"The Touch is supposed to be an everyday story. The film was originally conceived as a portrait of a woman. It doesn't deal with a magnificent and outstanding and glamorous woman. She is a middle-class housewife who lives in an enormously protected environment, in a world that is terribly cut off from the real world and its disasters and the draughts and the neuroses. She is the wife of a senior physician in a small town. She and her husband are well off financially, they live well, they have two well-behaved children and they live in beautiful surroundings. Everything is almost painfully splendid. What was interesting for me was to depict this woman and paint her portrait in a certain situation. As a result, it was my task to busy myself with a series of enormously concrete details. Then the story grows out of them. The story would be impossible without the setting. Every form of stylization is banned."


"It was not the picture I intended to make—for many reasons—especially the actors. You know that actors often change a film, for better or worse. I intended to paint the portrait of an ordinary woman, in which everything around her would be a reflection. I wanted her in close-up and the surroundings clear only when near her. I wanted the portrait to be very detailed and very lovely and true. But when I joined the actors, they liked the plot more than I did, and I think they seduced me away from my original plan. I can't say if the result is better or worse, but it is different."


"The Touch was supposed to make a lot of money for its author. I have probably resisted the temptation to make money more often than I have yielded to it. But there were times when I did yield completely, and I have inevitably lived to regret it. The intention was to shoot The Touch in both English and Swedish. In an original version which doesn't seem to exist anymore, English was spoken by those who were English-speaking and Swedish by those who were Swedes. I believe that it just possibly was slightly less unbearable than the totally English-language version, which was made at the request of the Americans. The story I bungled so badly was based on something extremely personal to me: the secret life of someone who loves becomes gradually the only real life and the real life becomes an illusion."


"Bibi Andersson felt instinctively that this part did not suit her. I convinced her to do it anyhow, since I felt I needed a loyal friend in this foreign production. Besides, Bibi had a good command of English. The fact that she became pregnant after having accepted the part threw a terrible monkey wrench into what seemed, on the surface at least, a matter-of-fact, methodical production set."