let it continue on the screen for as long as you want! While I was still active as a film director, my big dream was to make a whole feature in one single close-up.

"Returning to the distant cousin I mentioned earlier: I've never considered myself to be anything more than a craftsman, a brilliantly competent craftsman–if I can say that of myself–but nothing more. I make things which are considered useful, films or stage productions. I've never felt a need for–what's the expression?–sub specie aeternitatis. I've never worked with one eye on eternity. That sort of thing doesn't matter to me; what matters is to achieve a bloody good piece of craftsmanship. Yes. I'm proud to call myself a craftsman who makes chairs and tables that people find useful."

Stockholm, March 2002