Even for the short flight to Stockholm from his home on the island of Fårö, Ingmar Bergman confesses to swallowing tranquilizers. So it is hardly surprising that he will not be in New York for the four-month Bergman Festival that opens on Friday and celebrates his extraordinary life's work as a movie, television and stage director and as a writer. "I hate to travel," he said. "I don't go anywhere."

Of course, as might be expected of the enigmatic Swedish artist, it is not quite that simple. Traveling also disturbs the ordered and introspective life he now leads. Even the "demons" he tried to exorcise in many of his films seem under control. "They know they can reach me in the early morning and, if I stay in bed, they invade me from all sides," he said with a laugh. "But I cheat them because I get up. And they hate fresh air. I walk quickly in all sorts of weather–and they hate that."

Now, at the age of 76, he directs two plays every year at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm. And at his house on Fårö in the Baltic Sea, he spends his mornings writing novels, plays and television scripts. But since he stopped making movies in 1983, he has purposely turned away from his fame.

He seems relieved to be out of the limelight. His last film, Fanny and Alexander, took seven months to shoot and drained him of the will to make more movies. Above all, he wanted time to deal with the unfinished business of his life without the disruptions of film making and promotion. "I thought, 'Now it's over,' " he said. "It was a good feeling. And I decided as a principle not to give any more interviews."

On this point, however, he relented. The Bergman Festival, which is being produced by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will include a near-complete retrospective of his films and his television dramas. It opens simultaneously on Friday at the Walter Reade Theatre at Lincoln Centre and at the Museum of Television and Radio in Manhattan. Two of his recent productions for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden are also part of the festival. And it was thanks to persuasion by Lars Löfgren, the theatre's artistic director, that Mr. Bergman found himself one recent afternoon sitting in Mr. Löfgren's office, looking unhappily at a tape recorder.

He was dressed informally, a green cardigan over a brown sweater over a checked shirt. His thinning hair is now white; his hands trembled a little. But, even with a stubbly goatee, his sad, elongated face looked familiar. "I am very shy with people I don't know," he said. He was particularly worried about his English and had asked for an interpreter as security. But he had also made a deal with himself. For what he described softly as "the last interview" of his life, he said, "I will try to be absolutely honest."

What this meant, it transpired, was that a three-hour conversation about his life's work would involve only peripheral discussion of his more than 45 films, his numerous television dramas, the 130 or so plays and the handful of operas that he has produced, and the score of plays, the autobiography and the novels he has written. It was as if all these had by now taken on a life of their own–or had died. What interested him were the memories and feelings that still belong to him and continue to shape his work.

Yet, even for a man who has revealed so much of himself in his films and, more recently, in his 1987 memoir, The Magic Lantern, it was not always easy for him to talk. At times, he fell silent or sighed deeply. At other moments, he leaned backward anxiously, lowered his head or covered his face with his hand. Then, just as suddenly, he would break the tension with laughter, cheerfully describing himself as a "pedant" and a "nut case."

"Of course I am autobiographical," he said after one long pause. "I am autobiographical in the way a dream transforms experience and emotions all the time." But it was always like that. Since his childhood, he said, it was always a matter of playing games with fantasy and reality–and it still is today.

"The doors between the old man today and the child are still open, wide open," Mr. Bergman said. "I can stroll through my grandmother's house, and know exactly where the pictures are, the furniture was, how it looked, the voice, the smells. I can move from my bed at night today to my childhood in less than a second. And it has exactly the same reality."

His talent, of course, has always been knowing how to translate his memories, of pain or pleasure, into art. "When I write something horrible or depressing, I am not depressed or horrified," he said. "I am just at work. And what I am writing about is far away. I can stand in the centre of a drama, hearing the people around me saying things, I can hear exactly the way they speak, and I look at them and I just write it down because what they do can be very astonishing for me. But I have already passed through it, mostly."

It was this gift that enabled him to step outside his life into his world. From an early age, he would try to escape the harsh discipline and short temper of his father, Erik, a Lutheran minister, and the moodiness of his mother, Karin, by writing, sketching, playing with puppets and magic lanterns and making theatre.

Still, he was caught in an emotional helter-skelter. "I was very much in love with my mother," he said, barely minutes into the interview. "She was a very warm and a very cold woman. When she was warm, I tried to come close to her. But she could be very cold and rejecting."

At the age of 19, by now no longer on speaking terms with his parents, young Ingmar left home and, after a brief stint at university, found a menial job in the Stockholm Opera. It drew him into the world of theatre. He began writing plays, which he now dismisses as "lousy," and was soon also directing plays in student and local theatres. When he was 24, he was hired as a "script washer"–to polish screenplays–by Svensk Filmindustri, Sweden's main production and distribution company. And movies entered his life.

"It was a good way of learning script-writing because what we saw was American film and what we admired was its dramatic structure, its way of telling stories," he recalled. "That's how I learned the profession. Then, when I knew how to do it, I could throw it away and I had my own way."

Within a year, one of his screenplays had been turned into a movie, Torment, by Alf Sjöberg, Sweden's dominant director of the day and one of Mr. Bergman's subsequent mentors. (The Bergman Festival includes a retrospective of Sjöberg's films at the Museum of Modern Art in June.) Its success gave Mr. Bergman the chance to direct his first movie, The Crisis, and others soon followed.

By the mid-50's, starting with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, the movies that founded the Bergman legend began to flow. Recognition came quickly: The Virgin Spring (1960) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961) won the Academy Award for best foreign film in successive years. Crucially, in 1960, Mr. Bergman also began working with Sven Nykvist, the Swedish cinematographer who has shot 22 of his films (and who will be the subject of a program in June at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens).

Throughout the 1960's, shaped by the bitter memories of his childhood, his movies mirrored his own intense and often gloomy vision of life and death. Then, in the early 1970's, he turned toward another turbulent facet of his life–his five marriages and numerous passionate affairs–and, in such films as Cries and Whispers and Scenes From a Marriage, both in 1973, he peered deeply into male-female relations.

"Bergman was the first to bring metaphysics–religion, death, existentialism–to the screen," Bertrand Tavernier, the French film director, noted. "But the best of Bergman is the way he speaks of women, of the relationship between men and women. He's like a miner digging in search of purity."

It was with Scenes From a Marriage that Mr. Bergman also discovered television. And it reminded him of his mother's bedtime stories. "She would read for an hour, then close the book and you had to go to bed," he said. "But you knew that next Wednesday we would sit there again. And television is to me a wonderful storyteller. The family can come together, discuss what they see. And there's another thing wonderful about it. It's on the air for one or two hours, then it's gone."

When Scenes, which was originally shot in instalments for the small screen, was first shown on Swedish television, he was surprised by its impact. "I had to change my telephone number because people called me to ask about their marriage problems," he said.

Yet, throughout his career, film making caused him anxiety. It was one reason he liked to work quickly–"30 days yes, 40 days O.K., 50 days already too much." And it was perhaps the main reason he was relieved to give up movies. "You work eight hours and you make three minutes of the film and you know those three minutes have to be absolutely top," he said. "Sometimes, it would drive me crazy."

In contrast, theatre brought stability. He was strongly attracted by the classics–Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen and particularly his countryman August Strindberg–but he also directed plays by Pirandello, Anouilh, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. And, between 1952 and 1966, he was successively director of the main repertory theatres in Gothenberg, Malmö and Stockholm.

In fact, it was while rehearsing Strindberg's Dance of Death in Stockholm in 1976 that he was briefly detained on charges of tax evasion. It brought on a nervous breakdown and, although the case was dropped, he felt so betrayed by his country that he opted for exile in Munich, Germany.

He resided there for nine years and, in hindsight, believes that he overreacted. "It was silly to stay away that long," he said. "I was so angry when I left Sweden, but the anger went away." Once again, though, he sought refuge in the theatre, directing 11 plays in Munich and making just two feature films, including Fanny and Alexander, which won four Academy Awards in 1984. When he finally returned, he went "home" to the Royal Dramatic Theatre, known locally as the Dramaten, where he had first attended a play at the age of 9. He even remembered the occasion–a Sunday matinee in March 1928–and the place where he sat. "Sometimes in the silent hour of the house, between 4 P.M. and 5 P.M., I go in there and sit in that seat," he confessed. "Sentimental, nostalgic. But then I lived in this house all my life."

As if to anchor himself back in his country–"this country of gray boring compromises that I so love"–he chose works by Strindberg, A Dream Play and Miss Julie, to be among his first productions. They were followed by Hamlet, a sexually charged production that was performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988.

In late May and early June, the Dramaten will be taking Mr. Bergman's critically acclaimed versions of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and Yukio Mishima's Madame de Sade to Brooklyn, while his newest production, Molière's Misanthrope, will probably travel to BAM next year. (The troupe performed Madame de Sade there in 1993.)

Mr. Bergman clearly relishes working with the Dramaten's 80-member permanent company. As a movie director, he liked to use the same actors and actresses (and, in the cases of Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, with whom Mr. Bergman has a daughter, launched their international careers). And many of the actors who now appear in his stage productions (like Bibi Andersson in The Winter's Tale) were previously in his films. Somehow, all those who work with him become part of his broad family. "He takes great care of his actors," said Donya Feuer, the Dramaten's American-born choreographer. "He listens to them and looks after them."

But whether it is theatre, film or television, it is all, as Mr. Bergman puts it, "playing games." And in the end he said, what counts is the audience: "One task is to make people laugh and be happy and forget themselves. But another is to show them what is unbearable and terrifying in a way that they can bear it and learn from it."

Certainly, Mr. Bergman himself can now face things that once haunted him. "When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying," he said. "But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It's like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about."

He remains a pessimist: how can one not be, he asked, surrounded by such "horrifying and unbearable" reality? But "if I am in a good mood, I am a pessimist in a good mood. I won't allow myself my depressions."

Only occasionally does the dark Bergman resurface. "Is suffering a part of your education as a human being?" he wondered aloud at one point. "Is there a pattern that you can't see, is suffering a part of that pattern, is there a real grace, or is it a coincidence?" He sighed. "I'm not ready to discuss this."

Old age has clearly mellowed him, however. He has found contentment in his long partnership with Ingrid Karlebo, a well-to-do woman then in her early 40's who left her husband in 1971 to marry the director. The womanizing of his early years Mr. Bergman now views as "a big mistake." Years of estrangement from several of his nine children are also over.

Most crucially perhaps, through the books he has written in recent years, Mr. Bergman has made peace with his parents. The fiercely confessional tone of The Magic Lantern set the stage. Three novels followed, one about his parents (The Best Intentions, which became an award-winning movie directed by Bille August), one about his father (Sunday's Children, which was made into a film, directed by his son Daniel) and one about his mother (Private Confessions, for which he has written a television version).

The last proved the hardest because it involved discovering a different mother, a woman whose most intimate feelings were reserved for a secret diary that she kept until two days before her death in 1966. Mr. Bergman remembers his father reading the diary through a magnifying glass and slowly realizing that "he did not know the woman he was married to." It is with an episode from this diary that Mr. Bergman has completed the trilogy. "I have the feeling that I was so unfair to my parents when I was young," he said. "Now I feel very satisfied and happy that I have done this."

He nodded toward the clock in Mr. Löfgren's office and warned he would soon have to leave. There was one final question: Had he become such an acute analyst of human behaviour by undergoing therapy? "No, never," he said quickly. "If I didn't have my profession, I think I would be sitting in a nut house. But I have been unceasingly at work, and this has been very healthy for me. So I had no need for therapy."

He rose slowly to his feet. The director who always meticulously prepared every film or play now seemed also to have brought order to his life. "I will make some productions here in this theatre," he said of his immediate plans, "and I will go to my island and read books I did not have the patience to read or the patience to understand. And I will listen to music." He seemed pleased by the way he had finally staged things. "It will be a very good life, I think."