"Go ahead Max. Tell him. Tell him what he always said."

Max von Sydow is being uncooperative. Not with his interviewer, with whom the renowned 78-year-old actor has been nothing but deferential and gracious, but with his own wife.

In Toronto to appear at the closing night Toronto International Film Festival presentation of the Canadian-produced Emotional Arithmetic—in which von Sydow plays the emotionally burdened Polish survivor of a Nazi transit camp—von Sydow has been talking about his astonishing 11-film collaboration with the late Swedish master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It's a list that includes such seminal examples of artist-driven cinema as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Through A Glass Darkly and The Virgin Spring.

While the imposing six-foot-three actor—who is dressed entirely in the trademark black he seems to have been born to wear—is all too happy to not only discuss Bergman but to introduce a special festival screening of 1960's The Virgin Spring, he's not going to reveal what it was that Bergman "always said" about him. No matter how much his wife Cathrine Brelet, who is sitting (otherwise quietly) in on all her husband's interviews, may insist otherwise.

"It wasn't always," he says.

"Well it was most of the time."

"It was only once."

"No it wasn't. And it wasn't most of the time. It was all of the time. And since you're not going to tell him Max, I will."

Brelet turns back toward the interviewer. "Bergman always called Max 'my first and best Stradivarius.'"

The actor winces slightly, the victim of a clear breach of modesty.

"Well he did," says Brelet.

And well that he should have. In the young Max von Sydow Bergman found the ideal personification of his most passionate dramatic impulses an actor who could be at once intense, remote, conflicted, cerebral and almost toweringly present.

Little wonder that, right up to his death July 30, even after the filmmaker and the actor were living on different parts of the planet and communicating only on the telephone, Bergman, in von Sydow's fond recollection, "almost always returned to those early years. For both of us that was the best. We had such joy together making those productions."

"Productions" is a deliberately chosen word, for by it von Sydow means not only the movies but also the plays.

Among their many other shared interests and enthusiasms, both the performer and director shared an intense faith in the theatre.

And both would often claim that it was there, and not on screen, that they derived their most acute satisfaction. Bergman even called the theatre the true love of his life, while movies were only "my mistress."

"Not many people realize that I did as many plays with Bergman as I did films," von Sydow says. "And most of the time, almost all of the time, there was something remarkable with his concept of the play. I think there were some of the classics that he did that got, how shall I say, absolute form through his ideas."

"He had a great ability to make people share his enthusiasm for a project, for a film script or play," von Sydow explains.

"He seduced his people to work and to work with joy.

"Sometimes there were conflicts, and sometimes people said 'I cannot work with this man any more'—because he could be very demanding. But I think most of us enjoyed that. We all felt that it was important work that we did together."

Just how important is indicated in von Sydow's response to a question concerning how he would describe the role that working with Bergman, all those years ago in all those films and plays, played in the direction the actor's life would take.

"I'm sure that it is thanks to him that I'm here today," von Sydow says with a smile.

"It's because the early films I was in with him got an international audience, and were seen by international producers and directors that I got, how shall I say, an invitation to join the international crowd."