Simon: What about growing old? Do you have any feelings about growing old in general? Is that a terrible thing?

Bergman: No, no. It's nice. I've got everything; really. I have everything in life that a man can ask for and I am still curious and I am still looking forward to the film around the corner. The only thing that troubles me is that I must use eyeglasses.

Simon: Why does that disturb you?

Bergman: I always forget them and that makes for complications. But physically I have no difficulties. I feel well. No, growing old doesn't scare me at all.

Simon: Isn't it infuriating to think that scientists may discover processes by which they can freeze people and bring them back to life, and that we will have lived just a little too early for this?

Bergman: To me it would be no privilege; to me it would be terrible.

Simon: Why?

Bergman: If you live on an island, at the seaside, with farmers and fishermen, everything has its proportions. Here in the town nothing has proportions. If I am in a bad mood here at the theatre, at a rehearsal, everything grates on my bad mood. Brpphhh. Here in town everything is a little bit perverted. And your reactions seem extremely important to yourself and the contretemps of a spotlight not coming up on this place but on that is an absolute catastrophe. On the island, everything has its proportions; you are a very small part of this island and of the life there. If you scream, it has no effect, nobody hears; or perhaps a bird will fly up. You can make as much noise as you want, you can suffer, and it's only a part of the whole. And it gives to a hysterical mind such as mine—I was born hysterical; it's inherited from my parents—the proportions, the definite proportions of reality, it gives you peace. Because you know you cannot alter anything. That is good and healthy....

Simon: Let's put it another way. You were talking about your interest in the picture that's still waiting for you around the corner. Suppose you have to die when you are, let's say, seventy-five or eighty, and there's a picture waiting for you around the corner at eighty, which you can never get to. Isn't that a pity?

Bergman: No, it's all right.

Simon: You think the others are enough?

Bergman: Yes; some people think they are more than enough.

Simon: Do you feel that your film-making has profited from your work in the theatre, or are they two separate things?

Bergman: Sometimes it's the same and sometimes it's quite different. I have done very much in the studio and in the theatre, and I got good experience from both.

Simon: What about film actors? Do you think they profit a lot from acting on the stage or can one be a good movie actor without knowing anything about the theatre?

Bergman: Yes, I think you can be a good movie actor without being a good actor on the stage. It is a special talent, being a good movie actor, but I don't know exactly what it is. I think it is a sort of presence, a very strange, creative mind and a very special form of concentration that makes a good movie actor.

Simon: I must confess I have seldom if ever discovered minds in actors, at least as I conceive of the mind.

Bergman: That's not my experience. They have another way of expressing themselves than we have, and I understand their way very well because I often have the same way of expressing myself. Not when I talk with you but, I tell you, I always think when I talk and if I don't talk, I am intuitive, I have my radar. But when I have to talk and to explain things, I think that I think. I am most of all intuitive and I have trained my intuition; I trust it and always use it in my profession, but I don't discuss with it. So my intuition is my best weapon and my best tool.

Simon: There is one statement of yours that everybody is always quoting: about your thinking of yourself as a humble, anonymous workman on a Gothic cathedral.

Bergman: Very romantic. Forget it. What I meant originally was that anonymous creation in art, in music or painting or sculpture or theatre, was very unneurotic. And that is the best kind of all, creating unneurotically; which is why the nineteenth-century romantic notion of original genius strikes me as very silly, and as having nothing to do with real creation.

Simon: But, then, if you're neither the nineteenth-century original genius nor the medieval workman on the cathedral, what third possibility does that leave—something in between?

Bergman: Yes, I am a man making things for use, and highly esteemed as a professional. I am proud of my knowing how to make those things.

Simon: You were telling me that Shame was influenced not so much by the Vietnam war as by your recollections of Hitler's Germany.

Bergman: Yes, exactly. When I was a boy I was in Germany, as a sort of Austauschjunge (exchange student) before the war—1935, 1936—and I had German friends; I was fifteen or sixteen years old and came from Sweden completely ignorant, a political virgin. I stayed with the family of a German minister and his four sons and four daughters and a typical German mother in a little village in the interior. I liked them very much. Later, one of the sons, the same age as I, came to Sweden; we spent much time together and I learned German. We were all very fascinated by the fact that he was in the Hitlerjugend, and I went with him to school and they were reading Mein Kampf in his religion class; in Weimar, I was at the tenth anniversary of the Parteitag. It all held an enormous fascination, and we were all infected by this. Then the war started and I was in the military service; I was drafted from the University and suddenly we realized in Sweden what had happened in Germany; we finally understood. After the war, so many Swedish, Scandinavian, English, and American heroes told us what the German people should have done under the pressure of the dictatorship, what they really should have done. All these very, very clever people telling us what the German civilians should have been thinking and saying; how they really should have reacted to the concentration camps. All this was terribly painful for me, because I'm not very courageous and I hate physical violence. I don't know how much courage I would have if somebody came to me and said, "Ingmar, you are a very talented man, we like you very much; be the head of the Schauspielhaus (National Theatre); if not, you know what will happen to you, your wife, and your children. And, you know, we are having some difficulty with the Jews, and we don't want them in the Theatre; you will fix that for us. If you don't, you know what will happen to you." And I don't know exactly, I don't know at all, how I would have reacted in this situation. That uncertainty was very painful to me, and that is the main problem in Shame—what happens to ordinary people in such a war.

Simon: If I may jump back now to Persona, what about those dead bodies in the morgue at the beginning, and the boy who seems to be dead too but then comes to life?

Bergman: It's just my poetry. I was in the hospital; the view out of the window was a chapel where they were carrying out the bodies of the dead, and I knew that house was full of dead people. Of course, I felt it inside me somewhere that the whole atmosphere was one of death, and I felt like that little boy. I was lying there, half dead, and suddenly I started to think of two faces, two intermingled faces, and that was the beginning, the place where it started.

Simon: And did those two merging faces have a special meaning for you?

Bergman: No, but if I put two faces together, I get this third person.

Simon: But was one the face of innocence and the other the face of experience?

Bergman: No, nothing like that.

Simon: Just two faces?

Bergman: Yes, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann didn't know that I did this, that I put them together into one face, and I wanted to give them a surprise, so we made this composite in the laboratory and we got it back to the island where we were and then I asked them to come to the editing room. When they saw those two faces together on the Movieola, Bibi said, "What a terrible picture of you, Liv" and Liv said, "No, it's not me; it's you."

Simon: And the scene with Gunnar Björnstrand is purely in Alma's imagination; the actual man isn't there?

Bergman: No, it's just a sort of dream.

Simon: Some critics made terrible fools of themselves by analyzing that as if he were actually there, making love to Alma.

Simon: Speaking of critics, do you have any afterthoughts about your famous incident with Johnson? [Bergman had hit this critic at an open rehearsal.]

Bergman: No, the only thing is exactly what I said, I hate physical violence.

Simon: What did this particular critic do to make you so angry?

Bergman: He doesn't believe in what he's doing and he's cynical and he plays a game with other human beings, and I hate this way of behaving. Not of humiliating me, because I know who I am and what I am, but he has a way of humiliating, in a terrible way, the actors. I have seen too much of what he has done to people in this theatre and in other houses.

Simon: But you're not against criticism in general?

Bergman: No, for heaven's sake, no; we are both acting, don't you think? And, in a way, we are all acting together. Even if we are of different opinions, it doesn't matter. So, in a way, I like to read good criticism, and good criticism is telling me things about...

Simon: Yourself?

Bergman: No, not me, but things I see.

Simon: Do you read much criticism about your work?

Bergman: I read the reviews in the four Swedish papers, just to get the immediate reaction. But the rest—it takes too much time. You must understand, it's not the reading that takes time, but the effect of it that remains inside you in a very strange way. If it's favourable criticism, it leaves you all atwitter; if it's hostile, you feel poisoned. Just for a few hours, but still, it's a silly waste of time.

Simon: Let me ask you just one other thing. In The Naked Night, at the beginning, when the wagons are arriving in the rain and mud, and suddenly there is the image of a broken-down windmill which is no longer turning; how does that windmill get in there? Do you feel the deliberate need to symbolize some kind of breakdown in human events, or do you happen to be shooting out there and come upon the windmill, and you say, "OK, I'll put the windmill in"?

Bergman: Both. It's always like that when you're creating the right way; you always find things around you that you can use; they seem to be there just for your purpose. It is very strange; suddenly you find things.

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