The time and the place are crucial. I was 16, too young to be in university and too scared to be anywhere else. Saddled with all the usual subjects an aspiring man was expected to study–the Macro-Economics and the Linear Algebras and the Introductions to Accounting–I had one remaining hole to fill in my academic schedule. The title in the calendar read simply, The Theology of Ingmar Bergman. The requirements: Watch a bunch of movies and write a final essay. I signed on.

His hair white and his cassock ashen, the processor was a chain-smoking Catholic priest, who sandwiched the Bergman flicks between his true love–teaching an omnibus course that he joyfully labelled The History of Atheism. Eloquent, witty, generous, kind and dauntingly intelligent, the priest quickly became our guru, a filter-tipped god. He seemed a revelation to me. So did the films.

The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, The Virgin Spring, and then the so-called "silence of God" trilogy–Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence. These are the movies that made Bergman's international reputation, and gave rise to the adjective that sounds vaguely intimidating even today. Bergmanesque: bleak, torturous, interrogative, often allegorical and always angst-ridden. I watched, as the now-celebrated images got projected onto the screen and etched into my mind–Death's silhouetted procession in The Seventh Seal, Time's handless clock in Wild Strawberries.

I watched, and didn't always understand. Then the priest lectured and smoked a lot and joked a little, and I understood a bit more. But, even as a teenager (especially as a teenager), I knew this much for a certainty: The loneliness in the films spoke to a loneliness in me. And, paradoxically, I felt less alone–and immensely grateful.

I haven't revisited those films since. A kind of cowardice prevents me. They couldn't possibly have the same impact now, and I hesitate to measure the difference, somehow fearful of what the gap would imply about the ensuing years, about the changes wrought by Time's handless clock.

In the interview below, Ingmar Bergman says of those seminal pictures he made so long ago: "That does not feel like it concerns me. It feels like a very distant cousin did all that." To me, it feels like a very distant cousin watched all that.

And sometimes I miss him.

Ingmar Bergman is talking about his dream. "I was at a public bath, a quite large one...I was standing at the shallow end. At the other end, Pernilla August and Lena Endre walked in wearing rather piquant bathing suites. I could feel I was beginning to perk up, you know. When they sat down on the edge with their feet dangling in the water, I dove in. Since I had watched the Olympics in Sydney, I now swam butterfly, racing really fast. I appeared under their feet and kissed the soles of their feet."

August and Endre are the stars of Bergman's current project, not a film but a play, Schiller's Maria Stuart, which runs until May at the royal theatre in Stockholm. At 82, he is still wedded to drama, and anyway, "When you have two queens, you grab the opportunity."

Millions of people around the world have adopted their image of Sweden from Bergman's films. Every critical list includes at least one Bergman. Being a Bergman actor commanded respect. In the world of cinema, his female stars seemed to shine most brilliantly.

"Well," he says, "I have now left the butchering and whoring trade." I have to ask, although I know the answer: "Yes, the film trade." Later, he adds that a film project would be too physically strenuous for him anyway.

But he is at home at the Dramaten, the nearly century-old building whose walls, he says, speak to him. "I shared my blood with this damn building," says Bergman. "I love actors, you see."

Bergman's office at the Dramaten is at the second-row level, reached by an elevator to the right of the stage entrance. He has come to meet us in the dark corridor. Otherwise the photographer and I would get lost, he says with considerable delight.

"Well," he says as he opens the door to his small office, "this is where I live."

He also lives in the Karlaplan district of Stockholm. But he really lives on the island of Fårö, off the southwest coast of Sweden. He doesn't like Stockholm. "There are two places where I feel at home," he says, "Fårö and Rome."

On Fårö he takes the daily walks his daughter Linn (her mother is Liv Ullmann) has called "Dad's thinking rounds."

"How I take my walk depends on the winds," he says. "I have staked out four different routes. In May-June I cannot walk on the shore; the birds are breeding and then it's pure Hitchcock if you go near them."

A housekeeper comes in for three hours a day, cooking dinner according to a strict rotation. Bergman makes breakfast and lunch himself.

"At three o'clock in the afternoon I watch films," he says. He has his own movie theatre stocked with 4,500 video cassettes. And every year he chooses between 150 and 200 reels–real film reels–at the Film Institute, which are driven by truck down to Fårö.

"I am mostly interested in the development of Swedish cinema," he says, particularly silent film. He contends that it was on its way to becoming a remarkable art form by itself when sound arrived–and everything had to start over from scratch.

Asked about his own films he says: "Listen, that doesn't feel like it concerns me. It feels like a very distant cousin did all that."

I ask him why he hasn't capitalized on his fame at all the film festivals that want to have him as guest of honour. In 1997, for example, when he was to be awarded the Palm of Palms at Cannes, he sent Linn instead.

"You may perhaps not believe me," he answers. "But the fact is, I am very shy."

"I don't have any private social life any more," Bergman continues. "I actually have only one 'best friend' left alive." He is referring to actor Erland Josephson, who starred with Ullmann in Scenes from a Marriage. In fact, Bergman never sees him privately. "We speak on the phone every Saturday at 11."

He speaks with love of his wife Ingrid, who died six years ago. She kept him alive and creative during what he calls his "tax exile," and built his life at Fårö.

Bergman has seven buildings on Fårö–room for the children, and their children, and their children. He says he was "a lousy father," but he gets along well with all of them now.

He sees his life as a privileged and happy one, especially the years with Ingrid.

The last six years are different, marked by self-imposed solitude, but his desire to create and his joy in theatre are still strong. His next project is to direct an Ibsen drama for radio, and he is busy writing a play manuscript for radio or TV. He discusses his new plans for the Dramaten for next fall, when he will be 83.

It is Bergman who brings up death. He says that in dreams, everything happens without strain, without resistance. One plays the piano extremely well and swims the butterfly, one accepts and is accepted at meetings and with people one has never seen and people who are not even alive. "If death is anything like that..." he says.

When Bergman agreed to this interview, a condition was that I was not allowed to have a cold. He had just finished a course of penicillin that had lowered his immune system, and he does not like to have a cold, he says, when he is about to go to Fårö.

He forgot to mention the photographer. Now he explains he doesn't like to pose for pictures. Photography only during the actual interview. There are so many pictures already.

But then he agrees to a picture above the theatre's marble foyer, where a bar of some fancy wood has been built. He dislikes the flagpoles that have been erected in front of the Dramaten, hiding the fantastic Jugend front.

He tells me not to talk on his right, because that ear is damaged. He went into military service in a machine-gun company in 1938. When there was going to be firing practice with the old water-cooled machine guns from 1914 he put some cotton into his ears. But the sergeant roared: "Officer cadet 154638 Bergman, what kind of old-womanish behaviour is that? Take out the shit."

When the bang came, Bergman's hearing was damaged. He has experienced a constant high-pitched peep in his ear for 62 years.

I tell him that most of his films aren't especially Swedish, except for Fanny and Alexander, which he made in 1983. I saw it in New York and the critics, quite astonished, wrote that it was very unlike the usual Bergman films. It was as if the image of Sweden they had formed on the basis of The Seventh Seal, The Silence and Persona now would have to be changed into a completely new one in light of that delightfully sentimental tribute to the "little life" around a family table loaded with food.

Bergman follows modern cinema at his Fårö theatre, particularly Swedish cinema. He is delighted with Lukas Moodysson, whose film Together was just at Sundance. He says Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor is phenomenal, and he says that the new filmmakers whose roots are abroad offer exciting promise for the future of Swedish cinema.

"Yes, it will be damn good, you see."

Special to The Globe and Mail