Bergman: I am always in a very strange mood when people come to do interviews with me, complicated interviews, because I always have the feeling that I am responsible for some cousin or far-away brother, somebody whom I don't know very well, but am answerable to. Well, when we discuss this person, this Ingmar Bergman, we have to discuss him carefully and I will try to be as open as possible, but I never have the feeling that we are talking about me.

Simon: It must be a great responsibility, I was thinking, just to be you; because film is probably the most important art today and I think you're the most important film-maker in the world. To be the most important man in the most important art is a terrible responsibility. Does it bother you?

Bergman: No. I never think along those lines. My thinking does not work that way, because when I start writing a new picture, or start shooting or cutting it, or when I release it to the audience, it's always the first time, and always the last time. It's an isolated event, and I never think back or forward; it's just that. Of course, I have amassed a lot of experience over twenty-five or twenty-six years and thirty pictures and, of course, I have a lot of hopes and desires about what I want to do with what is still far away; but my relation to my work, my film work and my theatre work, is completely un-neurotic. I'm just a professional; I'm just a man who makes a table or something that is to be used, and the only thing that interests me is that it be used. Whether it is good or bad, a masterpiece or a mess, has nothing to do with the making, with my creative mind. So, my reply is: I feel responsible only for the craftsmanship being good, for the thing having the moral qualities of my mind, and, if possible, for my not telling any lies. Those are my only demands. When I make my pictures, I never place myself in relation to the New Wave or to my other pictures, or to Fellini, or to the cultural situation in the world today, or to television, or anything else. I just make my picture. Because if I started to think this way and that, there would be no picture. So, I have all my difficulties, and get all my joy, just handling the material.

Simon: Well, then, is it difficult to talk about your old films, is it something you dislike doing?

Bergman: No, it's the past; it's very far away. If it's necessary, we can talk about it; if it's not necessary, better yet.

Simon: You said a minute ago that you were entering the phase when you were beginning to collect your materials. How long does that phase usually last, and is that a difficult period?

Bergman: No, the collecting is very nice; the dreaming, the playing with the material, surrounding oneself with a lot of notebooks in which to jot down things. That is a marvellous time, a nice creative time.

Simon: How long do you spend on that?

Bergman: Sometimes a few months, sometimes years. But when I have to sit down to write, to start from the beginning and write the script, that is the hateful period–when I have to make up my mind about what I am going to do and actually write it. I don't like to sit still. I don't feel comfortable when I write, so I have to saddle myself with a lot of discipline day after day.

Simon: How many hours a day?

Bergman: Four or five. I start at ten o'clock or thereabouts, and I'm free at three. That's just sitting and writing; it takes me about two and a half months; yet I have to do it.

Simon: But you don't go back to it in the evening, do you?

Bergman: No, never. At three o'clock I have my tea and then I'm free. But of course, when I've been going on for a few weeks, I can't let go of it; it comes back at night or in the early morning. It is a bad, painful time, and I don't like it, but I have to do it. Because I can't just write down ten or twenty pages and go out with a crew and improvise. I am no improviser: I must always prepare everything.

Simon: I don't think that improvisation is such a good thing, really.

Bergman: It just isn't my way of film-making; my way is selective: a mirroring, reflecting. I put a mirror down; then I select, I take out, I put together.

Simon: Do you enjoy the shooting period?

Bergman: Very much indeed. Sometimes it is quite boring and frustrating, to be sure. But when we shoot, we are together; the actors, the crew, and I–we give and take; we are a very small group and we have all worked together from film to film; we know one another, and know what to do and how to do it. Sitting down with the cutting tape and editing is also very nice.

Simon: How long on the average does the shooting period last?

Bergman: About fifty shooting days, sometimes fifty-five, but no more than that. I made A Passion in exactly forty-five days, but Shame took about fifty-five.

Simon: And the editing?

Bergman: A very long time. I like the editing very much; I sit down and it takes me a lot of time, as much as three or four months.

Simon: And you work together with your editor?

Bergman: Yes. She is a nice girl, with much patience, who is exactly as pedantic as I am, and she knows everything. I sit down with her and we go at it together. I hate to sit alone, because I am a complete idiot with machines. I am very fascinated by them, but I don't like them.

Simon: What about cameras? Do you know very much about photography?

Bergman: Yes, I do. And I have learned everything about the laboratory, about mixing, and sound, and lenses, and everything. Because if I didn't, people would have to tell me things, and I'd be in the hands of those experts. And I don't trust experts. I just trust Sven Nykvist. He is a very fine technician, an aficionado.

Simon: Do you tell him exactly what you want, or can he guess it?

Bergman: I don't know how we work because we don't talk very much. We are very fascinated by lighting. We are always studying light. We are always aware of light.

Simon: Do you mean natural light?

Bergman: Yes. The light of reality. And the translation of natural light into artificial light and what we can do with it, that is our science.

Simon: Do you feel then that there is quite a difference between working with Hilding Bladh or Gunnar Fischer, your former cinematographers, and working with Sven Nykvist?

Bergman: Yes, of course. They were marvellous people, real professionals. But Sven and I have a special relation; I can't explain it. Sometimes we are very, very unhappy together. It's just like an old marriage. We don't talk very much. We never meet privately. But at the job, I think, we have a marvellous rapport.

Simon: Something seemed to happen with the photography in your films. There was a sudden change that came about in Smiles of a Summer Night. Perhaps it was a different film stock that you started using.

Bergman: No, no.

Simon: But there was a new sharpness, a definition, a chiaroscuro. The blacks were very black and the whites very white. I remember, particularly in the dinner scene, an intensity I had never seen in your films before, and wondered what had happened.

Bergman: Yes. I think it has to do with faces. Because I am always interested in faces. I just want you to sit down and look at the human face. But if there is too much going on in the background, if the face moves too much, if you can't see the eyes, if the lighting is too artistic, the face is lost.

Simon: I sometimes have the feeling with your films that one of them comes up with one solution to a problem, and the next one with a different solution to the same problem. That's not deliberate, I suppose; it just happens that way?

Bergman: It just happens. There is no orderly progression, no logic, and there are no rigid guidelines. My pictures always come out of tensions, specific situations, changing conditions. It's always like that. And why one picture appeals and another doesn't, I don't know. People who interview me always try to find a pattern. Of course, it's their profession. It isn't mine. My creative life is movement. It's like water. I don't want to be logical or find motives. That is completely uninteresting to me.

Simon: This is perhaps an unfair question; but does a film begin with some kind of a specific idea: what is it like to go mad, or what is it like to stay together with someone you don't love any more? Is there some kind of simple nucleus around which you build up a film?

Bergman: No. It always starts very secretly; 1 don't know exactly what is going on. It starts with a sort of tension or a specific scene, some lines, a picture or something, a piece of music. It just starts as a very, very small scene. And from this little scene comes a trembling. I look at it and try to pull it out. And sometimes it remains just this little thing. But sometimes it's more; I can't stop and suddenly I have a lot of material. So I never know exactly.

Simon: When you say "a piece of music," for example, are you listening to a piece of music and it suggests an idea to you?

Bergman: Yes, very often.

Simon: It becomes a shape somehow?

Bergman: Yes.

Simon: You are very fond of Bach and Mozart?

Bergman: I'm very fond of music. I can't say I have a favourite composer or period.

Simon: Whom are you interested in now?

Bergman: I think Monteverdi. His is very strange, very modern.

Simon: Have you ever liked twentieth-century composers?

Bergman: Yes. I'm very fond of music. I like all sorts. I like pop and the Beatles and those protest singers.

Simon: Do you care for painting?

Bergman: No, not very much.

Simon: Does this mean that you're not even very interested in it, or just that it doesn't affect your work? You don't like to go to museums, for example?

Bergman: No. Of course, when I come to Amsterdam, I feel it a duty to go to the Rijksmuseum; or when I come to Paris, I go to see the Impressionists. And here we have the Gauguin exhibition and tomorrow I want, if possible, to see it; but it is not necessary.

Simon: But music is necessary?

Bergman: Yes, music is absolutely necessary. It is the same thing with poetry. Poetry is not necessary, but books are.

Simon: What kinds of books?

Bergman: All of them. Don't you think that when you are young, you read a lot of books? I have a good example: I like Strindberg very much and he has written a lot of plays but also a lot of prose: novels and short stories, and when I was young I read them all–I had the feeling I had read them. This summer, because of directing A Dream Play, I started to read a Strindberg novel and suddenly I realized, yes, I read it when I was twenty-two, but I had not understood it, so I started to reread everything that Strindberg has written, except his plays. It was a fascinating experience. I like enormous books, enormous novels, the Russians.

Simon: Has Strindberg the dramatist been a great influence on you?

Bergman: Yes. I have been reading him since I was twelve or thirteen, and he has followed me around all my life.

Simon: How about Proust?

Bergman: Yes, I'm just going on with Swann in A la Recherche du temps perdu.

Simon: What about Joyce, which must be very difficult, I imagine?

Bergman: Yes, that is too much for me. I have read Ulysses but it was out of duty more than anything else.

Simon: Was it the language that made it so difficult?

Bergman: I read it in a Swedish translation because I read extremely slowly.

Simon: Even in Swedish?

Bergman: Yes, when I read, I read as slowly as if I were reading aloud. It takes me a lot of time, but I remember everything. I don't know why the slowness, but perhaps it's my profession: when I read a play I read as if it were being acted.

Simon: In connection with Hour of the Wolf and The Magician, I noticed a certain indebtedness to E.T. A. Hoffmann. He must be someone you like.

Bergman: Yes, very much.

Simon: Was he relevant to The Magician?

Bergman: More to the Hour of the Wolf. In Hour of the Wolf I really played with him.

Simon: Do you have any absolute favourites among your films?

Bergman: No. They are old pictures and already far, far away.

Simon: Do you always like the latest one best?

Bergman: No, on the contrary; the latest one is like an infant: it protests and it makes difficulties and it is very much alive. Sometimes I like it and sometimes I dislike it, but in a very unneurotic way. No, I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is Winter Light (The Communicants). That is my only picture about which I feel that I have started here and ended there and that everything along the way has obeyed me. Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture. I couldn't make this picture today; it's impossible; but I saw it a few weeks ago together with a friend and I was very satisfied. I very much prefer it to, say, Through a Glass Darkly, which, socially speaking, I don't like any more. It's an étude, a study, an exercise; it's a beginning, but it's a pudding. It's so far away, I can't be sure, but my feeling is that it's a pudding, a muddle. Some parts of it are no good, some are really cinematographic, but it can't compare with The Communicants.

Simon: One has the feeling that the Ingmar Bergman figure in the films, at least in the chamber-film phase, is usually Max von Sydow.

Bergman: No, no, not at all. I say, like Flaubert, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." I am all of them, I am inside all of them. It's not especially Max von Sydow or Gunnar Björnstrand or Ingrid Thulin.

Simon: Do you, when you write a part, have a specific actor in mind?

Bergman: Always, always, yes. It's very important. I always want to know the actor before I write a script. I don't know why, but I hear a voice, and see the behaviour. Perhaps it is wrong, I don't know, but we have always worked together.

Simon: It's wonderful to have such good actors as you have.

Bergman: I think it is good, this tradition here in Sweden, that all are working in the theatre, that we work together in different media.

Simon: It is interesting to me that some people do not come back in your films, even though I like them. For instance, I like Maud Hansson very much, but I only saw her twice in your films; Margit Carlqvist only once. Is there some special reason why they don't reappear?

Bergman: Very neurotic girls. I don't like to work with neurotic people; because they have to play neurotics, they should not be neurotics; but when they are, they are a disturbance to the work. Because the work in itself is so difficult, we must be very calm and very controlled. The work must be nice, like a family, like joy. We must have a feeling of security and loyalty. If people are without contact and completely imprisoned in themselves, I can still use them, but they endanger the whole production and I don't like that.

Simon: The men presumably are less of a problem, because they seem to last longer than the women.

Bergman: Yes. We have grown up together and we have worked together.

Simon: I wish I could see that documentary that you did about your island, except that I might not understand any of it.

Bergman: It's difficult to understand. It was necessary to make it, to try; you know I've lived there four years now and I know these people and I know their difficulties and I wanted to tell about them and let themselves tell about it all.

Simon: Was it fun handling the camera yourself?

Bergman: Yet, it's always so; Sven was with me, but I conducted the interviews for the first time in my life. It was a nice experience.

Simon: Tell me, are there any film-makers that influenced you in any way, that you learned something from, or do you feel completely self-made?

Bergman: No, no, no, no. I have grown up in a tradition. I don't think somebody just becomes a director, you know. We are like stones in a building, all of us. We all depend on the people coming before; I am just a part of this. So, I depend very much on a Swedish film tradition, Sjöström and Stiller, and on the Swedish theatre tradition–Sjöberg has meant a lot to me. He is my neighbour. He is marvellous. And then, you know, when I was young, nineteen or twenty years old, I saw the French pictures–Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows), Duvivier and Marcel Carné.

Simon: Did you like Les Enfants du Paradis?

Bergman: Not very much. It's a bit boring. Of course, I liked parts of it. But most of all I liked Quai des Brumes.

Simon: What about La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game)?

Bergman: They told me that Smiles of a Summer Night had some similarities; but I didn't know that, because I hadn't seen it. And then, you know, I have a collection of sixteen-millimetre films, and now I own it.

Simon: Do you like it?

Bergman: Not very much. I don't like Renoir very much. But then, of course, I always have seen pictures; I like to go to the movies. I'm a moviegoer.

Simon: What about Carl Dreyer?

Bergman: Yes, in a protesting way.

Simon: Against it?

Bergman: Yes, some of his pictures have infected me. But in a very strange way, he has always been an amateur. Like Antonioni.

Simon: I think in a way, you have done what Dreyer wanted to do.

Bergman: Yes.

Simon: But what about Antonioni?

Bergman: I have met him once.

Simon: Did you get along with him?

Bergman: Yes, we had a wonderful contact. I liked him extremely much. I liked his courage; he is a completely honest man.

Simon: Whereas Fellini, I think, is not so honest a man.

Bergman: No, no, please! Fellini is Fellini. He is not honest, he is not dishonest, he is just Fellini. And he is not responsible. You cannot put moralistic points of view on Fellini; it is impossible. He is just–I love him.

Simon: Yes, he is very charming.

Bergman: No, much more than that. I think he has not made his real pictures yet.

Simon: I think he has made two great films, The White Sheik and I Vitelloni.

Bergman: Yes, but you know, I am hopelessly in love with this man. Completely. Because, I don't know why, I have met him a few times and...

Simon: This joint project of yours with him has been abandoned, hasn't it?

Bergman: It collapsed. Of course it collapsed, because I am a pedant and he is not.

Simon: I understand he submitted an outline that was half a page long.

Bergman: Yes, yes, exactly, and I was sitting writing my screenplay.

Simon: How was it to be? How were the two parts to connect?

Bergman: That was the wrong way from the beginning. That is the damnation of this movie business, in the economical sense. Because, you know, our idea was to choose five or six actors, to have a crew of about six to ten people; to have some money; to have an empty studio and to start and just to make a dialogue and just to invent things, to improvise, to play together.

Simon: So there was not to be one Bergman half and one Fellini half?

Bergman: No. And then the economic interests came in and the Americans came in, and we tried to explain what we wanted to do. And they said yes, yes, yes–more or less–but then he had no money and he was in a bad situation and he was tired.

Simon: Fellini?

Bergman: Yes, after Satyricon, of course. And he was at work on Satyricon and I couldn't wait. Then suddenly we said, all right, I make my part and you make your part, and then we meet in the beginning and at the end. The whole project collapsed at that moment and I am sorry for that. I can teach him something, and he can teach me something.

Simon: Maybe in the future.

Bergman: Perhaps. When we are older and cleverer. I think it all collapsed because the Americans couldn't understand what we really intended to do. But, really, he was extremely difficult, though that means nothing because I love his work and I love him as a person, if he is a person, which I doubt, because he has no limits; he's just like quicksilver–all over the place. I have never seen anybody like that before.

He is enormously intuitive. He is intuitive; he is creative; he is an enormous force. He is burning inside with such heat. Collapsing. Do you understand what I mean? The heat from his creative mind, it melts him. He suffers from it; he suffers physically from it. One day when he can manage this heat and can set it free, I think he will make pictures you have never seen in your life. He is rich. As every real artist, he will go back to his sources one day. He will find his way back.

Simon: What I particularly admire in you is that you always change and develop; and as you learn new things you teach them to the world. Very few artists have been able to do that. Stravinsky, Picasso, a few others. But most of them repeat themselves.

Bergman: It's my way of living. I am always curious. It has to do only with that. No matter how depressed I am, I always wake up in the morning, in the very early morning, a bit curious: what will happen today? Sometimes I am very afraid. But always, always, even if it is completely black–inside and outside–I always feel something very strange–a curiosity.

And then, to express, to be in touch with other human beings. To mix experiences, to be involved; that's my life. If I am isolated or feel no contact or something like that, it is catastrophic for me. So I always try to be in contact. It is very difficult to tell you, but if you have a completely unneurotic relationship–I don't say I'm unneurotic, because I'm very neurotic–but if you have a non-neurotic relation to your work, it gives you so much joy and helps you such a lot and gives you a form, a discipline, such honest help. So, I just go on.

Simon: I am only interested in this from your own point of view. Tell me more about your feelings about Antonioni, because I think it'll tell more about you in a way.

Bergman: The strange thing is that I admire him more now that I have met him than when I only saw his pictures; because I have suddenly understood what he is doing. I understand that everything in his mind, in his point of view, in his personal behaviour is against his film-making. And still he makes his pictures.

Simon: How do you mean "against"?

Bergman: It all presents obstacles.

Simon: What is your favourite Antonioni film?

Bergman: I like most of all La Notte, because he had a marvellous actress in it.

Simon: Yes, Jeanne Moreau. But he didn't do very much with her.

Bergman: No, he never does, he never comes in contact with actors. They don't know what he wants, and he doesn't know how to talk to them.

Simon: He knew how to talk to Monica Vitti.

Bergman: I don't think so. But, you know, I like people who even if everything else is against them, continue, and I like and admire...I think it was marvellous that this man, this sleepless, tortured, scared man went to America to make a picture about Americans. This is a Don Quixote. And I said to him I could never have courage like that, because I haven't even been in America yet. I think even the thought of going to America, even with a return ticket in my hand, scares me, and I think he had such courage to go to America–to disappear into the desert with his crew and to stay there. He is a strange man, he is a marvellous man, and I admire him very, very much.

Simon: Perhaps you like the man better than his films.

Bergman: Yes, in a way. Because to me his films always have been a little, little bit boring, and we must be aware that the boring in art is very good in a way, but his is a little bit too boring. But after meeting him, all my reservations are gone.

Simon: When I first saw L'Avventura, I was a little bit bored, too, but on each reseeing it gets bigger and better. Have you seen it more than once?

Bergman: Yes, I like it very much, too. But to go on about directors or film-makers who have influenced me…technically, Cukor, very much.

Simon: In what way technically?

Bergman: In the editing. In the beginning we had no schools here for film-making. The only way of learning film-making was to be an assistant to a director–I was an assistant to Sjöberg–and to see pictures. And we had no film library, we had nothing like that when I was learning. Young students didn't get any money to go abroad; we were shut off, we were just sitting here.

Simon: How about Hitchcock? Is he someone you learned from?

Bergman: Yes, of course.

Simon: Technically, I suppose. But isn't there a great intellectual emptiness in his work?

Bergman: Completely, but I think he's a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho, he had some moments. Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more–no, I don't want to know–about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting. I learned a lot from all those Americans who knew their profession.

Simon: I find it's a terrible notion in modern film criticism that these people were artists, when they were really technicians. We must distinguish between an artist and a technician.

Bergman: Yes, that's important.

Simon: Modern film criticism tends not to distinguish. People like Raoul Walsh or Howard Hawks don't know what art is. They merely have marvellous techniques, some of them.

Bergman: They have told their stories and they made their films in a good, effective way. That is a duty: effectiveness in telling a story.

Simon: Yes, that's a very good minimum, but it's only a minimum.

Bergman: But it's difficult.

Simon: Are there any young film-makers that you particularly like? I hope you don't like Godard?

Bergman: No, no, no.

Simon: I detest him.

Bergman: Yes, I do, too. In this profession, I always admire people who are going on, who have a sort of idea and, however crazy it is, are putting it through; they are putting people and things together, and they make something. I always admire this. But I can't see his pictures. I sit for perhaps twenty-five or thirty or fifty minutes and then I have to leave, because his pictures make me so nervous. I have the feeling the whole time that he wants to tell me things, but I don't understand what it is, and sometimes I have the feeling that he's bluffing, double-crossing me. But what about this young Czechoslovakian director, Milos Forman? Have you seen his work? I like him very, very much.

Simon: There are other Czechs whom I like better. I think Menzel may be more interesting.

Bergman: Perhaps more interesting, but not to me. No, because Forman has an approach to human beings.

Simon: There's something a little primitive about him.

Bergman: Yes, I like that very much.

Simon: What about Bellocchio? Have you seen China Is Near?

Bergman: Terrible, terrible, very homosexual, very artificial, aggressive in a very empty way.

Simon: What about the early Truffaut? Did you like those first ones?

Bergman: Very much; very, very much.

Simon: What's happened to this man?

Bergman: He wants to make money; it's a very human desire. He wants a comfortable life. He wants to make money and he wants people to see his pictures.

Simon: Well, don't you think his early films were seen by people?

Bergman: But perhaps not by enough, and he didn't make enough money, and he likes the comfortable life of the modern film-maker.

Simon: But the trouble is his new films are not going to make much money.

Bergman: Then he made a mistake. Because if you lose both the money and your dignity, then it must be a mistake.

Simon: What about Bresson? How do you feel about him?

Bergman: Oh, Mouchette! I loved it, I loved it! But Balthazar was so boring, I slept through it.

Simon: I liked Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and A Man Escaped, but I would say The Diary of a Country Priest is the best one.

Bergman: I have seen it four or five times and could see it again...and Mouchette...really...

Simon: That film doesn't do anything for me.

Bergman: No? You see, now I'll tell you something about Mouchette. It starts with a friend who sees the girl sitting and crying, and Mouchette says to the camera, how shall people go on living without me, that's all. Then you see the main titles. The whole picture is about that. She's a saint and she takes everything upon herself, inside her, everything that happens around her. That makes such an enormous difference, that such people live among us. I don't believe in another life, but I do think that some people are more holy than others and make life a little bit easier to endure, more bearable. And she is one, a very, very simple one, and when she has assumed the difficulties of other human beings, she drowns herself in a stream. That is my feeling, but this Balthazar, I didn't understand a word of it, it was so completely boring.

Simon: You could almost say the same thing about the donkey, that when the donkey has taken on other people's suffering...

Bergman: A donkey, to me, is completely uninteresting, but a human being is always interesting.

Simon: Do you like animals in general?

Bergman: No, not very much. I have a completely natural aversion for them. Have you seen this picture Il Porcile (Pigpen)?

Simon: Yes, terrible. I think Pasolini is awful altogether.

Bergman: Yes, awful, awful. Meaningless. Completely.

Simon: There was a period in your life and work when the question of God was all-important, but not any more, surely?

Bergman: No, it's past. Things are difficult enough without God. They were much more difficult when I had to put God into it. But now it's finished, definitely, and I'm happy about it.

Simon: In an interview, discussing Hour of the Wolf, you said that you believed in demons; but how can you not believe in God, yet believe in demons? Aren't the two things connected? Can one have the one without the other?

Bergman: Well, if I say I believe in demons, of course, it is just a little joke. You sort of want to name things....

Simon: Things that bother you?

Bergman: Yes, of course. Yet it's not exactly a joke, because when I was younger, not very much younger, say, five, six, ten years ago, and back into my childhood, I was haunted by extremely terrible dreams, sometimes daydreams; sometimes things happened to me in a very, very strange, mysterious, and dangerous way, and I was very scared, and sometimes my dreams were so real that when I tried to remember something, I didn't know exactly if it had happened in reality or if I had dreamed it. It was very painful; but now it has disappeared–all of those things.

Simon: Why do you think it went away?

Bergman: I grew up. I worked a lot; I was director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre for three years. I started in the morning at eight o'clock and was there until eleven at night; then I went home and slept. I was at it ten months a year and there was no place left for demons and dreams. Then I went to my island; I have lived there four years. On the island, reality is so real, it's no place for demons and bad dreams. Instead of bad dreams, I now have very ridiculous ones, comical dreams–I often laugh.

Simon: Can you use those dreams in your work?

Bergman: Perhaps, I don't know. It doesn't interest me any more. To me reality is very real now, and other human beings.

Simon: More important than dreams?

Bergman: Yes, exactly, and if you have difficulty with your relationships with other people and reality around you, it is a place for demons; but if you are in contact with yourself and other people and reality, there's no room for dreams.

Simon: Would you say there is a central theme now in your work? Robert Graves, the poet, says that the two real themes, the only themes, are love and death. Do you have any such principal themes?

Bergman: Yes and no. I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of contact and what happens then. That's what is fascinating. I feel that I have come out into an enormous field, and I can now get started. I'm very curious about the pictures waiting for me around the corner. It's very difficult to explain. Because of that I made A Passion and my documentary, and because of that I am writing my new picture (The Touch).

Simon: Then your main theme is interpersonal relations?

Bergman: Yes, but much more so now than before, because I feel much freer.

Simon: Is it unfair of me to ask about certain episodes in your films that I find difficult to understand?

Bergman: No. I will try to be honest.

Simon: For example, in Hour of the Wolf, the episode with the child, the fishing and the drowning. What is the relationship of the hero to that boy–is that his son?

Bergman: No, I don't know exactly. I think it was based on a dream I had.

Simon: You were saying that in Persona, those little scenes between the titles meant the impatience of the film to begin. And you were talking about your sickness, your ear infection–what was it called again?

Bergman: Morbus Ménièris; sounds like a dish.

Simon: It made you lose your balance. How did that affect Persona?

Bergman: I was at the hospital for two months, and I wanted to make a poem of the atmosphere in which Persona grew.

Simon: Is that why Elisabet is in the hospital for quite a while?

Bergman: No, that has nothing to do with it.

Simon: Those first shots, then, before the titles, that is the poetry?

Bergman: That is the poetry, yes.

Simon: And you had that from the beginning?

Bergman: Yes.

Simon: You began with that? I thought perhaps it was an afterthought.

Bergman: No, but perhaps I elaborated.

Simon: Is there much change between your script and what happens when you start shooting from it, or do you stay fairly close to it? Some little changes?

Bergman: Yes, in A Passion many, because A Passion was written in a very strange way; I just dashed it off–not my usual way of writing. Then, I think, I translated it back when I shot it.

Simon: I find the most difficult part about most of your films is the ending, because the ending always to me is more of a question than an answer. But I'm sure that's what you want it to be. For example, in Persona the thing I find very difficult to comprehend is why we only see Alma getting on that bus and why we don't see Elisabet any more. A lot of people have taken this to mean that the whole thing takes place in Alma's mind.

Bergman: It does not. You see Elisabet for a very, very short moment. She's in the studio. She's at work.

Simon: But it's the same shot you've used before.

Bergman: Yes.

Simon: So one doesn't know whether that's the future or the past.

Bergman: She's going on. You know here, in the theatre, we play the same play every night for years. So she's back.

Simon: She's speaking again.

Bergman: Yes.

Simon: Because that one word which she says, "nothing," that, I think, she says in one of Alma's dreams. So that's not really Elisabet speaking.

Bergman: Elisabet has come back. She has invented a new aspect of her emptiness and she has filled up with Alma, she has fed on Alma a little bit. And she can go on.

Simon: Where does that leave Alma? Is Alma eaten up completely?

Bergman: No. She has just provided some blood and meat, some good steak. Then she can go on.

Simon: And there's enough left for Alma.

Bergman: Yes, Alma is still alive. You must know, Elisabet is intelligent, she's sensible, she has emotions, she is immoral, she is a gifted woman, but she's a monster, because she has an emptiness in her.

Simon: Do you think most artists have this emptiness?

Bergman: No, it has nothing to do with artists; it has just to do with human beings.

Simon: So she does not represent the artist?

Bergman: For heaven's sake, no. It was just a way of putting it–it was convenient.

Simon: But surely a character like the Magician does represent the artist in some way.

Bergman: He is an artist.

Simon: And Vergérus is the scientist. Was the point there that somehow both of them are struggling for an answer, a different answer, that neither of them can finally come up with–or does somebody come up with an answer?

Bergman: I have no answers; I just pose questions. I'm not very gifted at giving answers.

Simon: Was the ending of The Magician based on Brecht's Threepenny Opera somehow, because of the happy ending out of nowhere?

Bergman: No. It just happened. It was the right way of doing it. I just had the feeling that I had to end with some tour de force.

Simon: What about something like the last image of The Seventh Seal, the Dance of Death? Was that meant at that time to suggest that there is some kind of life after death? I mean was that a form of life, death leading these people, or was that a form of non-existence?

Bergman: When I made The Seventh Seal, I was still involved in all these complications. I can't remember exactly.

Simon: It was a very ambiguous image; it could mean that something goes on after death.

Bergman: Yes, The Seventh Seal is, in a way, very concrete, like a medieval play. Everything is there, you can touch everything. The Virgin Mary is real, with the child. When they are dancing, they are concrete; they are. It is not fantasies or dreams or imaginations. It is always my intention to be exact, to be precise, to be concrete; and sometimes I succeed, sometimes not. But my intention is always to be very simple.

Simon: That was a very concrete image, visually; but what it meant metaphysically was not quite so clear.

Bergman: To me that is not so interesting.

Simon: Well, then, would you say that Persona is really about how a person who feels empty, depleted, and sick gets back into life again by using another person?

Bergman: I don't want to say anything about that. Persona is a tension, a situation, something that has happened and passed, and beyond that I don't know.

Simon: Speaking of tensions–does living on an isolated island minimize them?

Bergman: When I write, you know, people say, "Come, come and have dinner with me tomorrow." I say, "No, I can't, because the airplane is booked; it is too complicated to come." So that is that.

Simon: It's a very practical solution.

Bergman: And when my girl friend and I quarrel and she wants to go away and she is all packed, everything is always too complicated; first she has to drive by a very complicated way through the woods; then, the ferryboat leaves only on the hour; from there, she has to find a flight. So, she ends up staying.

Simon: At one point it was announced that you would make a film out of Peer Gynt. Are you still working on that?

Bergman: No.

Simon: What happened there?

Bergman: Nothing.

Simon: Then it was not true?

Bergman: Yes. They asked me if I wanted to make a film of Peer Gynt after I had done it on the stage.

Simon: Yes, in Malmö.

Bergman: Yes. I said that could be nice. And they asked how much it would cost, and I said, "A lot of money." "How much?" "Give me five million dollars." Silence!!

Simon: That's too bad, for we have never seen a good production of Peer Gynt in America and your film would have explained what the play is all about.

Bergman: I think the only way to explain the play is to play it on the stage, because a film must be an adaptation; it is not the same thing; you must translate. It's hard work; I prefer to write my own scripts; not adapt; it is too much of a job.

Simon: My editors, looking at your films on the Movieola, felt that you were fascinated by certain objects, like doors or windows or curtains; do you share that feeling?

Bergman: Yes, it's a bit childish. To a child, a window is very interesting; or a door, or a mirror. My attitudes can sometimes be a little bit childish. Infantile. But if an artist loses his joy in playing, I think he is no artist any longer.

Simon: Yes, you know Nietszche, who spoke about the child in man?

Bergman: But look at Picasso or Stravinsky. Look at their faces. They are children, grown-up, old, wise children, with wonderful childish eyes. Marvellous!

Simon: In other words, you find no special symbolic significance in doors? You just like doors.

Bergman: It's fascinating. A door separates you from other people, or you can open it and come in.

Simon: A mirror probably does have more significance than that. Since you are so interested in faces, a mirror tells you more about a face.

Bergman: Look at a woman. Look at a woman looking in a mirror. It is interesting. Especially if she doesn't see you, if she doesn't know that you see her.

Simon: What about growing old? Do you have any feelings about growing old in general? Is that a terrible thing?

Bergman: No, no. It's nice. I've got everything; really. I have everything in life that a man can ask for and I am still curious and I am still looking forward to the film around the corner. The only thing that troubles me is that I must use eyeglasses.

Simon: Why does that disturb you?

Bergman: I always forget them and that makes for complications. But physically I have no difficulties. I feel well. No, growing old doesn't scare me at all.

Simon: Isn't it infuriating to think that scientists may discover processes by which they can freeze people and bring them back to life, and that we will have lived just a little too early for this?

Bergman: To me it would be no privilege; to me it would be terrible.

Simon: Why?

Bergman: If you live on an island, at the seaside, with farmers and fishermen, everything has its proportions. Here in the town nothing has proportions. If I am in a bad mood here at the theatre, at a rehearsal, everything grates on my bad mood. Brpphhh. Here in town everything is a little bit perverted. And your reactions seem extremely important to yourself and the contretemps of a spotlight not coming up on this place but on that is an absolute catastrophe. On the island, everything has its proportions; you are a very small part of this island and of the life there. If you scream, it has no effect, nobody hears; or perhaps a bird will fly up. You can make as much noise as you want, you can suffer, and it's only a part of the whole. And it gives to a hysterical mind such as mine–I was born hysterical; it's inherited from my parents–the proportions, the definite proportions of reality, it gives you peace. Because you know you cannot alter anything. That is good and healthy....

Simon: Let's put it another way. You were talking about your interest in the picture that's still waiting for you around the corner. Suppose you have to die when you are, let's say, seventy-five or eighty, and there's a picture waiting for you around the corner at eighty, which you can never get to. Isn't that a pity?

Bergman: No, it's all right.

Simon: You think the others are enough?

Bergman: Yes; some people think they are more than enough.

Simon: Do you feel that your film-making has profited from your work in the theatre, or are they two separate things?

Bergman: Sometimes it's the same and sometimes it's quite different. I have done very much in the studio and in the theatre, and I got good experience from both.

Simon: What about film actors? Do you think they profit a lot from acting on the stage or can one be a good movie actor without knowing anything about the theatre?

Bergman: Yes, I think you can be a good movie actor without being a good actor on the stage. It is a special talent, being a good movie actor, but I don't know exactly what it is. I think it is a sort of presence, a very strange, creative mind and a very special form of concentration that makes a good movie actor.

Simon: I must confess I have seldom if ever discovered minds in actors, at least as I conceive of the mind.

Bergman: That's not my experience. They have another way of expressing themselves than we have, and I understand their way very well because I often have the same way of expressing myself. Not when I talk with you but, I tell you, I always think when I talk and if I don't talk, I am intuitive, I have my radar. But when I have to talk and to explain things, I think that I think. I am most of all intuitive and I have trained my intuition; I trust it and always use it in my profession, but I don't discuss with it. So my intuition is my best weapon and my best tool.

Simon: There is one statement of yours that everybody is always quoting: about your thinking of yourself as a humble, anonymous workman on a Gothic cathedral.

Bergman: Very romantic. Forget it. What I meant originally was that anonymous creation in art, in music or painting or sculpture or theatre, was very unneurotic. And that is the best kind of all, creating unneurotically; which is why the nineteenth-century romantic notion of original genius strikes me as very silly, and as having nothing to do with real creation.

Simon: But, then, if you're neither the nineteenth-century original genius nor the medieval workman on the cathedral, what third possibility does that leave–something in between?

Bergman: Yes, I am a man making things for use, and highly esteemed as a professional. I am proud of my knowing how to make those things.

Simon: You were telling me that Shame was influenced not so much by the Vietnam war as by your recollections of Hitler's Germany.

Bergman: Yes, exactly. When I was a boy I was in Germany, as a sort of Austauschjunge (exchange student) before the war–1935, 1936–and I had German friends; I was fifteen or sixteen years old and came from Sweden completely ignorant, a political virgin. I stayed with the family of a German minister and his four sons and four daughters and a typical German mother in a little village in the interior. I liked them very much. Later, one of the sons, the same age as I, came to Sweden; we spent much time together and I learned German. We were all very fascinated by the fact that he was in the Hitlerjugend, and I went with him to school and they were reading Mein Kampf in his religion class; in Weimar, I was at the tenth anniversary of the Parteitag. It all held an enormous fascination, and we were all infected by this. Then the war started and I was in the military service; I was drafted from the University and suddenly we realized in Sweden what had happened in Germany; we finally understood. After the war, so many Swedish, Scandinavian, English, and American heroes told us what the German people should have done under the pressure of the dictatorship, what they really should have done. All these very, very clever people telling us what the German civilians should have been thinking and saying; how they really should have reacted to the concentration camps. All this was terribly painful for me, because I'm not very courageous and I hate physical violence. I don't know how much courage I would have if somebody came to me and said, "Ingmar, you are a very talented man, we like you very much; be the head of the Schauspielhaus (National Theatre); if not, you know what will happen to you, your wife, and your children. And, you know, we are having some difficulty with the Jews, and we don't want them in the Theatre; you will fix that for us. If you don't, you know what will happen to you." And I don't know exactly, I don't know at all, how I would have reacted in this situation. That uncertainty was very painful to me, and that is the main problem in Shame–what happens to ordinary people in such a war.

Simon: If I may jump back now to Persona, what about those dead bodies in the morgue at the beginning, and the boy who seems to be dead too but then comes to life?

Bergman: It's just my poetry. I was in the hospital; the view out of the window was a chapel where they were carrying out the bodies of the dead, and I knew that house was full of dead people. Of course, I felt it inside me somewhere that the whole atmosphere was one of death, and I felt like that little boy. I was lying there, half dead, and suddenly I started to think of two faces, two intermingled faces, and that was the beginning, the place where it started.

Simon: And did those two merging faces have a special meaning for you?

Bergman: No, but if I put two faces together, I get this third person.

Simon: But was one the face of innocence and the other the face of experience?

Bergman: No, nothing like that.

Simon: Just two faces?

Bergman: Yes, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann didn't know that I did this, that I put them together into one face, and I wanted to give them a surprise, so we made this composite in the laboratory and we got it back to the island where we were and then I asked them to come to the editing room. When they saw those two faces together on the Movieola, Bibi said, "What a terrible picture of you, Liv" and Liv said, "No, it's not me; it's you."

Simon: And the scene with Gunnar Björnstrand is purely in Alma's imagination; the actual man isn't there?

Bergman: No, it's just a sort of dream.

Simon: Some critics made terrible fools of themselves by analyzing that as if he were actually there, making love to Alma.

Simon: Speaking of critics, do you have any afterthoughts about your famous incident with Johnson? [Bergman had hit this critic at an open rehearsal.]

Bergman: No, the only thing is exactly what I said, I hate physical violence.

Simon: What did this particular critic do to make you so angry?

Bergman: He doesn't believe in what he's doing and he's cynical and he plays a game with other human beings, and I hate this way of behaving. Not of humiliating me, because I know who I am and what I am, but he has a way of humiliating, in a terrible way, the actors. I have seen too much of what he has done to people in this theatre and in other houses.

Simon: But you're not against criticism in general?

Bergman: No, for heaven's sake, no; we are both acting, don't you think? And, in a way, we are all acting together. Even if we are of different opinions, it doesn't matter. So, in a way, I like to read good criticism, and good criticism is telling me things about...

Simon: Yourself?

Bergman: No, not me, but things I see.

Simon: Do you read much criticism about your work?

Bergman: I read the reviews in the four Swedish papers, just to get the immediate reaction. But the rest–it takes too much time. You must understand, it's not the reading that takes time, but the effect of it that remains inside you in a very strange way. If it's favourable criticism, it leaves you all atwitter; if it's hostile, you feel poisoned. Just for a few hours, but still, it's a silly waste of time.

Simon: Let me ask you just one other thing. In The Naked Night, at the beginning, when the wagons are arriving in the rain and mud, and suddenly there is the image of a broken-down windmill which is no longer turning; how does that windmill get in there? Do you feel the deliberate need to symbolize some kind of breakdown in human events, or do you happen to be shooting out there and come upon the windmill, and you say, "OK, I'll put the windmill in"?

Bergman: Both. It's always like that when you're creating the right way; you always find things around you that you can use; they seem to be there just for your purpose. It is very strange; suddenly you find things.