"It's close to my heart and one of my films I'm always happy to see again."


"I have never made a less complicated film than Summer with Monika. We simply went off and shot it, taking great delight in our freedom. And the public success was considerable."


"I've always felt great affection for this movie...for several reasons. Partly because I think it's a good movie. It was all a stroke of luck. I met [Per Anders] Fogelström, who wrote the novel Summer with Monika, on the Kungsgatan. He'd written other scripts for Svensk Filmindustri, and we knew each other pretty well from before. I asked him if he was working on anything, and he replied that he was in fact writing a story about two young people with lousy jobs, each on their own. 'Really?' I said. 'That sounds like a film. Can't you make a script out of it?' 'Certainly,' he said. And so he wrote this script fairly quickly. I took it to Svensk Filmindustri...naturally. And it created considerable turmoil, because they considered it indecent, immoral—I don't know what. Nobody would want to see this stuff. There was no end to people's objections. But I explained to them that it would be a very inexpensive movie. We'd leave for the archipelago and they wouldn't see us for six weeks. And on our return we'd bring them a finished film. So, the next issue was who was to play the young girl. At that time, Harriet Andersson—she wasn't making her debut, because she'd had a small part in a movie called Biffen och Bananen. I thought she was very, very good. She was on stage at the Casino—No, it was called the Scalateatern, down at Norra Bantorget. It was a theatre for variety shows at the time. There she was in a negligee...and fishnet stockings, singing suggestive songs with immense charisma. It was such a fun production, and Harriet and I fell in love. It was a kind of fascination with exteriors. And it influenced the filming as well. In a way it's—I still think it holds its own."