When he became bored with reading about himself, Ingmar Bergman stopped giving interviews. In this exceptional encounter, he muses with Anna Salander.

It is a disaster from the start. Bergman looks at me with immediate revulsion as if I were a slimy thing with many legs who has crawled out from underneath the sofa. You have a cold, he says tonelessly. I answer him that I have the mother of all colds, that my daughters aged three and five have colds, that my mother who is looking after them, since I have to go and see Ingmar Bergman, has a cold, and that my husband, who is doing a story in Gambia, has come down with an amoeba infection.

Having said this I have to blow my nose, despite the fact that I just used nose spray, took two Advils for my fever and three doses of cough suppressant for a cough which threatened to displace my lungs. My handkerchief, which I try to hide in my hand, is soaked through, my throat feels stiff and burning red. To top it off, I have an open blister on my lower lip.

– I am terrified of germs, says Bergman, opening the door to his room. Even a mild cold lowers my effectiveness.

– I am terribly sorry, but my editor pointed out that he needed the article in a hurry. I couldn't cancel the appointment. Besides, I don't think I am contagious, I am, after all, on my third day.

– The third day is supposed to be the most dangerous, says Bergman settling into his desk chair.

– He really hates me, I think, surprised. I had better leave.

– No, stay, dammit. It's too late now. You have already passed the cold on to me.

I get out the tape recorder.

– Put it there, he says pointing to the edge of the table. It is more important that you hear what I have to say than what you yourself are saying, since you "hopefully" (as you put it nowadays) will be able to remember your own questions.

Silence. The February day is fading fast. Wet snow is falling slowly outside the windows facing Nybroplan, where traffic is rolling in a distant rumble. The room is obviously well insulated against noise. Despite my overdose of cough suppressant I am seized by a paroxysm of coughing. Bergman turns his head away, staring at the falling dusk. I don't want to know what he is thinking.

– Do you have a glass of water? I ask half suffocated.

– No, he says. The water in the tap is rusty since the pipes were installed in 1908. But you can have a shot of calvados.

He rises and fetches a bottle from a small refrigerator. The bottle and a chipped cup with floral decor. There you are. He pours some out, and I take a sip. A red-hot flame slices through my raw throat, my bronchial tubes are on fire and heat radiates into my arteries.

– Do you want another one? he says almost politely, waving the bottle. Personally, I hate calvados–it was given to me and has been in my refrigerator for twenty-two years. It was given to me by a Belgian journalist who spent an afternoon in my office taking me to task for not appreciating the greatness of Olof Lagercrantz, former editor-in-chief for Sweden's largest morning paper in Stockholm, Dagens Nyheter (The Daily News). He described me as a puma, curled up and whining about my poor wounded tail or maybe a paw. I don't remember exactly, his metaphor was not clear. He had met Lagercrantz on a trip to China, and they had found each other. When Olof came back, he had a Mao-inspired uniform made. I sometimes wonder if he is saving it in some closet, if he ever opens his closet and looks at this irrefutable evidence of a dismal error of judgment, or if he has donated it to the City Mission. Or maybe his elegant wife made a jacket out of the material, which was excellent. Hard to know, hard to forget. At my age, all kinds of things lose their importance, fade and lose their contours. Some things remain in focus with just the right degree of unpleasantness associated with it. Olof Lagercrantz remains. His work as author of brilliantly insightful biographies is beginning to fade. What is left are his public insults, his wounding invectives. Well, not just his. There are several. It gives me pleasure to hate them, even though several of them are dead by now. This, apropos of the calvados–you may keep the bottle. Every time I open the fridge and see that bottle I am reminded of the Swedish Left. And since it no longer pays any attention to itself, it is just as well that I too stop doing so. There are other, more immediate, things that are capable of raising my blood pressure. Such as, I ask ingratiatingly. I immediately notice my tone of voice. Unfortunately, so does he. Is that a herpes blister on your lip, he asks in a display of faint interest. No, it is a cold sore, that's all, I say and hear through the tape recorder that my voice has lost its ingratiating quality. Silence. The telephone rings. Bergman answers: Yes. No. No. Goddam asshole, I don't mean you. Ask that pisser. No. No. I am fine. How are you? I'll see you on Thursday as agreed–that is if I don't have a cold by then. No, nothing. Receiver down. Do you want to talk now? What do you want to know? I am yours for fifty minutes. Go ahead.

You are seventy-five. When are you going to call it quits?

– A good question. In Tabori's Goldberg Variations an aged and rather drunk theatre director says, "The stage is the only alternative to the morgue." A few years ago I would have disagreed. When I did Long Night's Journey [sic] and A Doll's House I was all set to quit. I actually meant it. Then the House found itself temporarily short of competent directors.

Under the wonderful illusion of being needed, I therefore stepped in and did Madame de Sade. Six actresses with no mental or technical limitations. It is strange with actors. They are so sensitive to imperceptible signals. And I simply hang there as a receiving dish, picking up their signals in my turn. Everything is indiscernible and inaudible. Our combined signals give rise to new messages. And on and on; that's the way it works. Before the rehearsal, I am almost always scared, angry or just depressed. I am frightened that the receiver and/or transmitter will turn out to be broken. And then there are physical calamities that have beset me all morning, starting at five: just now it is bleeding hemorrhoids. It's like having a period: I sit on the toilet dripping blood. Some other morning I am convinced that I am losing all my teeth. A third morning that my hip is going to hell. All these aches and pains I take with me to the Theatre. Then the rehearsal starts. After the first minute I have forgotten my physical indignities. After five minutes I notice that the delight of playing has spread its wings over us.

So you are not going to quit?

– No, I'm not going to quit. But the more decrepit I get, the more I want to work with young (more or less) talented, actresses in low-cut dresses. Don't put that down.

That's off the record?

– Off the record. Bless you. Twelve sneezes–not bad. A sex researcher once maintained that a sneeze basically uses the same muscles as an orgasm. Could that possibly be true? In that case, hats off to you!

I'll have another sip of calvados.

– Good, good, good. I'll tell you something you didn't know. How old are you anyway?

Thirty-two.

– Well, listen. I used to love it (before my German exile) when someone–actually anybody at all–called me and asked to do an interview. Any medium, any paper. I was shamelessly flattered. I eagerly looked forward to the encounter with the journalist and the microphone and the camera. I think I developed a kind of persona–a media personality who behaved in a special kind of way and had a special knack for answering a special kind of question. Eventually I discovered that not all interlocutors were as benevolent as I first thought in my childish delight. I was hurt, especially the first few years in Munich. The journalists were arrogant, clever and knew precisely what they wanted. They made sure that I put my foot in it. I had nothing to complain about: I was treated with respect, my interviewers were pleasant, they had done their homework–nothing sloppy about it. I then read what these ladies or gentlemen wrote about me and realized that their task was to take me apart. When I finally returned home (eleven theatre productions and two films later) I carried with me scars that were slow to heal.

– Early in my career I was incredibly oversensitive to negative reviews. I cried with rage and humiliation. Knowing that the individual in question was out to hurt or harm me or that the reviewer was actually venting honest disappointment or indignation made no difference. I cried and felt sick. It was like a curse. The same with interviews. A misunderstanding, an ironical aside, a comment about the way I looked or behaved could plague me for weeks like a stomach pain. Television was even worse. I used to take enormous delight in watching myself; I usually liked what I saw, like an actor who thinks he played a part well. I didn't pay much attention to what I actually said, even less to the other person. I studied the person that was supposed to be me, I taking note of my own inanity and my spontaneous but inappropriate actions, but by and large I was rather (quite) pleased.

– All this delight has been lost. Reading about Bergman, listening to Bergman's comments or watching Bergman on TV no longer held any appeal what so ever for me. It just felt stupid. My undisguised pleasure and my flattered enthusiasm turned to boredom and indifference. Now listen, dammit! For here is the nub of this long disquisition: reviews still make me sick. Not for my own sake–that would be rather silly after fifty-five years in this field, one hundred and thirty productions and about fifty films. No, what bothers me is the fear that one of the actors will be badly treated. That's how I feel. And it doesn't get any better. I myself am out of the picture once the dress rehearsal is over. But my actors are left, exposed. Triumphant or depressed. Demolished or ignored. Judged, humiliated, criticized, for everyone to see. Their courage in confronting the audience–not just the first time, but every time–never ceases to amaze me. I marvel at their self-discipline: they go on stage, they play their part even when they have been treated badly or just had their feathers ruffled. That was a parenthesis. Come to think of it, I don't know what we're talking about–probably about me. "Our thoughts are obscured by words," as Strindberg says in The Ghost Sonata.

Self-centred? I hear my voice as if from a distance, and the question surprises me. It must be the calvados, or the infection, or a combination of the two. I can see that Bergman enjoys the question.

– Self-centred? It goes with the profession. It sometimes amazes me that people takes me seriously, that anyone bothers to rake my advice, that a great House with every imaginable human and material resource is placed at my disposal. It's all a game–yes, it is, even though it is a game of life or death, as we say, mainly to justify ourselves to ourselves and to the surrounding world–but in reality we are engaged in a game the way children are: everything is representation, nothing is. Everything from tables and chairs to our most subtle emotions. A child at play is absorbed in itself. The same thing is true of those who have the peculiar job of theatre director. Actually, it is rather recent invention, whose main task is to make life difficult for both actors and audience. Many of us are actually totally mad, but no worse for that. Many see their profession as a very costly form of therapy. I, myself, fall somewhere in-between. My life in the almost comically frosty landscape of film may have made me ultra-sensitive to those who pay my keep, meaning the audience. After the heady symbiosis of the first few weeks, the loving sense of community of the early rehearsals, I step back a few paces and become transformed into the registering eye of the spectator. Already at that stage, do I represent the receiver. I am paid to perform the not altogether pleasant duty of informing the actor of the anticipated reactions of the spectator. I have to rein in my playfulness and my urge to act alongside him in check, also my desire to feel affection, to receive affection. The closer we get to the very first encounter with the public which will take possession of our creation for a few hours, the more dispassionate my insight becomes, and the more precise and pedestrian my instructions. If I like the actors (and I do, since I only work with actors I like) I know that I can tell them the truth. That is to say, I am able to give them my honest and straight-forward reaction to their efforts. They say that love is blind. This does not apply to the theatre. Love is clear-sighted. If not, it would be meaningless and calculating at best. At worst, fatal. Do you find this at all interesting?

I did not hear the question, since my attention had been diverted by trying to suppress an attack of coughing. So I took a sip and said (according to the tape recorder): Excuse me?

– No, I won't excuse you, I'll give you no sympathy, I'll just keep talking. Our time will soon be up and that will be it, for good. Do you want to talk about The Winter's Tale?

I was just going to suggest that, I said quickly. My editor was especially insistent that we talk about The Winter's Tale. Why specifically The Winter's Tale?

– Why The Winter's Tale, indeed? Now, I'm going to bore you with the puppet theatre I had when I was a child. The year was probably 1932 and I was fourteen. I had a well-equipped (and large) puppet theatre which I had constructed together with my best friend. My sister and her best friend were also involved in the activity of the theatre. It was a rather advanced contraption with a revolving stage, side stage, cyclorama and an intricate lighting system. Our biggest success had been Maeterlinck's Bluebird. Now we set out to surpass all our earlier efforts. The coming season was to include two major productions: The Magic Flute and The Winter's Tale. Both projects came to naught. The Magic Flute had to be cancelled for financial reasons: the gramophone records alone exceeded the theatre budget by seventy-nine crowns (This was a fringe theatre. Subsidies were highly irregular). My fabulously wealthy Aunt Anna, for instance, had gone abroad for most of the winter to seek a cure for her podagra. To use every last penny of our allowances was out of the question as it would preclude going to the movies. The Magic Flute was produced much later (1971). The reason why The Winter's Tale was not realized was somewhat more subtle. I had made drastic cuts in Hagberg's craggy but beautiful Swedish translation. The best of the play was left, unchanged but unresolved. Hermione's awakening, the return of love. I think I understood it already at that age. The Winter's Tale was about the death of Love, the survival of Love and the resurrection of Love. It was the resurrection that defeated me. I realized early on that my Hermione puppet was utterly incapable of being resurrected. The puppet remained a puppet–albeit three-dimensional–and my sister had made a beautiful red dress for her. I gave up mainly because, to my way of thinking, the conclusion was the most beautiful, the most moving and the most magnificent that I had come across in my as yet rather limited experience. I still think so today, sixty-three years later. I am never profoundly moved by anything that I have a professional or creative hand in. In the case of The Winter's Tale, this principle has broken down. Already when mapping out the stage instructions (the walking, standing, where am I/you going to say what?), already at that point my emotions were in great turmoil. I found it so difficult to keep my emotions in check that I developed a sore throat and nose. After that, at every rehearsal, every repeat, every piddling little detail, my feelings have been in an unprofessional upheaval, difficult to suppress. It has been a peculiar experience, unique in my professional life. That's what may happen, that's how it is sometimes.

But why The Winter's Tale, at this point, I ask distantly on the tape.

– I have a son and a daughter who both have great talent for theatre. I often suggested to them that they tackle The Winter's Tale. To me, this was theatre for young people. I had found the problems of the text had become insurmountable, or at least so I thought.

But it didn't turn them on, so to speak? I sniffle and blow my nose. It seems to me that Bergman looks at me with distaste. February dusk. From afar a voice is bellowing. It sounds like a frightened cow.

Voice training, Bergman says. The speech classes occasionally penetrate the sound-proofing. It is Kerstin Forsmark, the best voice coach in the world, working with Johan. No, it didn't turn my son or daughter on, for all my nagging. Maybe precisely because of my nagging. You never know about young colleagues, especially those who happen to be your children. No, it didn't turn them on, and time went by. One afternoon on Fårö, I was sitting in a chair in my study looking at the light over the sea, something I can do for hours on end when I am in that mood. I was listening to music: Jonas Love Almqvist's Songes sung by Irene Lindh. She works here in the House, as you know. Her interpretation of this complicated music was crystal clear, fervent, moving, perfect. Through the songs–darkly glowing, sweetly smiling, full of pain, mysteriously pleading–I could suddenly see The Winter's Tale. My difficulties vanished. Jonas Love Almqvist explained William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale–this, the poet's late creation, whose first half has the severity of a Beethoven symphony. The second half is more like The People from Värmland. Suddenly Beethoven's angry sounds pierce the idyll. Then right away a noisy scherzo and finally a chorale to the Sacredness of Man and endurance of Love. This mixtum compositum no longer seemed the least bit strange. I couldn't understand what it was that had presented such obstacles before.

– Then everything happened very fast: where is The Winter's Tale set? In the yellow salon. In the manor house. In Almqvist's Book of the Wild Rose. During Twelfth Night. At a birthday party. It was perfectly obvious. Jonas Love Almqvist provided the directions. Apart from which he had composed the music needed: Free Fantasias for Pianoforte. A parlour game taking place between the wintry afternoon sunset and the moonlight supper of the evening. Seem less transition between the play and the play within the play. All is possible, all is permitted. Of course! But what does the manor house look like? The artist, stage designer Lennart Mörk, and I deliberately set out to explore the Royal Dramatic Theatre. We sat together in the Marble Foyer (as many times before). Here was our manor house, our yellow salon. The theatre space merging into the audience space, which in its turn becomes the Marble Foyer. Unity, affinity. And costumes, the outfits, the clothes? First the tailcoats of the birthday parry and the elegant dresses. Then whatever the costume director Richard Furumo unearthed in the attics and cellars of the manor house (they even found skins of brown bear and polar bear!). Irene Lindh sang flawlessly. Jonas Love Almqvist entered the twilight room showing us the way to the dreams and the images of that a distant year, 1611. The same images, the same dreams. You recognize it, you know.

– The fact that a hundred people on, around and behind the stage want to share in the adventure, gives rise to an indescribable sense of togetherness. As when a mature orchestra masters the mysteries and challenges of musical notation through their expertise and sense of unity. That's the way it was, that's what happened.

Wouldn't this be a good time to quit, as you did after Fanny and Alexander?

– This is the third time you ask me whether I'm going to "quit," as you put it. I will answer by giving you two quotations. The first Goethe, of course: "It is important to compromise oneself in time." I have taken the liberty of paraphrasing the Great Man and say: "It is not enough to compromise oneself in time, but it is important to keep doing it all the time." The other is from Baudelaire and rather terse: "You have to work, if not out of joy then at least out of despair. For having fun has proved to be more boring than working."

By now, I am really sick, I am convinced I am running quite a temperature, and my runny nose is rendering me incapable of rational thought. Besides, I have formed a positive dislike to the man in the desk chair. I find it difficult not to show my antipathy. Simply telling myself that he is insufferably vain sitting there wrapped in a cloak of unshakeable self-confidence is of no use. I have an irresistible urge to hurt him. I want to see what his reaction will be: surprise, disappointment, anger? I load, aim, fire: Are you really as well liked as you think?

Bergman suddenly gives me a grey look. He has no answer, and is silent.

– This is what happens in theatre, he finally says. If you give me something I can use, I will respond by liking or even loving you. If I get something from you, I will like you or love you. Our paths cross during working hours. Suddenly work is over, and we have to part. Sometimes it hurts. But it will pass. If we look at the activity as a whole, there is a rather harsh rule which we seldom stop to consider: Theatre demands loyalty. This does not mean that theatre owes us loyalty. Our social rituals within the House are marked by faint but quite discernible verbal inflation. As for me, I have always wanted to be liked, even when we are not part of the director-troupe-staging set-up. But this desire of mine is childish and also risky. I fetter some. Someone fetters me. This leads to partial blindness and risky positions.

When you were involved in film, you surrounded yourself with the same people all the time. Was that the wrong thing to do?

– I find this boring. Film and theatre are different processes. Film is one continuous downhill race in which you have to know each other very well in order for everybody to reach the goal intact. Theatre is a drawn-out, methodical operation which allows for difficult and irrational components of different kinds (as for instance an outburst of dislike or the sudden eruption of too much love, lust or just indifference).

You turn down all interviews, why did you agree to this one?

– I apologize, but someone showed me your picture. I thought you were pretty–I apologize again. Your voice on the telephone was sweet, I am sorry. I thought: this girl I would really like to meet; I apologize a last time.

Time is running out, I think maliciously. Now he suddenly behaves, since he knows that I have him on tape. He knows that I have it within my power to hurt him, just by reproducing word for word all the trite statements he has made in the course of this session. As if reading my thoughts he says, in a tone of phony professional politeness that you won't forget the conditions of our interview: that I be allowed to read and OK what you write.

There won't be much time, I say in order to alarm him. I may have to call you and read it to you over the phone.

– I want to see what you write. Then we can talk on the phone. That was our agreement.

That's right, I say, blowing my nose. Then he says that he trusts me, and I think: he shouldn't. But in order to reassure him I say not to worry. We'll get a hold of each other, and then I turn off the tape recorder and gather up my stuff. He is polite, helping me on with my coat, accompanying me to the elevator and wishing me good luck (whatever he means by that). He even gives me his secret telephone number "so we won't lose touch."

Three days later I call the secret number. He answers right away. I ask him how he is. He tells me he has a cold. Since I am getting better all the time and he worse, we spend a few minutes comparing notes. I then tell him what happened. My editor has rejected my article. He claims that it was written "from a supplicant position," and that to include everything from the tape is old hat, that the interview is too long, too wordy and the contents uninteresting. But that I was welcome to use it. On the condition that I don't use my own name. He suggested that I turn to a relatively new magazine, Dramat, published by the Royal Dramatic Theatre. When I said that I was not familiar with the publication in question, he described it in a stream of superlatives. Dramat is a terrific magazine, with an acute sense of things to come, self-critical, fun, and in many ways fresher than anything else in that category. Its picture material well presented in a bold, modern lay-out. He offered to call the editors himself and recommend my article.

I asked Bergman if he had any objections. He said he was happy, and thanked me in a hoarse voice for pleasant collaboration. I asked if he wanted me to read him what I had written.

He thanked me for my offer but told me that there was no need and that he trusted my judgment implicitly. Then we said goodbye and wished each other a speedy recovery.

Anna Salander is a Finno-Swedish freelance journalist. She is currently living in Rome where she is working on a book on the Taviani brothers.