"It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa. At that time my admiration for the Japanese cinema was at its height. I was almost a samurai myself!"


"I remember that there was an intentional emphasis on a very close relationship between the father and the daughter, and the mother was not really let in, she was kept out of that relationship and suffered from a certain jealousy even. The sequence between my being told about the rape, and my slaughter of the robbers, serves almost as a textbook example of Bergman's technique in building up the tension in scene after scene, without hardly any dialogue at all."


"Today I take full responsibility for the religious problem I set up in The Seventh Seal. A genuine romantic piety rendered the special luster there. But with The Virgin Spring my motivation was extremely mixed. The God concept had long ago begun to crack, and it remained more as a decoration than as anything else. What really interested me was the actual, horrible story of the girl and her rapists, and the subsequent revenge. My own conflict with religion was well on its way out."