"I felt very much that it was an anti-war picture. I thought that I was doing something that was very important. That is the difficult thing with acting today. You sometimes feel that it is really stupid. But in The Shame I felt that I was doing something which was important for human beings."


"I do not know to what degree it was an intentional comment on Vietnam by Bergman, but I am sure it did refer to it to a certain extent. Many Swedes have some kind of missionary trauma; we want to better the world, and this happened a great deal during the 1960's."


"When I see Shame today, I find that it can be divided into two parts. The first half, which is about the events of the war, is bad. The second half, which is about the effects of war, is good. The first half is much worse than I had imagined; the second much better than I had remembered....One might say that the authenticity of the second half is disturbed by an overblown scheme involving a wad of paper money that changes hands several times. This scheme reflects an influence from American dramaturgy of the 1950s....When I made Shame, I felt an intense desire to expose the violence of war without restraint. But my intentions and wishes were greater than my abilities. I did not understand that a modern portrayer of war needs a totally different fortitude and professional precision than what I could provide. Once the outer violence stops and the inner violence begins, Shame becomes a good film. When society can no longer function, the main characters lose their frame of reference. Their social relations cease. The people crumble. The weak man becomes ruthless. The woman, who had been the stronger, falls apart. Everything slips away into a dream play that ends on board the refugee boat. Everything is shown in pictures, as in a nightmare. In a nightmare, I felt at home. In the reality of war, I was lost."