In Sweden Bergman's timing in making a film or directing a play is so precise that people can set their clocks and calendars by it. One has the feeling, too, that Bergman faces an interview with the same kind of professional discipline. It is a job to be done and he is going to try his hardest to go through with it. The only thing that might make him withdraw is an interviewer's cough or cold: Bergman is perhaps a bit of a hypochondriac; or perhaps he knows only too well what the flu can do to the schedule of a planned work. (Before starting to shoot a new film, he insists that all personnel take flu shots and gammaglobulin.)

I meet Ingmar Bergman while he is finishing the shooting of Whisperings and Cries. The setting is an old estate by Lake Mälar, south of Stockholm. The houses are a bit run down; outside, the park blazons in fall colours. We talk on the carpeted steps between two floors in the main building, where all the rooms have been painted in different shades of red to suggest the symbolic setting of the film: the landscape of the soul–as a child Bergman used to imagine the soul as a damp membrane of red. All around us technicians keep running with lamps and cords, but Bergman shields off the world around him. Once in a while he glances at me, but most of the time he looks straight ahead through his slightly cupped hands, which shadow his face.

How do you react to what is said and written about you?

I never read very carefully what's written about me. All that is vanitas vanitatum or whatever it's called. It's as if it concerned someone else, some distant cousin or relative but not myself.

But you still react to what is written about you?

Well, sort of. But very briefly. If someone writes something nasty about me, I fume over it for about half an hour until I get the poison out of my system. If it's something favourable, I probably think about it a little longer, about an hour maybe. But you see, all that must be something very secondary. I simply must discipline myself to ignore all my old films, all my old stage productions and all that is written about me.

So you never think about your old films?

No. To do so would be a terrible burden. I have to weed out all the films I've made in the past. The only thing that matters is what I am doing now and what I plan to do. The rest is irrelevant.

Does that mean that you don't like your old films?

Some I like more and some less. But I don't think about them.

So you never think about The Seventh Seal for instance?

No.

But you do like that film?

Birgitta!!!

I know. But the film is terribly important to some of us. I know the impact of the film when I show it to my students.

It makes me happy to hear that. But it's irrelevant. The only thing that matters is what I am doing now and what I plan to do. And right now I'm making Whisperings and Cries.

And what do you plan to do?

I don't know. But when I'm making a film, my mind works at top speed. Often new ideas come to my mind and out of these a new film might be born.

Do you ever change a film while you're shooting it?

I didn't use to. But now it varies. The Touch changed character while we made it. Persona was a film that evolved as we worked with it.

Your manuscripts look different today, don't they?

Yes, they are much less complete. When I wrote something like The Seventh Seal, there was a frustrated dramatist in me. I wrote stage plays for the screen in those days, because the theatre seemed closed to me. But nowadays I don't work that way anymore.

The verbal aspect of your films has also changed.

Yes! God, those old films with their stilted literary language!

It seems to me that when you begin to move away from a literary language, you begin to use more close-ups.

I don't think so. I think that's critical rationalization. I've always believed in the close-up. In the close-up lies the great suggestive power of the film medium.

Did you become more aware of the close-up after the breakthrough of television in Sweden in the early sixties?

No, not at all. I've always used the close-up. You can look at any of my old films and you'll see that it's true. But of course it's easier today. It was darn tricky in the old days to make close-ups. But because the camera lenses are more sensitive today and the raw film is faster and the lighting technique simpler and the personnel handling the camera more capable, we can use more close-ups. Then, too, you must remember that in the old days the producer cried like a pig when we used close-ups. No, for god's sake, he used to say, we don't want a meat market on the screen!

You don't think the close-up can be overused? I am often irritated by the habit of television cameras to select a small detail of the face, the mouth for instance.

Yes, but then you're not talking about close-ups anymore. You' talking about detailed shots. And those can often be very suspect. But with a close-up I mean a shot of the face that includes the mouth and the eyes. A close-up is created by the expression around a person's mouth and by the angle of his eyes and the skin around the eyes.

Do words seem important to you at all today?

Words are used to conceal reality, aren't they? I'm not very good at words. When I try to say something in words, I always seem to lose half of what I want to communicate.

So that's why you use music instead to convey rapport between people?

Yes. Music is a much more reliable means of communication.

But you still use words in your latest films?

Yes. The Silence and Persona were experiments. Attempts to see how far I could go without words. But now image and dialogue–as well as other sound–seem more like equal units; in the tension between image and word a new dimension is created.

You said that you feel you lose half of what you want to say when you use words. But you talk with a great deal of ease.

Yes, but you know, I've had to train myself to become articulate with words. In fact, my whole intellectual capacity is a matter of training, of self-discipline. You see, I've always had a hard time learning to reason logically. Anything that doesn't have an emotional anchoring is practically incomprehensible to me. In school, for instance, I was totally, completely devoid of any talent for math. Even today I can hardly add two and two. To subtract is even more difficult for me, not to speak of division or the multiplication table. In school, geography was also a difficult subject.

Was it too abstract?

Yes. All those maps. But history was a great deal of fun. And religion. All those stories in the Old Testament. Latin was fun too.

That seems strange to me.

No, that's not so strange. Because to study Latin was a combination of detective work and a kind of intuition. It was terribly exciting to figure out those old texts.

So you didn't study Latin the mechanical way Minus does in Through a Glass Darkly?

Bergman's answer is his famous big, hearty laugh.