Bergman: I am always in a very strange mood when people come to do interviews with me, complicated interviews, because I always have the feeling that I am responsible for some cousin or far-away brother, somebody whom I don't know very well, but am answerable to. Well, when we discuss this person, this Ingmar Bergman, we have to discuss him carefully and I will try to be as open as possible, but I never have the feeling that we are talking about me.

Simon: It must be a great responsibility, I was thinking, just to be you; because film is probably the most important art today and I think you're the most important film-maker in the world. To be the most important man in the most important art is a terrible responsibility. Does it bother you?

Bergman: No. I never think along those lines. My thinking does not work that way, because when I start writing a new picture, or start shooting or cutting it, or when I release it to the audience, it's always the first time, and always the last time. It's an isolated event, and I never think back or forward; it's just that. Of course, I have amassed a lot of experience over twenty-five or twenty-six years and thirty pictures and, of course, I have a lot of hopes and desires about what I want to do with what is still far away; but my relation to my work, my film work and my theatre work, is completely un-neurotic. I'm just a professional; I'm just a man who makes a table or something that is to be used, and the only thing that interests me is that it be used. Whether it is good or bad, a masterpiece or a mess, has nothing to do with the making, with my creative mind. So, my reply is: I feel responsible only for the craftsmanship being good, for the thing having the moral qualities of my mind, and, if possible, for my not telling any lies. Those are my only demands. When I make my pictures, I never place myself in relation to the New Wave or to my other pictures, or to Fellini, or to the cultural situation in the world today, or to television, or anything else. I just make my picture. Because if I started to think this way and that, there would be no picture. So, I have all my difficulties, and get all my joy, just handling the material.

Simon: Well, then, is it difficult to talk about your old films, is it something you dislike doing?

Bergman: No, it's the past; it's very far away. If it's necessary, we can talk about it; if it's not necessary, better yet.

Simon: You said a minute ago that you were entering the phase when you were beginning to collect your materials. How long does that phase usually last, and is that a difficult period?

Bergman: No, the collecting is very nice; the dreaming, the playing with the material, surrounding oneself with a lot of notebooks in which to jot down things. That is a marvellous time, a nice creative time.

Simon: How long do you spend on that?

Bergman: Sometimes a few months, sometimes years. But when I have to sit down to write, to start from the beginning and write the script, that is the hateful period—when I have to make up my mind about what I am going to do and actually write it. I don't like to sit still. I don't feel comfortable when I write, so I have to saddle myself with a lot of discipline day after day.

Simon: How many hours a day?

Bergman: Four or five. I start at ten o'clock or thereabouts, and I'm free at three. That's just sitting and writing; it takes me about two and a half months; yet I have to do it.

Simon: But you don't go back to it in the evening, do you?

Bergman: No, never. At three o'clock I have my tea and then I'm free. But of course, when I've been going on for a few weeks, I can't let go of it; it comes back at night or in the early morning. It is a bad, painful time, and I don't like it, but I have to do it. Because I can't just write down ten or twenty pages and go out with a crew and improvise. I am no improviser: I must always prepare everything.

Simon: I don't think that improvisation is such a good thing, really.

Bergman: It just isn't my way of film-making; my way is selective: a mirroring, reflecting. I put a mirror down; then I select, I take out, I put together.

Simon: Do you enjoy the shooting period?

Bergman: Very much indeed. Sometimes it is quite boring and frustrating, to be sure. But when we shoot, we are together; the actors, the crew, and I—we give and take; we are a very small group and we have all worked together from film to film; we know one another, and know what to do and how to do it. Sitting down with the cutting tape and editing is also very nice.

Simon: How long on the average does the shooting period last?

Bergman: About fifty shooting days, sometimes fifty-five, but no more than that. I made A Passion in exactly forty-five days, but Shame took about fifty-five.

Simon: And the editing?

Bergman: A very long time. I like the editing very much; I sit down and it takes me a lot of time, as much as three or four months.

Simon: And you work together with your editor?

Bergman: Yes. She is a nice girl, with much patience, who is exactly as pedantic as I am, and she knows everything. I sit down with her and we go at it together. I hate to sit alone, because I am a complete idiot with machines. I am very fascinated by them, but I don't like them.

Simon: What about cameras? Do you know very much about photography?

Bergman: Yes, I do. And I have learned everything about the laboratory, about mixing, and sound, and lenses, and everything. Because if I didn't, people would have to tell me things, and I'd be in the hands of those experts. And I don't trust experts. I just trust Sven Nykvist. He is a very fine technician, an aficionado.

Simon: Do you tell him exactly what you want, or can he guess it?

Bergman: I don't know how we work because we don't talk very much. We are very fascinated by lighting. We are always studying light. We are always aware of light.

Simon: Do you mean natural light?

Bergman: Yes. The light of reality. And the translation of natural light into artificial light and what we can do with it, that is our science.

Simon: Do you feel then that there is quite a difference between working with Hilding Bladh or Gunnar Fischer, your former cinematographers, and working with Sven Nykvist?

Bergman: Yes, of course. They were marvellous people, real professionals. But Sven and I have a special relation; I can't explain it. Sometimes we are very, very unhappy together. It's just like an old marriage. We don't talk very much. We never meet privately. But at the job, I think, we have a marvellous rapport.

Simon: Something seemed to happen with the photography in your films. There was a sudden change that came about in Smiles of a Summer Night. Perhaps it was a different film stock that you started using.

Bergman: No, no.

Simon: But there was a new sharpness, a definition, a chiaroscuro. The blacks were very black and the whites very white. I remember, particularly in the dinner scene, an intensity I had never seen in your films before, and wondered what had happened.

Bergman: Yes. I think it has to do with faces. Because I am always interested in faces. I just want you to sit down and look at the human face. But if there is too much going on in the background, if the face moves too much, if you can't see the eyes, if the lighting is too artistic, the face is lost.

Simon: I sometimes have the feeling with your films that one of them comes up with one solution to a problem, and the next one with a different solution to the same problem. That's not deliberate, I suppose; it just happens that way?

Bergman: It just happens. There is no orderly progression, no logic, and there are no rigid guidelines. My pictures always come out of tensions, specific situations, changing conditions. It's always like that. And why one picture appeals and another doesn't, I don't know. People who interview me always try to find a pattern. Of course, it's their profession. It isn't mine. My creative life is movement. It's like water. I don't want to be logical or find motives. That is completely uninteresting to me.

Simon: This is perhaps an unfair question; but does a film begin with some kind of a specific idea: what is it like to go mad, or what is it like to stay together with someone you don't love any more? Is there some kind of simple nucleus around which you build up a film?

Bergman: No. It always starts very secretly; 1 don't know exactly what is going on. It starts with a sort of tension or a specific scene, some lines, a picture or something, a piece of music. It just starts as a very, very small scene. And from this little scene comes a trembling. I look at it and try to pull it out. And sometimes it remains just this little thing. But sometimes it's more; I can't stop and suddenly I have a lot of material. So I never know exactly.

Simon: When you say "a piece of music," for example, are you listening to a piece of music and it suggests an idea to you?

Bergman: Yes, very often.

Simon: It becomes a shape somehow?

Bergman: Yes.

Simon: You are very fond of Bach and Mozart?

Bergman: I'm very fond of music. I can't say I have a favourite composer or period.

Simon: Whom are you interested in now?

Bergman: I think Monteverdi. His is very strange, very modern.

Simon: Have you ever liked twentieth-century composers?

Bergman: Yes. I'm very fond of music. I like all sorts. I like pop and the Beatles and those protest singers.

Simon: Do you care for painting?

Bergman: No, not very much.

Simon: Does this mean that you're not even very interested in it, or just that it doesn't affect your work? You don't like to go to museums, for example?

Bergman: No. Of course, when I come to Amsterdam, I feel it a duty to go to the Rijksmuseum; or when I come to Paris, I go to see the Impressionists. And here we have the Gauguin exhibition and tomorrow I want, if possible, to see it; but it is not necessary.

Simon: But music is necessary?

Bergman: Yes, music is absolutely necessary. It is the same thing with poetry. Poetry is not necessary, but books are.

Simon: What kinds of books?

Bergman: All of them. Don't you think that when you are young, you read a lot of books? I have a good example: I like Strindberg very much and he has written a lot of plays but also a lot of prose: novels and short stories, and when I was young I read them all—I had the feeling I had read them. This summer, because of directing A Dream Play, I started to read a Strindberg novel and suddenly I realized, yes, I read it when I was twenty-two, but I had not understood it, so I started to reread everything that Strindberg has written, except his plays. It was a fascinating experience. I like enormous books, enormous novels, the Russians.

Simon: Has Strindberg the dramatist been a great influence on you?

Bergman: Yes. I have been reading him since I was twelve or thirteen, and he has followed me around all my life.

Simon: How about Proust?

Bergman: Yes, I'm just going on with Swann in A la Recherche du temps perdu.

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