We Must Talk of Everything: Conversations with Ingmar Bergman

By G. William Jones

Ingmar Bergman’s exceptional contributions to cinematography have earned him a worldwide reputation as the greatest living filmmaker, “the supreme conjurer.” The director of more than forty films—the latest being Fanny and Alexander (which he insists will be his last)—Bergman was the inaugural winner in 1981 of the Algur H. Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts, a tribute to his extraordinary achievement in his field and his deep commitment to artistic excellence.

William Jones is professor of video and cinema in the Meadows School of the Arts, SMU. The founder and director for twelve years of the USA Film Festival, Professor Jones is also the author of eight books, six screenplays, and more than eighty articles.

The following conversations with Ingmar Bergman were held during four seminars with the world-renowned director while he was at SMU to receive the prestigious Meadows Award. The discussions resulting from all four seminars will soon be published in book form by the SMU Press.

JONES: You have been speaking to me for thirty years, but this is the first time I’ve had a chance to speak to you—a wonderful opportunity. When I first began to hear you was in your films, such as The Seventh Seal, Winter Light, the trilogy. I was in seminary at the time, and these were the films that were certainly on the “seminary circuit.” All the theology students thought they were wonderful films. You spoke to us so relevantly about God and the silence of God. Have metaphysics simply taken another place in your pictures, or have you had done with them?

BERGMAN: As you know, I am the son of a minister. I lived eighteen years of my life in the home of my parents. From my fourteenth year I felt very aggressive, I felt imprisoned. When I was nineteen years old I went away from my home, and I didn’t see my parents for about four years. There was an enormous conflict between my father and me, also between my mother and me, because my mother was always very loyal to my father. But I think she suffered very much under this emotional cut. In the time when I was at home and in my country (excuse me for starting so very early in life, but I think it’s important in this thing), in my early times growing up, I was extremely religious. Religious, really, in a very primitive and magic way, as children very often are. I heard all those things my father talked about. I had to go to the church every Sunday, and I didn’t like it because I wanted to go to the movie theater and the only chance to go to the movie theater was first to go to the church, and then to have tea with a lot of aunts and relatives. It was very boring, it was very hard—it was a very tough discipline. I don’t say that it was without joy because there was very much joy in our home, and my mother always supported my interest in the theater.

My father was a very beloved minister in the community and, like a great actor, he was one man in front of his community and another man at home. He was a very depressed and melancholy man, and we had to be very quiet when he was at home. We had a great fear of him. Sometimes he would be very lively, very joyful, and would play with us. But sometimes, suddenly without understanding, he changed completely. So our mother was the constant basis for our security, and for me it was wonderful, because she supported my interest in the theater enormously. My father did, also, but he had not much time because they were both very much devoted to the work in the community.

I was very religious, and I believed in God in a very strange way. The education in my generation was built on a terrible basis: a bad conscience. You should have a bad conscience always because you were a human being. You know, you say in the church every Sunday, “I am a man full of sin.” The whole point of education was to give you a bad conscience for your sins; for what you hadn’t done, for what you had done. As a little child, of course, I wanted to please my parents and I wanted, after all, also to please God. We hadn’t too much to do with Christ, I think. He was a little bit far away, and at Easter it was terrible. We knew he suffered terribly, and we had to wear black clothes and we had to eat very strange sorts of food and we were not allowed to play. So we didn’t like Christ very much. Of course, he was very cute and very nice when he was lying there as a newborn child and we got presents and so on. But, you know, God—I could see him in the church every Sunday. Not the whole of him—that would have been much better. But I only saw a great big eye. It’s a symbol, the enormous eye. I think I had this eye inside me, and he looked at me the whole time. I knew that everything I did, I did in front of his eye. And that made me feel lousy. So I had a bad conscience in front of my parents and in front of God and in front of the school, and it was—I think it was a little bit difficult.

But sometimes we had much fun at home and forgot everything, and it was a nice, warm atmosphere, coming very much from my mother, whom I loved desperately.

Then, when I was eighteen years old, I just made my revolution. I went away. I hated my parents and I didn’t want to see them anymore. I cut off all religion, everything. But, you know, the bad conscience was still there, because the bad conscience was a part of my character. I couldn’t get away from it. God was away, grace was also away, love was also away, but the role was there. You understand what I mean? I carried with me a terrible fear, because I felt so insufficient, I felt so limited—and there was no grace, no love—and then the next step is aggression. Out of this fear grew a terrible, enormous aggression. I think I was unbearable at that time, at the university, for my colleagues and for the other students and for my parents and for the girls. But then I think I started to construct my own sort of religion. I think it was very infantile. It was very childish, very primitive, very barbaric. But there was some sort of religious feeling, some sort of relation between me and some God who had lost his big eye but had some sort of interest in Ingmar Bergman. He liked me, in a way, but our relationship was complicated, I must say. I felt in my life—in my daily life, in my relation to other people, to other human beings—I felt extremely bad. I felt, “I can’t do the right things. I always do the wrong things. I’m always too aggressive, I destroy all relations, connections to other people.” I was unbearable, I was impatient, and I think if I had met myself today as I was at that time, I would not like myself very much.

So, with that feeling I went to my profession. I started very early in the theater and, at forty-one, I came to this film company as script-polisher—rewriter. I decided then, very early, “I am a lousy human being, as a character, very bad.” That was absolutely clear to me, and that was the bad conscience. “But,” I said, “I will be the best director in the whole world.” And that was absolutely clear to me, too, that I must compensate for that feeling by being the best director in the whole world. That was my longing, that was my hope, and that was my desire. Then, of course, the whole time I lived in some very strange relationship with somebody I called “God.” I made prayers, I went to the church, sometimes lonely, sitting in the church having conversations with somebody I called “God.” But I still didn’t like Christ, because he was between us. Between God and me was somebody whom God loved more than me, so I just put him aside. To me, he was a human being and I think he made many errors. I was very critical of him, you know, in his going to Jerusalem that day. I felt that it was just to make a show. I was very angry. I didn’t understand and I disliked very much what he said and, I think, we had a very difficult relationship with each other—or I had to him. He didn’t tell me about his.

But, then, in 1942, I started to write plays for the theater. In one year I wrote twenty plays. Today they are impossible to read and most of them have disappeared, but there are two or three of them that are left and, to me, even if I look mercifully and nicely at them, they are absolutely incredible, impossible to read. They were very deep, I must say, and there were also many, many symbols and they had very much to do with my relation to him outside—or inside—me, so when I then started to write my pictures, that strange thing I called “God” was always there, present. Even if I didn’t write about God or even if I didn’t write in a religious way, he was always present in all my pictures. Except for Smiles of a Summer Night and some other comedies, he was present in everything that I made until Winter Light. In Winter Light, I made the final cut with that strange thing I called “God.” I cut off relations. Before that I still had a lot of bad conscience in accepting myself. I had a fear of my way of living, of acting, of behaving, and I had a terrible fear of death. Then suddenly—it came almost over one day, you know—Saul got to be Paul. But I think in me, Paul became Saul. So I changed almost overnight. I changed completely, and that is what I wanted to try to say, without symbols, very simply in Winter Light. The strange thing happened that, at the moment when I could cut off this relation to somebody from my childhood that had been an enormous burden for me, I started to accept myself. My aggression subsided, and my fear, and that was the most important. My fear for death got completely wiped away. Of course I have a complete and natural fear of pain and so on, but that enormous, neurotic fear of death that you see in The Seventh Seal was completely wiped away. That was it. What also came out of this in Winter Light was that I accepted life as it is. Earlier I always said, “You up there, I protest!” I always had a protest. I always had a dialogue with somebody and I made him guilty. He was guilty—he was guilty to me. He had the responsibility.

Everything that I tell you is, of course, very childish and very primitive, but I have tried to be absolutely honest about it. But at the moment I started to accept myself, I could also accept other human beings, other people. I could accept life with its greatness and its cruelty, and I could accept also my failures in my profession. So, that was the whole thing.

STUDENT: After you went through this period, and you more or less reconciled yourself with that intense fear that you had to draw on for your creativity, did you find yourself having to go someplace else to get the creativity?

BERGMAN: Perhaps you mean my neurotic relation. I tell you something very strange. When I lost this relation, I got much more creative. You know, many people think if an artist suffers, he will be a better artist. There are those who think that if a lobster is cut into pieces while still alive, it tastes much better, because the lobster suffers when it’s cut into pieces. Some people think that about artists: if they suffer, they are much better artists. I don’t think it’s right that way, because every neurotic behavior is some sort of rigid behavior. Do you understand what I mean?

JONES: Compulsive behavior?

BERGMAN: Yes, it’s away from life. If you can come away from this neurosis, life comes into your soul and into your creative work. Your creative mind opens up. Of course, there are a lot of great artists, wonderful artists, who are and were very neurotic human beings. I think I am a very neurotic man, too; but in my relation now to myself and to my profession, I’m completely un-neurotic.

STUDENT: Do you think that creativity can be a way out of neurosis?

BERGMAN: Yes, in my case. You know, I was constantly creative. I made two or three pictures a year. I made three or four productions for the theater a year, and for broadcasting, and I was writing scripts for other directors. I was constantly at work, and, of course, that was an outlet. It saved my life, because if I hadn’t had the chance to work that hard, I think I would be today in a madhouse. Because the tensions in me, the difficulties in me, the difficulties in my relations to other people, to reality, were so enormous, that I was almost mad.

STUDENT: Did you find that after you found this acceptance your films became more of an examination of human relationships, rather than a questioning like your earlier questioning of God?

BERGMAN: Yes. As I said, at the moment you accept yourself, say to yourself, “Yes, this is Ingmar Bergman. He is like that. Now, try to live with him, try to accept him, try to like him”—at that moment, you also look at other people and say, “I think you look nice, let’s talk to each other. I have always been extremely curious about other human beings, about other people, so I just wanted to say to you, what about you, what about your life?” And I started to listen—not only in here but also to you. I more and more came to the point where I found other human beings extremely interesting. I found other people miracles. Mostly, of course, at that time, because I was at work the whole time, I had these contacts with the actors and actresses. But it was like I came out of prison.

JONES: Coming out of your home when you were eighteen opened you up in a certain way. Coming out of a very repressive religious life opened you up. How about leaving your home in Sweden? Did you feel that opened you up, when you went to Munich and made films?

BERGMAN: It’s a very, very complicated and personal question, but I will try to answer your question openly and honestly, if it’s possible.

When I was rehearsing Dance of Death, by Strindberg, at the Royal Palace Theater in Stockholm one day, the police came and took me away and said I had done something with taxes. I didn’t know anything about it. Everything was false arresting. It was a misunderstanding. But, to me, it was the most terrible thing that had happened to me in my whole life. To all the world, I suddenly was a man who had done something with my taxes. I was not an honest, decent man anymore and I couldn’t stand that, so I had a breakdown. I had to go—and that was a very interesting experience—to a hospital, to a madhouse, to live there for some weeks, about four weeks. But then one day, I got angry, very, very angry. It was wonderful. I got Valium the whole time and I found it wonderful. If they had come to me and said, “We will take off your head today, Mr. Bergman,” I would have said, “Oh, yes, I would love it, that’s what I want!” I had completely lost my identity. I was sitting all day looking at the TV and talking to my colleagues there at the madhouse. We had wonderful, very strange conversations, and it was very nice. Everybody was very polite, very tactful, and we talked in a very slow, nice away—sometimes also a very strange way—to each other. But one day I got terribly angry and I threw the Valium away and I said, “I don’t stay here any longer! I won’t stay in Sweden any longer.” I said to my wife, “Now we will go abroad. Anywhere, but we will go away from here, because if I stay here one week more, I will stay here forever.” I had a feeling that I had lost my identity completely and I liked it! That was it. So, I had to come back to myself, to my feeling of humiliation, to all the pains, to all those things because that was me!

So we went away. We went to Paris and to New York and to Los Angeles and to Berlin and—I don’t know—to Copenhagen, Oslo. And, then, I was in Los Angeles and Dino deLaurentis offered to make my Serpent’s Egg and I was happy and I went to Munich to make the preparations. We lived there for some weeks. We found the city wonderful, with its enormous vibrant cultural life. We liked it; it was absolutely wonderful. The head of one of the theaters made me an offer to come and work there. I accepted, and now I live in Munich. I think my anger, my sudden aggression against being without identity, saved my life. Of course, Serpent’s Egg is not a very good picture, but it also saved my life because I came back to my profession. Sven Nykvist, my cameraman, came to me and we worked together—and life started again, in a way. I have tried to answer your question honestly, I hope.

STUDENT: Does it make you mad when film distributors take the liberty of changing your films around? For example, with The Clown’s Evening, they changed the name to The Naked Night and cut out scenes and shots they felt were irrelevant.

BERGMAN: I tell you, when I have made my picture, when I have looked at the first cutting, and then I get a print and I have looked at it and when I have listened to the soundtrack and I see that is the picture or that is not the picture I wanted to do, I must leave it and look forward. If I should sit here or somewhere in Sweden and be angry because some foolish distributor changed the name of my picture, I couldn’t go on. In New Zealand today they are running a very, very bad print of one of my pictures. I presume that it is so. But I can’t be angry because the print is so bad in New Zealand. I have to decide, at the point when I have seen the final release print, that I will not think any more of that picture.

STUDENT: Are the distributors allowed to do that? Isn’t there a law?

BERGMAN: They are not allowed to cut my pictures. Nobody is allowed to cut anything away from my pictures. But the projectionist does it every day. In America in the fifties, my pictures were considered to be pornographic. So when the projectionists got my pictures, they cut the “good parts” away and sold them! But that was in the fifties.

STUDENT: “Good parts” of Ingmar Bergman for sale!

BERGMAN: Exactly! Yes!

STUDENT: Is there any one film, out of all the films that you have made, that is a personal favorite of yours?

BERGMAN: Some pictures, and they are not the best as judged by the audiences and the critics, are my favorites. You know, in a way, they are all my children. I have borne them. They are now about forty-three or forty-four or something of them. Some of them are very healthy. I knew from the first moment that they would go their way through the whole world and they would fix everything and they would stand there on their legs—good legs—and that they would make me proud. And then there are other pictures which still make me ashamed. I think of them and I get red and I am furious that pictures stay forever, you know? What I love most of all about theatrical productions is that they are here on the stage for one year, perhaps two years, then they disappear. Then they don’t exist anymore, just in the hearts of the people who had seen them, if they are good. But a film exists forever, today. I think they have made an invention just now to prevent their ever being destroyed. I think that’s terrible sometimes. Some of my pictures I disliked tremendously, and then there are three or four that I like very, very much. I think they are not perfect, but sometimes I think there are things in those pictures I have made that are very alive. Do you understand what I mean? There is not only good acting, good storytelling, but it’s also really alive. And that makes me like them very, very much.

STUDENT: Which pictures are those? That’s unfair, not to tell us!

BERGMAN: No, it’s not unfair! But if you don’t mind, I won’t tell you. I will give you one example. There is a picture of mine—it’s a picture called The Passion of Anna. In Europe, it’s only A Passion. It’s related to the Passion of St. Matthew, or something like that. There is a scene in that picture where Liv Ullman sits in a chair telling about her marriage. It’s a long scene, telling about a terrible car accident and what happened after that. She’s just sitting like that, bending her head, and we had the camera here, very close to her, and I think the scene lasts about six or seven minutes. It’s just running, the camera doesn’t move. That is, to me, the most alive moment in my whole career. What she affords, what she does, what she makes there, what she plays, is not “realistic,” not nature, but it’s much more. She plays it with all the dimensions because what she tells is also a lie, and you can see that it is a lie. The blood in her face is coming and going and tears come into her eyes. She disciplines herself—her voice is always very quiet, the whole time it is very, very quiet and it’s just going on like that, and because of that, The Passion of Anna is one of my pictures I like most. Do you understand now?

STUDENT: You said that some of your films don’t convey the message that you meant when you began filming them. At what point do you realize that they are not going to convey that message? Before cutting, or is it at the cutting? Or do you try to change it, or do you have the occasion to change it?

BERGMAN: That’s a very good question, as the politicians say.

JONES: That usually means they’re not going to answer it.

BERGMAN: Oh, I will try to answer it. You know, when you’re writing a script, you can change everything, but when you’re shooting a script, you can’t change anything. It’s too expensive. You can take one or two shooting days and change small things, but mostly, you see, when you are creating or shooting a picture, you are, in a way, protected from understanding that what you’re doing is very bad. When I am sitting, seeing the rushes, I try to be completely objective. I always like my daily rushes alone, because I know if somebody is sitting there they influence me, and I think I’ve got to think what they think. I try to sit there; not negative, not positive, completely objective and looking at what’s happening on the screen. If I accept it, I go on. If I don’t accept it, I reshoot. The shooting time, mostly, for a Scandinavian film, for a European film, is about fifty days. Autumn Sonata was more than thirty-eight days, but about fifty days, we’ll say. You are, in a way, protected from seeing if there is something wrong. You cut it together and then, when you see the picture cut together, you are still protected because you are so technically involved with your picture. Then, I show it to a few friends of mine whom I know—whom I trust very much, who are absolutely honest with me and we have that sort of relationship and communication—they say, “Ingmar, that and that and that and so on.” Then I say, “No, you are wrong,” or “You are right!” Sometimes it can be unbearable, the criticism of friends, because they can be very tough and very hard, and there is nothing to do. Often I agree with what they say. I can give you an example: The Life of the Marionettes is one of the pictures I liked very much when I made it. In a way, I found it was fascinating not only to work with actors who had not been before the camera before, but also to have a film without a plot. Just to make an investigation, like an operation: very, very clear, very simple, very sterile, but not to find the truth. I found that fascinating. Then, a friend of mine whom I like, who plays the big role in Scenes from a Marriage, saw the picture. “But Ingmar, this is, of course, a very technically perfect picture. It’s wonderful. But I dislike it, because life has so many dimensions and you have only looked at one dimension. You have made a prison and there is no window in it. In our lives, even if it’s a prison, there is a window. You can see the daylight. But in this picture, you can’t see the daylight at all, and that is a great mistake because you take away the dimensions of life just to get your effect.”

I made an equation to be right, I took things away. I think he’s right.

Just once in my life, I had to make a picture for economic reasons. That was in 1951, and that’s the only time in my life I have made a picture for economic reasons. I had a lot of children and a lot of wives and they must have their money. So, I agreed to make a picture. It was a sort of criminal—I don’t know what. Suddenly one day, ten or twelve days after this started, I said, “Okay, why not? Why not make some sort of Hitchcock story? I like that. Why couldn’t I do that?” Twelve or thirteen days after the start of the shooting, I’m standing in the studio thinking, “I’ve got to get out of it. I can’t stand it. What am I doing? What sort of fool am I?” It was a very, very bad picture. To have the discipline to go ahead with that picture—because a lot of people were working on it—to work the other thirty days to fix the picture, that was the greatest burden I ever had as an artist in my whole life. The company didn’t have the money afterwards and I didn’t get my salary, so that was the punishment! That is the moral!

STUDENT: What type of difficulties did you have in making The Touch, as your first English-language film?

BERGMAN: Shall we not talk about all my bad pictures? When I started they were very nice, they came to me and said, “Mr. Bergman, you will get a lot of money. You can do what you want. We love you. We find your pictures wonderful. But please, make it in the English language.” And I said, “Yes, of course.” I wrote a script and I liked the script very much. It was in a way nice; it’s a beautiful script. I don’t dislike the script. But we came to one little detail: we had to make it in English, and as you have perhaps heard, my English is not very perfect. We had a dialogue coach there, a very nice girl who said, “Mr. Bergman, Mr. Bergman, may I—excuse me but—” Suddenly, after one take which I thought was very good, with Bibi Andersson, the dialogue coach says, “Mrs. Andersson, could you please do it that way?” and we did it again, and again. I decided never in my life to make a picture in the English language again. But then, of course, when I went to Germany, I had to make a picture, The Serpent’s Egg—with the original picture in German and English. Now I think I know more about how to make it, but I don’t think I will make any pictures anymore in the English language.

STUDENT: I find it interesting that you believe in making your films for the audience rather than for yourself, yet your films seem highly personal. How do you draw a distinction between what you want and like and what you perceive the audience wants or likes?

BERGMAN: It’s very simple to answer that question because I always think the audience will know what I’m doing! I always believe that the audience will accept more or less what I’m doing. Sometimes I think, “This will be too difficult for the audience, but I am a great artist and I make what I want.” As I have said before, what I am doing is not masterpieces for eternity, but I am a craftsman: I make my chairs and my tables and I make things for other people to use. If they don’t use them, I am very unhappy. If they say, “I don’t care,” I am very unhappy. If everybody says, “This picture is uninteresting, I disliked it”—no, not “disliked” because that’s emotional; but if they feel completely “I don’t care,” I think that would be hell. But that hasn’t happened to me yet, and I hope it will not happen.

STUDENT: You have expressed a lot about wanting to communicate with people, the need to communicate. I was reading in your preface to Face to Face about your giving form to your own anxiety—”a tooth-ache,” you called it—getting it out of your system and seeing it. I know a lot of people that have seen that film and have gotten a lot from it about coming face to face with things that are very hard to deal with. You outline dilemmas very acutely in your films, but will you ever show a way through a dilemma, and not just stop with the dilemma?

BERGMAN: Sometime, yes. What is important when you make a picture? You can’t go farther than you can. Do you understand? You can just take the steps you can take. You can’t take another step after that. Perhaps you have seen Through a Glass Darkly? There, I go a step longer than I can. I felt the film stops when the helicopter goes away with the mad girl. That is the end of the picture. But I felt the people needed to have an explanation, to have some sort of contact, to have some moment of something else. So I wrote that last scene, that is terrible to me today. It is unfair, in a way, because it is a little bit a lie. Not at that moment when I made it, but today, it is a bit of a lie. I tried to make something that I couldn’t. So, sometimes, I know a solution, and then I try to show the solution, but sometimes I can only give the tension, the problem, the situation. Then, I give the problem and the situation and I leave it to the audience—to the human beings sitting out there—to make their own solutions, to discuss the picture. You can see Scenes from a Marriage. People think there is an optimistic end to that picture. I don’t think so, because I know those two people, Johann and Marianne. They are coming now into real difficulties, new lives, new compromises, and they have to go ahead with that. When I write a script with some sort of solution, I know the solution before, but mostly I think my pictures are just suggestions. I put it here. Please—take it, use it, leave it, do with it what you want.

JONES: You used to say about people’s use of your films, “I hope that perhaps the light in your soul will change a little.” Do you still say that?

BERGMAN: It’s possible. It would be the best of all, you know, if once in one of my pictures, only one human being had got something out of it for his life, for his daily life or for his future. I would be happy. That is the whole reason. If people use my pictures, it doesn’t matter if they are angry or aggressive or critical, but just that they are emotionally involved with my pictures. That is the only thing that is important to me. 

“We Must Talk of Everything: Conversations with Ingmar Bergman” by G. William Jones, Volume 68, No. 1, Winter 1983.

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