Gunnar Fischer was born in Ljungby in 1910, and learned his craft under the legendary Julius Jaenzon, who had photographed many of the great silent films of Victor Sjöström and Mauritz Stiller. Eight years senior to Bergman, Fischer worked with him on a dozen pictures and helped to establish the Bergman "image" around the world. His lighting is bold and often expressionistic, his focus crystal-sharp. Although skilled on location (as demonstrated by Summer with Monika), he achieved his most subtle effects in the studios, in Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries and in particular The Face. Although Sven Nykvist assumed the mantle of Bergman's lighting cameraman from the 1960s on, Fischer returned to do the "credits" sequence of The Touch, showing various aspects of the ancient town of Visby. He was probably the best cinematographer of his generation in Scandinavia.

Q: What was it What was it like working at Filmstaden, the studios of Svensk Filmindustri, in the 40s?

GUNNAR FISCHER: SF was one of the older studios. They were built about 1919 or 20, and they made some of the big silent films of people like Sjöström and Stiller. So there was a great tradition there and a lot of memories. It was a fantastic place. I came there in 1935 and a lot of the people working there had been working since the beginning–before 1920–and they had a lot of experience which they were very generous with.

Q: When did you first work with Bergman?

GF: It was the first time he was going to make a film at Filmstaden. It was a film called Crisis and Ingmar and I made a test and I think we were both very happy. For Ingmar it was the first time he saw something he had written transformed into living pictures. And we both thought that we were making it together, but it was not the intention of the studio management because they took me away, as they thought that we can't let two youngsters, inexperienced, make a feature, it's too much money to spend on that. So they put another photographer on it and it was not very lucky, because I think they hated each other from the first scene. It was no good at all. Then Ingmar made no films at Svensk Filmindustri for some years. But after a while he came back and we made our first film together and that was Hamnstad or "Port Of Call."

Q: In films such as Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika there is a lot of location filming on the islands outside Stockholm.

GF: Oh, Summer with Monika was a happy film to make because we had a very small unit. We always have small units in Sweden, but that was the smallest one I can remember. And we had two young players, Harriet Andersson and Lars Ekborg, and I don't think they were ever paid at all. Perhaps they had very small wages. We had a very small budget, but we went out and rented a house from a school teacher on the island just outside Stockholm and we were working there and no one at the studio cared about us. It was wonderful to have it that way. And I remember one day we heard from the laboratory that there were some scratches on the material and Ingmar and I went to look at the rushes and found the scratches, but we were very happy because that meant we could take one or two weeks more filming out there. All of us had a happy time there.

Q: But you often made the exteriors on the back lot at Filmstaden.

GF: Oh yes. The Seventh Seal was shot there. It wasn't a wood, there were just some trees, but we made all the wood shots there. And we had someone from the fire brigade come and put in some water for us and made a muddy creek. But they started to build houses around there, so when they are burning the witch, if you are very, very observant, you can perhaps see the lights of windows through the trees. Now there's nothing left of that wood anymore.

And then in Wild Strawberries the old professor is going through Sweden in a car and Victor Sjöström was very old and ill and very weak. So we couldn't take him out and shoot it in a car. So we had to make every shot with back projection in the studio. And our back projection was not very good and we had no time to make tests. We had to shoot everything so that it would be all right from the very beginning, and they were not very good. I hate to see them now.

Q: Could you describe your method of working together?

GF: Ingmar usually had a rough idea how he wanted the scenery (blocking). He always wanted the camera at the right place, and he always wanted to look through the camera when blocking the actors. Because he had to have the scene limited through the camera eye. So we always did it that way. And afterward Ingmar and the actors went to one side and I had to get it ready.

Q: The Devil's Eye, released in 1960, was the last film you worked on with Bergman.

GF: We had had a very good collaboration for many years. I made 12 films with him. But on the last one, The Devil's Eye, we began to part. I think we were very unlike in a way. And I was working on a film when he was preparing the next one. So he chose another cameraman and that was Sven Nykvist and he likes Sven very much and they worked very well together, I think. So they went on working.