"Last summer I discovered that I was expecting a child again. Just like Sarah in the Bible, I was, much to my amazement, pregnant at an advanced age. At the beginning, it made me feel quite ill, but then it was both funny and astonishing to sense the desire coming back. The desire returned, and then I put aside three months to devote to my new pregnancy, to concentrated scriptwriting."



"Saraband was planned as a television film. But when I'd finished the script I was unsure what to do with it, so I talked to Erland Josephson. Saraband could have worked equally well as a stage play, a film or a radio play. But we decided television would be the best medium. Now people are talking about turning it into a feature, but we'll have to wait and see. A major advantage of a television film is that it's shown one evening and then it disappears. It does a tour of the world and then it's forgotten. There's such a big show around features—they're screened at festivals and nominated for all kinds of prizes. Maybe that's what attracts young film-makers, but to me it's pretty insignificant."



"Saraband can be seen as a concerto grosso, a concert for full orchestra—only, here, with four soloists. The drama consists of ten dialogues that follow a particular pattern, and it's an attempt at analysis of a difficult situation."



"Saraband is autobiographical in that Bergman had a son who died before they got to make up. That was horrible for him. You would think this film would be everything he would like to say—I love you, I care for you, etc.—but in the film it's still as if they can't talk. That is very brave. He is saying this is who I am; this is my music and I am going to play it again and again. I am sure that much of the film has to do with the wife, Ingrid van Rosen, whom he lost 10 years ago, but also it has to do with the idea that for some people, the easiest person to love is someone who has gone. But the picture of the dead wife in the film is not of Ingrid. It's a lady who works in costumes."



"When I was directing Faithless, Erland Josephson and I made a little video film for fun about our characters from Scenes From a Marriage. We sent it to him, and I think that's when he had the idea to use the same characters again. But Saraband is not Scenes From a Marriage 30 years on. And I don't think it belongs to Faithless, which was a much more forgiving film. Saraband is a film that does not forgive."