"ON LIFE AND WORK" "He became world famous in 1956, A CONVERSATION with Smiles of a Summer Night" "and received all kinds of awards and honors." "Three Oscars." "The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly," "Fanny and Alexander." "Titles, festival awards." "They don't affect him." "It doesn't concern me." "It's obvious that I consider myself extremely honored to be an honorary doctor here and professor there and get the Legion of Honor." "I chartered a plane from Munich to Paris, arrived bang on time to that ceremony, which in itself was extremely solemn and splendid, and afterwards, you see, the plane had to land in Munich before 1 0:00 in the evening" "because that's when the airport closed." "So, there was the plane waiting at Le Bourget, and when that ceremony was over," "I took Ingrid by the hand and we got a lift" "in one of the president's cars with flags on it and two motorcycles in front and behind." "So they drove between 50 and 60 miles an hour, those policemen with " blenders" and sirens going." "You know, straight through, and all the cars yielded way as we came racing." "We drove like this down one-way streets." "We drove from Elysée Palace to Le Bourget in nine minutes flat in the worst evening traffic, and I know that then I appreciated the indescribably good fortune of being famous." "" Nobody today knows the names of those who built Chartres Cathedral."" "I think there's great joy in working anonymously as an artist." "But that's impossible." "No, I mean in the structure, in the social structure we live in, and where the artists fit in, of course, and in the media society where we live, anonymity is unthinkable," "and for many it can be an inspiration and a stimulus not to be anonymous." "I think that" "I would have been happier if I'd been anonymous." "On the other side, your films, there's a personal signature in them which just isn't found in that cathedral in Chartres." "People recognize Bergman." "Yes, but that's just it." "I find myself in a situation where anonymity is unthinkable." "But it made all the difference, didn't it, when you gradually came into balance." "I mean economically and so on." "Maybe there was a certain advantage somewhere, sometimes, in being Ingmar Bergman, that is, as far as being a producer." "I think that's always been a certain advantage." "I've always had a certain advantage being Ingmar Bergman." "I think that now that things are as they are, and the situation is as it is, then it's good." "I've had pleasure in being this pseudonym Ingmar Bergman." "I often don't have any contact to speak of, or feel a little strange facing this figure, who is an extrovert." "Sometimes you speak of yourself in the third person." "More often than not, he's a strange figure for me, someone I'm not very closely acquainted with." "I have nothing against him, but he's nobody especially well known." "Like when I read books or look at things written about me," "there's this stranger." "But has it never happened that you are actually doing the things you look at, as if it was another person doing it?" " As if you're kind of divided?" " Yes, I understand." " Anger or" " No, no, that's not it." "In other words, my self, or the persona is thoroughly composed." "I am, to a remarkable degree, all of one piece." "Within this, within this composition, there are enormously strong oppositions and an enormous amount of chaos and enormously complicated situations." "In 1 9 1 3, Karin Åkerblom married Erik Bergman, later vicar in Hedvig Eleanora Parish in Stockholm and chaplain to the king." "Ingmar Bergman was born on the French national day," "July 1 4, 1 9 1 8." "He was a Sunday child." "His brother Dag, later a diplomat, was four years older, his sister Margereta four years younger." "Ingmar spent his childhood in Stockholm, in Dalarna, but also in Uppsala." "WHO AM I?" "That has always been a problem I have tried to tackle." "Who am I and where do I come from?" "And why have I become what I am?" "Do you understand this better now?" "No, less." "Or, more precisely, not worse." "But I know less about myself now than I did ten years ago." "That's true." "But you have, as you yourself say, taken over certain role behaviors from, for example, your authoritarian father." "You sometimes say that, anyway." "But " taking over" sounds so deliberate." "There's nothing deliberate about it." "It's just something that turned out that way." "I don't think I'm so very much like my father." "I think, on the other hand, especially now that I've read my mother's diaries," "I myself recognize much later that I'm very like my mother." "I am quite like my father in appearance," "but I'm really more like my mother." "In any case, I think my artistic gift-- if one can talk about something like that, it's such a ridiculous expression" "I did inherit that from my mother." "My brother, you see, was in many ways a person who was permanently damaged forever, because of the upbringing he had." "I had a similar upbringing in one way, almost exactly the same upbringing as my brother," "but I managed to come out of it better than he did, because he reacted to this upbringing by being aggressive and trying to defend himself." "I reacted to that upbringing with lies and dissimulation." "Escaped it?" "I escaped and created an identity for myself that could be acceptable to my parents, and tried to figure out how my parents would react." "And besides that, I was an out-and-out liar." "I lied freely and without restraint, and sometimes I was found out and harshly punished" "for these lies." "After a while, I just continued, completely without restraint." "So it was all crime and punishment." "So obviously I regarded myself as a real shit and a scoundrel." "But on the other hand, it was a good way of protecting myself." "It was the only way I could make it." "FANNYAND ALEXANDER Take your trousers down, Alexander." "Bend over." "Stand up, Alexander." " You have something to say to me?" " No." "You must beg me for forgiveness." "I won't." "Then I shall have to beat you again until you think better of it." "Can't you spare us both this unpleasant experience?" "I never beg for forgiveness." "You don't beg for forgiveness?" "No." "Lie face down, Alexander." "Don't hit anymore!" "Well, will you beg me for forgiveness now?" "Yes." "Do up your trousers and blow your nose." "Justine, give him a handkerchief." "What have you got to say now?" "Alexander begs the bishop for forgiveness." "Speak up, Alexander." "I want everyone to be able to hear your repentance." "Alexander begs the bishop for forgiveness." " For the lies and perjury." " For the lies and perjury." "You do understand that I punished you out of love?" "Yes." " Kiss my hand, Alexander." " May I go and lie down now?" "Yes, you may." "But to give you the opportunity to think over the day's events in peace and quiet, you shall sleep in the attic." "Justine will bring a mattress and blanket, and at 6:00 tomorrow morning, Henriette will unlock the door and you'll be free." " Is that all right, Alexander?" " Yes, Your Grace!" "My parents never did anything out of meanness, or out of cruelty, or out of desire to punish," "as I imagined when I was subjected to it at that time." "They did it out of horror at the way their children, especially their boys, behaved themselves." "But you must have had a fantastic feeling of freedom when you left home." "Yes, but by then I was already badly injured and it lasted a very long time, and I noticed also" "that damage influenced the way I exercised my profession." "So for an endless period of my life," "I devoted myself to cleaning up my upbringing, trying to stick to what was good." "You see, it wasn't" " I may have often given the impression" "Our home was no hell." "We also had fun." "We had it good." "We had it" "There was a lot of fantasy and a lot of joy and music and lots of people." "We were able to have our friends there and there was theater." "So I mean, when father was in one of his good moods and not so" "He was in fact very manic-depressive and made awful demands on himself." "When father was happy, there was nobody who could be happier." "It radiated around him." "And my mother could be terribly affectionate, and tender too," "sympathetic and clear-sighted, so I think they did as well as they could." "My parents were people of good will, but the upbringing we had, especially my brother and I," "really was hell, there's no doubt about it." "We shared that with many of that generation, of course." "Only they didn't become artists." "They just suffered." "Yes, and afterwards they couldn't wait to tyrannize others." "But there were certain elements in your upbringing or lack of upbringing that came to be of some use to you after all." "There was music, playacting." "There was theater." "And the church is also a theater." "Yes, but I think I can put it this way:" "I was never hindered." "My interests, partly music, were automatically in the home." "And I also had some music lessons, which, because of idleness, I didn't make proper use of." "But that we played theater, that I had my puppet theater, that was encouraged." "That was something" "I could take joy in and where I had total freedom." "And what's more, I enjoyed the theater." "I was able to go to the theater-- once a week, I mean." "And I went to the theater as much as I could." "DIALOGUE WITH CHILDHOOD" "When I want to put myself to sleep in the evening," "I can go through my maternal grandmother's apartment, room by room and remember in the smallest detail, where different things were, how they looked, what color they were." "I also remember the light, the winter or summer light, coming through the windows, the pictures on the walls." "The objects, you know" "It was a flat that had been furnished before the turn of the century, and there really was an enormous amount of objects." "For that was the bourgeois style then-- not a single millimeter could remain uncovered." "There should be things everywhere, and so it was in that apartment." "And I can remember that in detail." "This is really strange because my mother's mother died when I was 1 2 and I hadn't been in there since I was maybe 1 0 or 1 1 ." "And yet I can remember it in detail." "But there were things in that apartment that still have a magic significance and importance." "I use a lot of that in Fanny and Alexander." "If one can draw any conclusions from it,Jörn, it may well be that, in a way," "the whole of my creativity is in reality terribly childish." "It's rooted in my childhood." "I can, in less than a second, go right back into my childhood." "I think that all I've done on the whole, anything of any value, has its roots in my childhood." "Or, in dialectic terms, it's a dialogue with my childhood." "I've never distanced myself from my childhood, but I have indeed carried on a dialogue with it." "That's self-evident." "In 1944, the 25-year-old Bergman, who had already made a name for himself in Stockholm, was appointed director of the Helsingborg Municipal Theater, embarking on a career that continued in Göteborg, Malmö, and gradually led to his being appointed director" "of Sweden's Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in January 1963." "At the same time, he wrote and directed films." "WORK AND CHAOS It was a hectic life." "Supposing we go back in time to your tumultuous time, as you call it, your background." "For you lived a more or less bohemian life, despite all the planning, up until a certain point in time." " And you did various things." "Just one thing." "My exercise of my profession has never been bohemian." "My life around this profession was, you might say" "You use the word " tumultuous," and it is indeed absolutely right." "But since I was practically continuously busy," "I went from film to film, from film to play, from play to play, uninterruptedly, year in, year out." "There really wasn't so very much time left over for tumult." "But now and again it was a little tumultuous, yes." "I wondered how everything fitted in." "You had a great deal to do." "You made films and ran theaters and you had homes or a life that was not on the same level." "How did it all fit together, living a pedantic life, if that was a life, and then be a terrible pedant when it came to the job?" "I lived extremely simply." "I had an apartment and some furniture." "I got married very often and there was supposed to be some kind of a home." "But I wasn't particularly interested in settling down." "I don't remember much about my private life." "If I'm to be perfectly honest, if I want to date something," "I do it with reference to films or plays." "" Yes, yes, that was the summer I made Smiles of a Summer Night,' '" "Then I know it was 1955." "I mean, that's roughly it." "Or " That was when I became director of the Dramatic Theater." "That was 1963, about then."" "It has been like that." "I can't remember when my children were born." "I don't know how old they are." "Well, I know roughly how old they are, but I don't know what year they were born." "Which is, in fact, disquieting." "But if someone says that a child was born between two films, then you know." "Or between two plays." "Yes, roughly." "I was just thinking about this concept of home." "There was in fact one home, your childhood home, or maybe your childhood homes, also Uppsala and Dalarna, but does home mean anything later, during this period?" "No." "Together with my fourth wife, who's a pianist," "I made a heroic effort to create a home." " Djursholm." " Yes, precisely." "With a real house, properly furnished," "and even with certain social rituals." "But it was all over very soon." "But that was a time when you played the bourgeois." "Yes, that was still an ambition of mine, to break with my earlier somewhat" "summary private existence." "I didn't have a private existence,Jörn." "I'm thinking about that." "I was writing too, and when I was supposed to write," "I often didn't know where to do it." "I was at a loss." "So all the time I had stomach and intestinal ulcers, and eventually I was taken into Sophiahemmet, and they repaired me and so I sat there and wrote in the hospital." "You didn't write your manuscript in what was called home." "No, never." "I lived in some pension in Dalarna." "I went up there and lived and wrote." "It wasn't until I got Fårö." "That's exactly 30 years ago." "So on the Midsummer holiday of 1 967, I moved in on Fårö." "Since then I've never written anything in any other place than on Fårö." "SWEDISH SOCI ETY" "There was one aspect of Social Democracy that I approved of enormously, and that was that people of completely different opinions who really detested one another, to put it crudely, capitalists and socialists, could sit down together at a table" "and hammer out a really rough compromise that they then followed." "I saw that as something deeply satisfying." "The tediousness, honesty, decency of these compromises." "There has been a lot of blood under the bridge since then." "Yes, but what kind of blood is it that has run since then?" "Since then I have, I mean" "Acts of political treachery have followed one another in close succession." "The political nomenclature came from the academic world and lost that contact with Sweden the founding politicians used to have." "You've written a book about this yourself, and you know precisely what I'm talking about." "Yes, I know." "I believe I know." "I was still a loyal Social Democrat until I discovered that they were trying to take my life away in connection with that tax business, when they were trying to kill me." "Do you see that as a Social Democratic plot, or was it the bureaucracy?" "No, I see that as an excrescence on the new Social Democracy's reckless pretensions to power." "They allowed themselves practically anything, and they were allowed to do anything." "On January 30, 1976," "Ingmar Bergman was taken for police interrogation in the middle of a theater rehearsal, for alleged tax offenses." "He was later acquitted on all charges." "PERSECUTION AND ILLNESS" "Then I was hit by a reality that I couldn't maneuver in and couldn't manipulate." "So life became-- For me, life became" "This happened a few times in my life." "Life became unbearable." "I couldn't live any longer." "What do the doctors say to you in such a situation?" " What did you say?" " What do the doctors say?" "Doctors!" "They say," "" Let him have eight 1 0mg Valium a day, and if he needs more, give him two more, and he can have two Mogadon at night."" "I once asked one of these " shrinks," who was a good friend of mine." "I asked, "Have you ever cured anybody?"" "So he looked" " He was an old man, a clever man." "Then he looked sadly at me and said," "" Well, Ingmar, cure is a big word."" "And he was very famous for it." "He was a guru for many." "He's dead now." "A guru for many." "The only problem with him was that he kept his patients for 1 8 or 20 years." "Could you ever have thought in your wildest imagination that you would undergo some kind of psychoanalysis in any other way than through writing?" "No, I don't think so." "The only time when" "That was in connection with that tax business, when I was in the nuthouse for three weeks." "Because I wanted nothing else and nothing more than to jump off the balcony." "But I thought too that that was a poor solution, so I agreed to be locked in, and also it was because I was subjected to incredibly heavy medication." "And though it certainly took away the torment itself and the suffering, that medication" "changed my identity little by little." "I didn't recognize Bergman anymore." "I didn't recognize myself." "I didn't know" "I sat there so meekly and read books, and slept a lot and walked in the corridors, and chatted with the other nutcases, and we had a pretty good time together and sat and watched an old broken TV in the evenings." "IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN Please, begin." "Thank you." "You weren't afraid you would permanently sink into a state of passivity or despair?" "It wasn't even thinking,Jörn." "It was just a self-preservation instinct." "And then if we take this further, you know it was quite simply my aggressiveness that saved me." "Because when the tax authorities didn't find anything through the ways they started, they began to push with new methods and with blackmail and anything they could think of." "I was so damned mad that I decided I would leave Sweden, and then I recovered." "So in some way, my rage helped me." "Rage." "I was completely" "I was completely wild with fury and I got well through it." "But you didn't have any other period of sinking into illness?" "I have had something like it, but not in that way." "Certainly, my wife's death." "That was a blow against my will to live and my whole existence, my reality-- a total catastrophe" "but I have never" "My sorrow has never been associated with any rage or bitterness or cynicism or anything like that." "I hid myself in my sorrow like in a room, and felt myself maimed, but I get through." "I mean, I'm now in my 80th year." "I get by from day to day." "I'm a bit indifferent." "There are a number of things that are unpleasant, and a number of things that are pleasant." "Can you remember what you imagined when this exile began?" "Did you imagine that the rest of your working life in film and theater would be played out abroad?" "I couldn't stay in a country where they wanted to finish me off-- where they wanted to kill me." "Did you think you'd have to spend the rest" "Somewhere." "We did, in fact, leave Sweden in April," "Ingrid and I." " We met in Paris." "At the George V." "But then I went to Los Angeles and negotiated with Dino de Laurentiis to make three films with him." "First that" "The Merry Widow, among others." "I believe." "What?" "The Merry Widow." "That was the idea." "There were also other films." "We were going to make three films." "So then we went to Copenhagen." "Then I was so terribly 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 went up in the evening, up to Fårö, and sat on the steps and looked at the lilac hedge that was in full bloom." "We sat on the steps in the twilight in the warm night, the mild, light, summer night." "Then the next day we went down again and on to Munich." "I was abroad for eight years and didn't work in Sweden again for a long time." "But it wasn't just Swedish as a language, but also the lilac hedge, I mean Sweden." "Yes." "It was a fantastic feeling to come home and work in Swedish again." "It was an incredible feeling to be able to use the Swedish language again." "A great sensual pleasure." "It was unforgettable." "Ingmar Bergman has written the original manuscripts for all of his almost 50 films for the cinema and TV, and for seven films directed by others." "In addition, he has directed theater and opera for 60 years, altogether over 120 stage productions, his own plays and documentary films." "The film history has no counterpart." "WRITING" "In films you have here and there, fairly often, in fact, been considerably more experimental than in the theater." "The films have required their form, and the theater productions have required their form." "I have never decided that now I'll experiment, if you understand what I mean." "There has never been" "any decision on my part except that everything should take the form" "I think it should have." "I'm completely uninterested in whether I'm experimenting or not." "But is it in some way intuitive?" "Who the hell can be so crazy as to write a manuscript such as Cries and Whispers?" "That's how it is." "It was necessary to write it in that way." "Or Persona, or the last I have written now, Faithless." "They have taken their form simply because it was necessary to write it in that way, do it in that way." "You didn't think about the dramatics?" "No, I never thought about it at all, at any time." "That wasn't what I meant." "But if we go further back in time." "Sawdust and Tinsel or Prison." "Didn't you think then either?" "No, I didn't." "Yes, oh" "Not Sawdust and Tinsel, but Prison." "Because that was the first time" "I got to do one of my own scripts." "I was absolutely mad with joy and I wanted to have in it everything I'd been thinking about." "It did become" "Without my really trying, it did turn out strange." "PRISON" "But really you don't want to claim that you're an intuitive storyteller." "That is, someone who doesn't" "But wasn't it you who said that when you start to write, you don't know what it's going to be?" "That's right enough." "True." "Sure." "And that is really intuition." "And it's the same way with me." "When I start to write," "I have a sort of basic scene, a starting scene." "I usually say that in Cries and Whispers," "I had a scene with four white-clad women in a red room in my mind for a very long time." "And that was all, generally speaking." "Yes, that's all." "And so then I began to wonder why they were there and what they were saying to each other, and so on." "It was mysterious." "It came back again and again, and I had no peace because of this scene." " A kind of vision." " Yes, you know how it is." "Then you begin to pull on a long thread that comes up from somewhere, and the thread can break suddenly." "And so nothing more comes of that, but then all of a sudden, you have a whole ball of thread." "Has the thread ever been completely broken for you?" "Yes, many times." "But not the threads that you have been writing on for a few weeks or in manuscript form or" "No, not once I've begun to write." "No, because by the time I begin to write," "I've finished my workbooks." "There I've written endlessly, masses of stuff,." "but once I've begun to write the script, I know what I'm doing." "What do the workbooks deal with?" "With everything." "The script grows out of the workbooks." "Yes, precisely." "That is to say, untrimmed, complete." "Working on the workbooks is fun." "Have you always been doing that?" "Yes, always." "I didn't use to have so much time." "But when I've had time to myself." "Many times, when I was younger and had to earn money for all my wives and children, it happened, so to speak, that I had to start with the script crack, bang, straight-off." "But now I can lie on the sofa and play with my thoughts and have fun with them, look at pictures," "do research and so forth, which is extremely pleasant." "The workbooks are unreadable for anyone but me." "But afterwards, out of this large number of workbooks, the writing itself begins." "And it goes fast." "It goes fairly fast, but it's damned boring." "It goes fast because it's so boring." "It's so hellishly boring." "It's precisely the same thing as when you go to a theater performance and have to sit and draw the scenery and how they walk and stand and where they stand when they say that and then" "Hellishly tedious." "When I write a script," "I write a certain number of pages per day." "Did you ever think of writing any other way than by hand?" " No, never." " Why?" "No, I can't write on a machine." "I've tried." "Is it physical?" "Yes, it's physical." "Deeply unsatisfying." "I have a certain type of writing pad that I write on." "They had them when I was a script hack in Svensk Filmindustri, employed as a scriptwriter, 1942." "We got a kind of yellow-lined pad that was about this big." "They always wrote by hand with a fountain pen with a broad nib." "So I wrote like that." "Since then, I've always written on this yellow paper and these pads." "Where do you get hold of them?" "Twenty years ago or so, it turned out that they weren't making these pads anymore, so I got them to make" "800 such pads for me." "And I've still got a few left." "I reckon they should last until the end of my life." "The hell they will." "You see, now I write with a ballpoint pen, but not just any old ballpoint pen." "It has to be a very special pen with a very large ball." "It's the writing itself, despite the fact that my script is barely legible, the writing itself gives me pleasure." "I like writing by hand." "It gives me great satisfaction." "Since I always write on the same kind of pad," "I know how much I've written." "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 no matter where the hell I am, I lay down my work." "I close down for the day." "Because it's so tedious." "But the workbook is fun." "That is the creative process itself." "Writing the script is the process of putting it in order." "Would you yourself consider that you have some sort of ritualistic superstition about these blocks and pens and the place where you work and these three hours, or is it just a work routine?" "No, it's a ritual." "They are strict rituals." "Don't speak on the telephone with anyone, get up early and eat breakfast, go for a walk, don't read the newspaper, don't speak on the telephone." "Sit down at the desk." "The desk must be tidy." "There can't be any things lying around all over the desk." "I'm maniacally pedantic when it comes to how my desk should look if I'm to be able to sit there and work." "When I've been writing for 45 minutes, I take a rest." "By then my back aches, so I get up and walk around my 54-meter-long house, or go and look at the sea or something for a quarter of an hour." "Then I sit down and write for another 45 minutes." "Script writing is an obligatory effort." "Is there any kind of fight?" "A fight against" "Against disorder." "Carelessness." "Chaos." "Lack of discipline." "But you've never had a lack of that." "No." "I've never had any lack of discipline." "But if I had, things would have gone right to hell." "I can tell you that." "Therefore, I have had" "a constant fight all the time with my lack of discipline." "You can't be undisciplined in my work." "It's impossible." "That's why I became so terribly, and for many so tryingly, pedantic." "THE DEMONS" "There's a peculiar contrast between two things, and that is that you describe both in film and in autobiography and everything the demons, which you spell in your own way, but in all the pictures of you" "showing you directing in the theater or film studio, you appear to be in a good mood." "I think it's part of a director's duties to be in a good mood while working." "To create a kind of comfort around the performance of the job." "And this should also be found in his workroom." " A sensation of comfort?" " Yes, and security." "And that's extremely important." "When I was young, I didn't understand any of that." "I dragged in the devils of my private life and my hangovers and my women problems and my shortcomings and my stupidities." "I dragged them with me into the studio or onto the stage, and carried on like a devil, and by doing this," "I created terribly unpleasant and disagreeable situations." "But there's also something called" "" pedagogic eruption,"" "and once in a while you may need to make use of this." "It means very premeditated attacks of rage." "They are well-considered beforehand." "And it is precision bombing, for that's what's needed." "It shouldn't get too terribly cozy in a studio or on a stage," "but somehow we feel." "And the people you work with are so terribly ambitious, for the most part, and so terribly sensitive, so they feel that, despite the fact we are playing a game, despite the fact that it looks like fun," "we're joking and telling funny stories and relaxing and so on, they still feel that they are in a situation of life and death." "And when I say life and death, I mean just that." "Is it also a matter of maintaining a certain tempo?" "Yes, to a very large extent." "For example, when you start in the studio, the film studio at 9:00 in the morning, then you should start at 9:00." "The first scene should be shot at 10:00." "You should always start punctually, somehow." "A day shouldn't start with endless discussion." "Generally speaking, chatter is an abomination, because there are two or three or four maybe who are involved while a great crowd of people stand around and fidget and think that it's terribly boring." "I think that all such discussion of different kinds-- the same applies to the theater, even more in the theater-- should take place away from rehearsals and away from studios." "But how did you manage to create a boundary between what you yourself call the demons and a film studio or a theater?" "The demons" "They should in some way be harnessed to the wagon." "They should be there." "I suffer, for example, from-- what shall we call it?" " the suspiciousness demon." "I'm a terribly suspicious person." "And a hypochondriac maybe too?" "Let's not carry on and reckon up all the demons, for God's sake." "But I mean they should be in attendance." "They should stand at attention and on parade so that I can convey to the actors" "how suspicion and how hypochondria works in gestures or in tones of voice or in movement." "It's self-evident that the demons have to be called in." "It would be terribly risky not to have them with you, but they have to be kept very much under control." "You know that as long as I'm in the studio or the theater, it's a universe controlled by me." "Even the demons are under control then." "I mean, the passions are under control." "Everything's under control." "It's my control." "But the moment the lights go out and the camera stops" "and I go out through the studio door, or even earlier, or when the rehearsal is over, or the production is over for the day, then I no longer have any control over the demons." "Then it's no longer my universe, so to speak, the often unpredictable universe" "that I am trying and have always tried to control, but that has always confounded my efforts." "That's what matters then." "LIVING WITH GRIEF" "Ingmar married Ingrid von Rosen in November 1971." "INGMAR'S 60TH BIRTHDAY, 1978 They lived together for 24 years until her death in 1995." "I can't stop thinking about the fact that not only your films but you yourself have been surrounded to an unusual extent by sickness and death." "Yes, now the two-- Hmm, since Ingrid passed away." "Then I thought and was convinced, when Ingrid got sick, that now my creative work was totally finished." "But as long as Ingrid lived, she was terribly anxious that I should continue with my work, so I did two plays" "During her time of illness." "Yes, and afterwards, I continued." "After Ingrid's death," "I couldn't write at all." "The writing was completely paralyzed." "I could sit for hours at my desk, and nothing got written." "But, you see, it's another thing to sit alone and write." "It's two completely different things." "If ten actors are standing before me and saying," "" Do something with me."" "A stage production." "Then they set me in motion." "They demand that I do something." "I must say that it's been a big comfort in the terrible loss I suffered to go to the theater and meet the actors and force myself into some kind of activity." "In the meantime, the writing was completely dead." "Has the desire to write come back now?" "It was almost immediate." "I thought that now something has to be done." "I was on Fårö already at the beginning of April this year and sat down at the desk." "And simply in order to keep my hand moving, I decided to" "My first workbook, I summoned up five pages." "I decided" "I always write by hand." "I decided that I should write five pages a day on anything at all." "It started like that." "And afterwards, I was gradually able to trick myself back into the story itself, but that took a hell of a long time." "So I did five, eight, ten pages a day on all sorts of things." "It was a way of practicing the language." "It was a road-blasting job,Jörn." "Yes, because everything was rusty and stiff." "I was really in bad shape." "But living with sorrow." "I'm thinking about when your father died, your mother died and your brother died." "That wasn't the same thing." "No, it wasn't by any means." "Not by any means." "It's like being crippled." "We lived together for 24 years." "We lived close to one another" "in a very good relationship, a good comradeship." "I can't call that anything other than being crippled." "I can say that to lose a part of yourself to lose a part of your body, it hurts constantly." "But I've learned a technique" "that helps me live with it reasonably well." "What does this technique consist of?" "Working?" "That's one of the ways, living a very strictly ordered life." "So that each hour has its task, and I follow a very carefully drawn-up routine." "But you've been doing that for a long time." "But now more than previously, so I won't go to pieces." "Is this the reason why you really don't want to meet others?" "You've become a bit more of a hermit." "Yes, to a very large extent." "Do you want to see new people?" "No, I find that difficult." "I like talking on the telephone." "I think the telephone is a wonderful instrument." "You can have a great joy in being good friends on the telephone." "But I live now for the most part alone, quite alone." "And I like that very much." "There's also the fact that it's becoming bearable." "This thing about predictability, is that what it does?" "The fact you know what you'll be doing at what time of day and all that?" "Precisely." "Shakespeare says somewhere about sleep that it's" "" chief nourisher in life's feast, the welcome death of each day's life."" "I take a sleeping pill in the evening, and then I can sleep six hours." "I think it's a Bergman quotation that I remember, whether from a script or whatever:" "" What's scary about death is that you don't know what happens afterwards."" "In other words, it's unpredictable." "That's quite right." "When I was young, I lived in great fear of death." "I had a terrible fear of death." "It was really through The Seventh Seal, that I somehow came to terms with that fear of death, for I wrote about it there," "about the Black Death." "I was operated on once, a trivial operation, and I got too much anaesthetic, so that they nearly didn't get the life back in me again." "A minor operation, and I was out for eight hours." "They had a terrible difficulty in getting me back to life." "The interesting thing was that for me those eight hours were no hours at all, not a minute, not a second." "I was completely gone." "I was completely switched off." "So that was eight hours that were completely gone from my life." "And that felt extraordinarily comforting when I thought that such is death." "First, you're something, and then you're no longer anything." "You're nonexistent." "You just aren't anymore." "You're like a candle that's blown out." "That gave me an enormous feeling of security." "What complicates this feeling of security and total extinction is Ingrid's death." "I have incredible difficulty in thinking, in imagining, that I won't meet her again." "That's an unbearable thought." "Therefore, two modes of thought have come into violent conflict with one another." "I've tried to write about it, but I can't do it yet, and it may be a while." "What's more, I often experience Ingrid's presence." "In the room?" "Yes." "Not as a ghost." "But I know that, in some way, she's quite close to me." "Whether it's a projection from inside myself or a reality, that really doesn't matter." "When you live very much alone, you start to talk to yourself." "I have conversations with Ingrid, and it seems to me that she answers me, and sometimes I think she comes with good advice and opinions about what I'm doing and not doing." "And that's comforting." "There's great relief in that." "So it's not hard to carry on an invisible dialogue, so to say." "No, on the contrary." "It's extremely comforting." "That's perhaps why" "I think that being in Stockholm is trying." "Because in Stockholm" "That's why I'm now planning to become an old Fårö man." "But the old Fårö man can't make theater." "No, but I really don't need to go on with that so much, you know." "Because nature on Fårö is so very..." "I feel a great closeness to nature there." "I have a great feeling of being at home there." "I never feel at home in Stockholm." "I never feel at home any other place than on Fårö." "On Fårö, there I can be, there I can live." "I also feel a greater closeness to Ingrid there." "Does this have something to do with the fact that you think of the beach, a seashore like Fårö, so that the sea is infinite-- it's a kind of eternity?" "It's a good feeling, this closeness to the sea." "This enormously barren nature, which doesn't have a lot of colors." "And it's so infinitely and beautifully proportioned." "The sea and the horizon." "The enormity of being surrounded by it." "That's very comforting." "You spoke a moment ago about The Seventh Seal." "You've made quite a few films that revolve around the problem of religion, above all Winter Light." "So one may ask:" ""You've been occupied with the externals of religion." "Is it the case that when the devil gets old, he becomes religious?"" "Since you have fought it." "I'm not what you'd call religious." " Not at all?" " No, not in the least." "Not in any way." "On the other hand," "I have a whole lot of ideas about other realities that surround me." "I also have the feeling sometimes that we're part of an infinitely large pattern" "that we never analyze, never understand, never take in." "You can feel that sometimes." "EPILOGUE:" "A COMFORTABLE CHAIR" "When you'd finished writing Laterna Magica," "I got a letter from you." "It says, " I'm now on my way out of everything, without bitterness and with a great feeling of satisfaction." "Now it's simply a matter of organizing the epilogue so that it's reasonably pleasant." "One absolutely must have something other than theater, between oneself and death."" "And then, in the last ten years, you have produced a large number of books, scripts," "TV films, plays." "So you certainly can't call that an epilogue." "Yes, it surprises me that already then I was beginning to talk about the epilogue, because now I do so very often and with great feeling." "I think that the reason" "I got so much done" "could be that I finished making films, and filming is" "both physically and mentally demanding." "And, suddenly" "Film work is so trying, and when that strain fell away," "I had a whole lot of time left-- a whole lot of strength left, and desire." "I just wonder if it got easier or harder with the years." "When you think of the fact that when you made Fanny and Alexander, you'd been making films for almost, what is it, about 40 years, yes, something like that, if you include Crisis." "It is a very long time." "So shouldn't it have gotten easier since you knew the trade?" "No, it got worse." "It got harder because" "Is it Antonioni who said that each camera adjustment is a moral issue?" "When you're young and you make films, and you know that very well yourself, you know that when you see the rushes, you take them and you're happy, just because the actors move and it's more or less all right." "But when you get older and have been at it for a long time, then you know that, in fact, for this particular scene, there's only one solution, and I sincerely hope I've hit on that solution." "What would you like to imagine people will say about Bergman in 20 years?" "Or 30 years?" "Or what would Bergman himself say?" "That's something I've just never thought about." "Because, as I said earlier," "I'm so 1 00% convinced that" "I produce goods for everyday use, both in theater and on film," "and whether they survive me or don't survive me," "or what people say-- that's all the same to me." "That you can be sure of." "I'm completely sincere now." "But I really don't care." "You should remember that you're already in the everyday language." "You can read in a novel by Naipaul." "You know, that Trinidadian writer." "Two people are talking in the African night, and the one says to the other that "this is a Bergman landscape."" "I mean, it's in the cultural" "Well, it's as I say, as I said earlier:" "All of that stuff is as if it concerned somebody else." "In some way it's got nothing to do with me." "I'm starting to rehearse a play." "I'm starting a production." "I start on Tuesday." "And the fear I have is preceded by a sleepless night and great fear," "and it's no good my trying to tell myself that I've already done it and that it was successful." "And I am in fact world-famous now and I'm written about, and people are terribly nice to me." "It doesn't help, because I go to that rehearsal" "and think of only one thing:" "Let this rehearsal go well." "Let it be meaningful and let it be alive." "I think that it's" "Both when I go in the studio, as with the TV films or films that I make," "TV plays or in the theater," "the only thing that means anything when I'm working" "is that the work should be meaningful for those who do it," "and then also be alive," "so that it will live its own life." "That is the only thing I'm afraid of, and God knows that I'm terribly afraid of it, and that is that suddenly the ability to make something living" "and moving-- that that will be taken away from me or that I will lose it." "That suddenly I'll no longer know how to do it." "Or that time runs out on me or that I'll stand there, and people will do what I say just out of politeness." "But above all, I think," "I surprise myself just a little when I think of this Tuesday morning at 5:00 and I know" "that the anguish will continue until I go in to the rehearsal, and after five minutes, it's gone." "But I know that before this the fear will be total," "and that's how it's always been." "That's how it's been." "Maybe you don't believe all this is true, but it really is so." "I mean, any filming day in my life, any rehearsal day in my life," "I've had-- naturally more or less, but always a fear-- this anxiety that" "I can't express it in any other way than this anxiety that what I do won't live." "That it will be stone-dead." "And it has happened many times that I have had stone-dead days." "That's the most terrible thing there is." "It's something I dream about, still." "You know, I don't have so many nightmares, but it's my recurring nightmare" "that I do things that are stone-dead-- that I can't put my life into what I do." "Now, ordinary people imagine they are part of a heritage, and that there is something that goes on after them-- their children or whatever." "But you say that all you've done is workmanship." "There's nothing that-- Is there nothing that continues?" "My relation to the theater, plays, films, or TV productions is a" "And this is no false modesty,Jörn." "It is so." "In the first place, I'm a craftsman and I make a good product." "I make a product that's to be used, and I'll be terribly upset if it suddenly turns out that nobody wants to use my product." "I think that the only really unfortunate thing is when something I have done is not used." "And I can be terribly proud, professionally proud, of having done a good job." "That's what is fundamental-- the primary thing for me." "It's like making a good article for everyday use-- a good table or a comfortable chair."