The following interview was filmed in Stockholm during three days in November, 1997.

Jörn Donner: Sometimes you talk about yourself in the third person.

Ingmar Bergman: I'm usually a stranger to myself, someone I'm not especially acquainted with. I've nothing against that person, but don't know much about him. Just as when I read books or things written about me, there's always that stranger there.

Jörn Donner: But haven't you ever had the experience of watching yourself doing something, as if another person were doing it? As if you're somehow divided?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, maybe.

Jörn Donner: Anger, or...

Ingmar Bergman: No, no, not that, but myself–or the person there–is probably quite together. To a large extent, I'm all of a piece. There are huge antagonisms in this composition, a lot of chaos and enormously complicated situations.

It's probably always been a problem I've tried to tackle: Who am I and where do I come from? And why have I become what I am?

Jörn Donner: Do you understand it any better now?

Ingmar Bergman: [long silence] No, no, it's worse, or rather not worse, but I probably know even less about myself now than I did ten years ago.

Jörn Donner: But as you yourself say, you've taken over certain characteristics, behaviour patterns, from your father, for instance, authoritarianism.

Ingmar Bergman: But when you say "taken over," that's quite conscious. There's nothing conscious about it, but something that's just become that way. I don't think I'm all that much like my father. On the other hand, I think, especially now that I've read my mother's diaries, I recognize an awful lot...that I'm tremendously like her. I'm perhaps like my father in looks, but I'm probably most like my mother. Anyway, as far as my artistic talent is concerned–if you can call it that; such a silly expression–but I've probably inherited that from my mother.

My brother, Dag, you see, became in many ways a person who was damaged, finally and for good, because of his upbringing. I was brought up in exactly the same way as my brother, but I managed to cope better than he did. He reacted with aggressiveness and attempts to defend himself. I did the same with lies and dissimulation.

Jörn Donner: Escaping?

Ingmar Bergman: I escaped and found myself an identity that might be acceptable to my parents, and tried to find out how my parents would react. I was also an arch liar. I lied quite happily and uninhibitedly, and occasionally I was caught and severely punished for lying. Then after a while I went on lying just as uninhibitedly. It was a sin, too, and punishable, so of course I saw myself as a shit and a coward. But on the other hand it was a good way of protecting myself, the only way I was able to cope.

My parents never did anything out of malice or cruelty, nor from any desire to punish me, as I imagined when I was exposed to it, but they did it because they were horrified by their children's behaviour, especially us boys.

Jörn Donner: You must have had an amazing sense of freedom when you left home.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, but by then I was extremely damaged and that stayed with me for a very long time, and I also noticed how that damage affected me in my work. So for a terribly long time in my life, I've had to work on cleaning up after my upbringing, trying to keep what was good in it. You see–perhaps the wrong impression has often been given–our home wasn't hell.

I mean, we had fun, too, and things were all right for us. There was lots of imagination and joy and music and lots of people. We could bring friends home, and there was the theatre. I mean, when Father was in a good mood and not...He was a manic-depressive and made huge demands on himself. When he was happy, no one could be happier–he shone with it. And Mother was very loving and tender-hearted, compassionate, too, and clear-sighted, so you see, they did their very best. My parents were people of goodwill, but our upbringing, especially for my brother and me, that was hell, there's no doubt about it. It was much the same for many of my generation.

Jörn Donner: Only they didn't become artists. [laughter] They just suffered.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, then hurried to oppress others.

DIALOGUE WITH CHILDHOOD

Ingmar Bergman: When I am going to sleep at night, I can walk through my grandmother's apartment, room by room, and remember everything in the most minute detail, where different things were, what they looked like, what colour they were. I can also remember the light, winter light or summer light, through the windows, the pictures on the walls. The apartment was furnished before the turn of the century and contained a huge number of things. That was the bourgeois style of the day, not a millimetre was to remain uncovered; there had to be things everywhere. It's really strange. My grandmother died when I was twelve and I haven't been there since I was about perhaps ten or eleven. But I remember it in detail. The things there in the apartment, they still have a magical content and significance to me. I made a lot of use of that in Fanny and Alexander. If any conclusions are to be drawn from that, Jörn, then it may well be that in that way, the whole of my creativity is really tremendously childish, all based on my childhood. In less than a second, I can take myself back into my childhood. I think everything I've done in general, anything of any value, has its roots there.

Or dialectically, it is a dialogue with childhood.

PERSECUTION IN SWEDEN & SELF-PRESERVATION

Ingmar Bergman: I was a faithful social-democrat up to when I discovered that they were trying to take my life with that tax affair¹ and they tried to kill me.

Jörn Donner: Do you see it as a social-democratic plot, or was it the Swedish bureaucracy?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I see it as an offshoot of the reckless claims to power by the new social-democrats. They allowed themselves practically anything, and were allowed anything. But they went on for four years. After that, I couldn't stay in a party that wanted to finish me off.

Then I was affected by a reality that I couldn't do anything about. I couldn't manipulate it or control it, and then life became unbearable....It's happened several times in my life. I couldn't go on living.

Jörn Donner: What did the doctors say to you in a situation like that?

Ingmar Bergman: Oh, doctors! They say, "Let him have eight 10-milligram Valiums a day, and if he needs any more, give him two more and he can have two Mogadon at night." I asked one of those shrinks once–a good friend of mine–if he had ever cured anyone at all. He was an old man, a clever man, and he stared sorrowfully at me and said: "Ingmar, cure is a big word." He was famous, a guru to lots of people. He's dead now. The only problem with him was that he hung on to his patients for eighteen to twenty years.

Jörn Donner: In your wildest imagination, could you see yourself submitting yourself to some kind of psychoanalysis in any other way apart from writing?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I don't think so. The only time was in connection with that tax business, when I was in the nuthouse for three weeks. I didn't want anything except to jump off the balcony, and I thought that was a poor solution, too, so I agreed to be locked up. And then the tremendously heavy medication they gave me–which actually removed the torment itself, the actual suffering–also changed my identity bit by bit. I no longer recognized Bergman. I couldn't recognize myself. I went there so meekly and I read books, slept a lot, and walked along corridors talking to the other nut-cases, and we had quite a good time together, sitting and watching an old faulty television set in the evenings. [laughter]

Jörn Donner: So you didn't become terrified that you might sink permanently into a state of passivity or despair?

Ingmar Bergman: It wasn't even thinking, just an instinct for self-preservation. If we take that further, it was quite simply my aggressiveness that saved me. Because when the tax people didn't find anything in the way they first set about it, they took to new tactics and blackmail, everything they could think up. I was so damned angry, I decided I would leave Sweden–and then I recovered. So in a way, for once my anger came to my rescue. Anger; I was utterly, simply furiously angry, and that cured me.

Jörn Donner: Can you remember what you were thinking when your exile began? Did you imagine that the rest of your working life in film would be abroad?

Ingmar Bergman: I couldn't stay in a country where judgment would take my life. Where it would kill me. So, then my wife and I went to Copenhagen. And I became so fearfully homesick for Sweden. It was summer then, you see. So one evening I chartered a plane and Ingrid and I flew home to Fårö. We drove that evening up to Fårö and sat on the steps gazing at the lilac hedge that had just come out. We sat on the steps in the twilight on a mild, light summer's night. Then the next day we drove down again and went to Munich. I was abroad for eight years and I didn't work in Sweden for a long time.

Jörn Donner: So it wasn't just the Swedish language, but also the lilac hedge in Sweden.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it was the amazing feeling of coming home and working in Swedish again. It was an incredible feeling, being able to use the Swedish language again. A great sensual pleasure. Unforgettable.

Jörn Donner: And you've never had any more of those introspective spells?

Ingmar Bergman: I've had something like it, but not in the same way. Of course–my wife's death, that was a mortal blow to my will to live in general, to my whole existence, my reality.² A disaster in every respect, but my grief has never had anything to do with anger or bitterness or cynicism, or anything like that. But I've been living in my grief as if in a room and regarding myself as an invalid, and I just get by–I mean, I'm now in my eightieth year. I get by from day-to-day. It's rather trivial. There are things that are boring, and some that are fun.

WRITING

Jörn Donner: Quite often, you've been considerably more experimental in films than in the theatre.

Ingmar Bergman: Films demand their form, and staged plays theirs. I've never simply decided that now I shall experiment, but everything has just been given the form I've thought it ought to have. I'm not at all interested in whether I'm experimenting or not.

Jörn Donner: But is it some kind of intuition? Who the hell would be crazy enough to write a script such as Cries and Whispers?

Ingmar Bergman: [laughter] It's like this: it was necessary to write it in that way, or Persona, or the one I've just written, Faithless. They've found their form simply because it was necessary to write them in that way–to do them in that way.

Jörn Donner: You didn't think about the drama...

Ingmar Bergman: No, in general I wasn't thinking about anything.

Jörn Donner: That's not what I meant. But to go back in time, to Sawdust and Tinsel or Prison. Didn't you think them out either?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I didn't. Well, not Sawdust and Tinsel, but Prison–I suppose that was the first time I wrote my own script. I was quite crazy with delight and had to get everything that I had been walking around and thinking about into it. Without my really making any effort, it became...peculiar.

Jörn Donner: I suppose you don't want to say you're an intuitive writer.

Ingmar Bergman: But wasn't it you who said that when you begin writing, you don't know how it will turn out?

Jörn Donner: That's right, of course, yes.

Ingmar Bergman: It's just intuition, and it's the same when I start writing, I have a kind of basic scene, a beginning. I usually say that in Cries and Whispers I went on for very long, and had a scene with four women in white in a red room.

Jörn Donner: And that was all, generally speaking.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it was only that. And then I started thinking about why they were there and what they said to each other, that kind of thing. It was mysterious. It kept coming back again and again, and I couldn't get that scene to come out right.

Jörn Donner: A kind of dream image.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, you know what it's like. Then you begin winding in a long thread that appears from somewhere or other, and the thread can suddenly snap. That's the end of that, but then all of a sudden, it's a whole ball.

Jörn Donner: Have threads often snapped for you?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, lots of times.

Jörn Donner: But not the kind of threads you've spent weeks working on, or in manuscript form.

Ingmar Bergman: No, not once I've started writing. By then I've already done my working books. In them, I've written endless things, masses of stuff, but once I've started on the script, then I know what I'm doing.

Jörn Donner: What are your working books about?

Ingmar Bergman: Absolutely everything.

Jörn Donner: So the script grows out of the working book?

Ingmar Bergman: Exactly. Well, it's unfinished, completely. Keeping working books is fun.

Jörn Donner: Have you always done that?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, always. At first, I didn't really have the time. But when I did have the time, yes. Often when I was younger and had to earn money for all my wives and children, then I had to begin on the script, so to speak, bang, directly, I mean. But now I can lie on the sofa and play about with my thoughts and have fun with them, looking at images, doing research and so on. All that's great fun. My working books are also quite illegible to anyone else but me. But then the actual writing begins out of these notebooks.

Jörn Donner: And it goes quickly?

Ingmar Bergman: Relatively quickly because it's so boring. It's hellishly boring, just like when you do a theatre performance and sit there sketching out the scenes, how the actors are to move and stand, when they're to say what, and all that–hellishly dreary. When I'm writing the script, I write a certain number of pages a day.

Jörn Donner: Would you consider writing in any other way but by hand?

Ingmar Bergman: No, never.

Jörn Donner: Why not?

Ingmar Bergman: I can't type. [laughter] I've tried.

Jörn Donner: Is it a physical thing?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, it's a physical thing, profoundly unsatisfactory. I use a sort of notepad to write on. They existed when I was employed as a slave scriptwriter at Svensk Filmindustri in 1942. You were given a kind of lined yellow notepad. Then you had to write by hand and with a broad-nibbed fountain pen. Since then, I've always written on that yellow paper and those notepads.

Jörn Donner: Where do you get them?

Ingmar Bergman: About twenty or so years ago it turned out that they weren't making them anymore, so I had them make eight-hundred pads especially for me. And I've still got a few left. I think they'll just about last me out.

Jörn Donner: I should damned well think so.

Ingmar Bergman: I write with a ballpoint pen nowadays, but not just any old damned pen. It has to be a very special ballpoint with a very fat tip. It's the actual writing, although my handwriting is so difficult to read, that gives me pleasure. I like writing by hand. It is very satisfying. In that I always write on the same kind of pad, I know how much I've written, you see. And I never write for more than three hours. When the three hours are up, even if I'm in the middle of a scene or wherever the hell I am, I stop working. I stop for the day. Because it's so boring. But the working book is fun. That's the actual creative process. Writing the script is just the arranging process.

Jörn Donner: Do you think you have some sort of ritualistic superstition about these notepads and pens, where you work, and those three hours, or is it just a routine?

Ingmar Bergman: No, it's a ritual. I have very precise rituals. Get up early and eat breakfast, go for a walk, don't read the paper, don't talk on the telephone with anyone. Sit down at the desk. My desk has to be tidy, nothing lying about in a mess on it. I am maniacally pedantic when it comes to what it has to look like if I'm to be able to sit working at it. Then when I've been writing for about three quarters of an hour, I take a break. I've usually got a backache by then, so I walk all through my house, or go and look at the sea, or something like that for a quarter of an hour. Writing scripts is a Pflichtbung.³

Jörn Donner: A kind of battle? Against...

Ingmar Bergman: Against disorder, sloppiness, lack of discipline.

Jörn Donner: You never lacked that.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, no, I've never lacked discipline, but if I had, things would have really fallen apart, I assure you. Because I'm constantly battling against my lack of discipline. You just can't be undisciplined in my profession, you just can't. That's why I've become so frightfully pedantic, so trying to so many people.

DEMONS

Jörn Donner: There's a strange contrast between two things: in both your films and your autobiography you describe your demons with a capital D, while on the other hand in all the pictures of you at work in the theatre and on films, you always seem to be in a good mood.

Ingmar Bergman: I think it's part of a director's duty to be in a good mood at work. To create a kind of cheerful atmosphere around the actual exercising of the profession. In the workroom, too.

Jörn Donner: A sense of comfort?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, and security. It's terribly important. When I was young, I didn't understand that at all, and took it all with me into my working life, my hangovers and troubles with women, all my shortcomings and stupidities. I dragged them with me into the studio or on stage and raced around like a demon creating hideously unpleasant and uncomfortable situations.

But there's also something called the educational outburst, that you sometimes have to make use of. These are enormously premeditated attacks of rage. And they are a precision bombing, because that is what's needed. Things mustn't be lovely and cozy in a studio, or on stage. And the people we work with, they're so often tremendously ambitious, so tremendously sensitive, that although we're playing a game, although it looks like fun–we're joking and telling funny stories and we relax and so on–they still feel it's a matter of life and death. And when I say life and death, I actually mean just that.

Jörn Donner: Is it also a matter of keeping up a certain tempo?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, to a tremendous degree. For instance, when you start in the film studio, at nine in the morning, then you start at nine in the morning. The first scene is to be shot at ten. Somehow you have to start punctually. A day shouldn't start with endless discussion. To me, chatter is largely an abomination, because then there are one or two people, perhaps more involved, while a whole lot of others are standing around, even more in the theatre–should be outside of rehearsals and outside the studio.

Jörn Donner: How have you managed to create a distance between what you yourself call your demons and a film studio or a theatre?

Ingmar Bergman: My demons...well, they've somehow got to be harnessed. They have to be there, because I suffer from, for instance–how shall I put it–the demon of suspicion. I am an immensely suspicious person.

Jörn Donner: And a hypochondriac, too, perhaps?

Ingmar Bergman: Let's not keep on counting my demons, for Christ's sake, but I think they ought to be present. They have to stand at attention, on parade, so that I can convey to the actors how suspicion functions and how hypochondria functions, in gestures, tone of voice or in movements. Obviously the demons have to be brought into it. It would be tremendously risky not to have them with you, but they have to be kept very much under control.

You see, as long as I'm inside the studio, or in the theatre, then that's a universe controlled by me. Then the demons are also under control. Everything's under control. But the moment all the lights go off and the camera stops, and I leave by the stage door, or the rehearsal is over, then I no longer have control over the demons. Then it is no longer my universe, so to speak, but the often unpredictable universe that I try to control, but which has constantly bedevilled my efforts.

LIVING IN SORROW

Jörn Donner: I can't get away from the fact that not only your films but you yourself have rather unusually been surrounded by illness and death.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, the two...since Ingrid died. I thought, in fact was convinced, that when Ingrid fell ill, my creative activities would be totally at an end. But as long Ingrid was still alive, she was terribly keen that I should keep going, so I did two productions....

Jörn Donner: While she was ill?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, and then I went on. After Ingrid's death, I simply couldn't write anything. My writing was totally paralyzed. I could sit for hours at the desk, and nothing got written. But, you see, it's another matter sitting alone and writing. These are two quite separate things: if ten actors are in front of me saying, "Do something with me," then I get moving. They're demanding me to do something.

I must tell you it's been a great relief, with this dreadful loss I've been through, going to the theatre and facing the actors and forcing myself into some form of activity. Meanwhile my writing has been totally dead. Not until this last summer have I been able to resume writing.

Jörn Donner: Has your desire to write come back?

Ingmar Bergman: I thought something had to be done. I was in Fårö at the beginning of April this year and sat down at my desk. And just to get my band going I decided I would write five pages a day–on anything. That's how it started. Then I could gradually ease myself into the actual story, but it took a hell of a long time. Then it became five, eight, ten pages a day. About all kinds of things. It was rock-blasting work. Everything had gone rusty and turned to stone. I was really in a bad way.

Jörn Donner: But living with grief, thinking about your father dying, then your mother and your brother. That wasn't the same thing?

Ingmar Bergman: No, not at all. It wasn't that at all. It's sort of like becoming an invalid. Ingrid and I had lived together for twenty-four years. We were very close, in a very good relationship, good comradeship. I can't call it anything else but becoming an invalid. I could say it's like losing part of your body: it hurts all the time. But I've taught myself a technique that means I can live with it, more or less.

Jörn Donner: What kind of technique. Working?

Ingmar Bergman: That's one of the ways; living a strictly humdrum life. Having something to do every hour. I follow a tremendously constructed routine.

Jörn Donner: But you've done that for ages.

Ingmar Bergman: Much more than before, so as not to fall apart.

Jörn Donner: Is this why you don't want to meet other people? You've become a bit more of a hermit.

Ingmar Bergman: Yes, to a very great extent.

Jörn Donner: Don't you want to see new people?

Ingmar Bergman: No, I find that difficult. I like talking on the phone. I think the telephone is a wonderful instrument. You can find great delight in being good friends on the phone. But nowadays I live mainly alone, quite alone. And I like it very much. It means life is bearable.

Jörn Donner: Predictability, is that what does it? The fact that you know the times of the day when you do this or that?

Ingmar Bergman: Exactly. Shakespeare says somewhere that sleep is "the chief nourisher in life's feast, the death of each day's life." I take a soporific at night and can then sleep for six hours.

Jörn Donner: I think there's a Bergman quote, if I remember correctly, "The trouble with death is that you don't know what happens afterward." It's so unpredictable.

Ingmar Bergman: That's quite right. When I was young, I lived with a great fear of death. It was really through The Seventh Seal that I more or less overcame that fear, for I wrote about it then, about the Black Death. I once had an operation–a minor one–in which I was given too much anesthetic so they couldn't bring me round again. A minor operation, and I was out for eight hours! The interesting thing was that for me those eight hours weren't hours at all, nor minutes, nor a second. I was completely out, extinguished. So eight hours were completely out of my life. It felt wonderfully safe when I thought, so this is what death is. At first you're something, then you're no longer anything. You're nonexistent. You're like a candle blown out. That gave me a sense of security.

What's complicated is this sense of security and then the total extinction that is Ingrid's death. I find it immensely difficult to imagine that I'll never see her again, an unbearable thought. So those two lines of thought are in great conflict with each other. I've tried to write about it, but I can't yet, and no doubt it'll be some time before I can. And also, I often experience Ingrid's presence.

Jörn Donner: In the room?

Ingmar Bergman: Yes. Yes, not as a ghost, but I somehow feel her quite close to me. Whether that's a projection from inside me or a reality doesn't really matter. If you live very much alone, you start talking to yourself. Then I have conversations that I carry on with Ingrid, and I think she answers me, and sometimes I think she gives me good advice and opinions on what I'm doing or not doing. That's some consolation. That brings great relief.

CONCLUSION

Jörn Donner: When you finished The Magic Lantern, I had a letter from you. In it you said: "I'm now on my way out of everything with no bitterness, and with a great sense of peace and satisfaction. All I have to do now is to organize the epilogue so that it becomes more or less decent. You simply have to have something other than theatre between yourself and death." So over that period of years, you produced numerous books, scripts, films for television–you can't just call that an epilogue.

Ingmar Bergman: Well, it surprises me that I'd already begun talking about the epilogue, for I do that nowadays a great deal and with great empathy. I think a reason why so much got done could be that I stopped making films, and filming is both physically and mentally such an effort–the actual working on films is such a strain. When that was gone, I suddenly had a whole lot of time and plenty of strength left, and the desire.

Jörn Donner: I was just wondering whether it got easier or more difficult over the years. If you think about when you were doing Fanny and Alexander, you had been making films for almost–how long was it?–about forty years. If you include Crisis, it's an awfully long time, so it should have been easier once you knew the job.

Ingmar Bergman: No, it grew harder. It grew more and more difficult. When you're young and making films, you know this, you see it when you see the rushes and accept them, and you're so pleased the actors are moving roughly as they should. But then when you get older and have been doing it for so long, you actually feel that there's only one solution to this scene, and you sincerely hope you've found it.

Jörn Donner: What would you like to be said about Bergman in twenty years time? Or thirty years? Or what would Bergman himself say?

Ingmar Bergman: That's something I've never really thought about because, as I said before, I'm so one-hundred-percent convinced that I make useful things, both in the theatre and on film, and if they survive me or not–or what people say–I'm totally indifferent to. You must believe that.

Jörn Donner: You must remember you're already part of everyday language. For instance, when you read a novel by V.S. Naipaul, and two people are talking in the African night, and one of them says to the other that this is a Bergman landscape. [laughter]

Ingmar Bergman: Well, as I say, all that seems to be about someone else. Somehow or other it has nothing to do with me. I start rehearsing a play, I start on a production. I begin on a Tuesday and with the terror I feel–it's preceded by a sleepless night and great terror–then it's no use saying to myself that I've done this or that and that it's succeeded. And although I'm world famous and written about and people are immensely nice to me, that doesn't help, because I go to that rehearsal thinking only one thing: "Please may this rehearsal go well, please may it be meaningful, and please may it be alive." I think that when I go into the studio as well, like with these television films, or films I make, the only thing that means anything when I'm working is that the work has to be meaningful to those who are carrying it out, and that it has be alive. That's the only thing I'm afraid of, and God knows, I'm dead scared of it–that my ability to make things come alive and be effective is taken away from me, or that I might lose it, that I suddenly don't know how to do it. Or that time leaves me or I'm left with people doing what I say, out of politeness. But most of all, I think, I surprise myself when I'm thinking about this on Tuesday morning at five A.M. and I know the anguish will continue until I go into the rehearsal and then five minutes later it'll vanish. But I know before that the terror is total. And it's always been like that. Maybe you don't believe me, but it is so. I mean, every filming day of my life, every rehearsal day of my life, I've always had–naturally in varying degrees–this terror, this anxiety that what I am doing won't come alive, that it will be stone dead. And I've had many stone-dead days. It's the most frightful thing in the world. That's the kind of thing that I still dream about.

You know I don't have so many nightmares, but that's my recurring nightmare: me, doing things that are stone dead. That I can't put any life into what I'm doing.

¹ On January 30, 1976, in the middle of a theatre rehearsal, Bergman was taken by the police for interrogation about alleged tax offences. He was later acquitted on all charges.

² In November 1971, Ingmar Bergman married Ingrid yon Rosen. It was his fourth marriage. They lived together for twenty-four years until her death in 1995.

³ A compulsory exercise.