"I have never encountered anyone with this 84-year old's hunger and curiosity for cinema, and energy to speak about his constant film viewing", says Sydsvenskan's Jan Aghed who have met the film enthusiast and the film collector Ingmar Bergman.

Each year Bergman sends a list of about 150 movies that he wishes to see to the [Swedish] Film Institute's enormous archive. In the beginning of June, they are delivered by truck to his house on Fårö, where he has a private theatre with state-of-the-art equipment and a strict routine of watching one movie at 3 pm, each afternoon, five days a week. During the summer months along with children and grandchildren on vacation, who all receive a note on each Monday with the week's schedule.

In addition he loans a lot of new movies from the current repertoir that he finds interesting, from various distributors, and follows closely the current Swedish and foreign film production. Mention François Ozon's Sous le sable or Tanis Danovic's No Man's Land, and the response is an enthusiastic reaction. He's seen Ozon's film several times, and Danovic's is "extraordinarily good". Add to this a cherished private film collection with over 400 titles, and about 4500 titles on video. When talking about movies with Bergman, it's no wonder that you instantly notice a vast and versatile knowledge about the history of film. At the same time, you will hear a lot of unorthodox values of single filmmakers and their work. Sometimes they are completely different from established opinions. Like when we begin talking about Orson Welles, one of the icons of the film history.
- To me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane, which I have a copy of - is all the critics' darling, always at the top of every poll taken, but I think it's a total bore. Above all, the performances are worthless. Welles walks around with a facial mask and a wig whilst portraying this mogule Hearst, but you can see the edge of the wig all the time! The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable.
How about The Magnificent Ambersons?
- Naah. Also terribly boring. And I've never liked Welles as an actor, because he's not really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, you talk about actors and personalities. Welles was an enormous personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain, you see, that's when he's croaks. In my eyes he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker.

About an other celebrated colleague, Michelangelo Antonioni, still working despite his 90 years of age, it sounds like this: - He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up, which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte, also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido, and damn what a boring movie that is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He's basically an aesthete. Take Il Deserto rosso, for example - if he wanted a street, he'd repaint the houses in the street. He concentrated on the single image, never realising that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement. Sure, there are brilliant moments in his films. But I don't feel anything for L'Avventura, for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.

- To Antonioni's fellow countryman Federico Fellini and his films I have an entirely different relation. We were supposed to collaborate once, and along with Akira Kurosawa make one love story each for a movie produced by Dino de Laurentiis. I flew down to Rome with my script and spent a lot of time with Federico while we waited for Kurosawa, who finally couldn't leave Japan because of his health, so the project went belly-up. Fellini was about to finish Satyricon. I spent a lot of time in the studio and saw him work. I loved him both as a director and as a person, and I still watch his movies, like La Strada and that childhood rememberance - what's that called again? The interviewer has also seen the movie several times, but just now the title slips his mind.
Bergman laughs delightedly.
- Great that you're also a bit senile! That pleases me. (Later that same day, several hours after we've said goodbye in the lobby of Dramaten [The Royal Dramatic Theatre], the phone rings. It's Bergman. "AMARCORD!" he shouts.)

- If we talk about filmmakers who've given me fundamental experiences and impulses, we have to begin with Victor Sjöström, him first and foremost of all. And then Marcel Carné and Kurosawa and of course Fellini. No ranking between them, it's just that I have such a special relation to them in particular.
- I watch Victor's Körkarlen and Tösen från Stormyrtorpet every year. It's almost a tradition that I start my season on Fårö with one and finish off with the other. To see them again and again has become somewhat of a tradition. A drug. Or a burden. Of Victor's Hollywood productions, The Wind is often mentioned first, but I think that He Who Gets Slapped is incredibly remarkable. Isn't it amazing how he managed to become so acclimatized in Hollywood and still be groundbreaking?

Bergman claims to be especially fond of silent movies from the mid and late 20's, the years just before the art of cinema was infected by sound, and was about to develop a language of its own.
- Back then you had Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and his The Last Laugh with Emil Jannings, which didn't have any dialogue, only narration with images, and with wonderful movement and sensuality in the selection of images. And his Faust with Jannings and Gösta Ekman in the title role, and the masterpiece Sunrise. Three amazing films telling us that Murnau, at the same time as Erich von Stroheim was walking the same path in Hollywood, had developed very much when it comes to creating an original and independent film language.

As a young boy, Bergman went to the movies constantly, sometimes night after night, and at the matinees each Sunday.
- I had a problem with having to go to church on Sundays. The first matinee began at one o'clock, but after church we were having coffee at our house, and then you had to be there and be polite and everything. The other matinee was on at three o'clock, but then the ***** was that we were having dinner at five. Nevertheless, I often managed to sneak out and come home in time. Father was a priest at the Sofia Home, and then a vicar at Storgatan, so there were lots of lively small theatres at relatively close range for me. Your parents never minded this interest in film?
- No, no, not at all. Both father and mother went to the movies, and found it to be entertaining. But I remember once when mother became really angry with me. I must've been eighteen years old, and I had seen a film by Julien Duvivier called Pépé le Moko, and I told mother and father that you have to see this, so they saw it with high expectations. And it wasn't a suitable movie for vicar Erik Bergman and his wife - I got yelled at by mother, who wondered how I could see such foul, immoral trash. After that I stopped recommending movies to my parents.

This episode awakes in turn another vivid memory. Bergman is at a festival in France sometime in the 60's, and is interviewed by French film critics. They want to know about the movies that have meant the most for him.
- Totally truthfully I mentioned that Duvivier and Carné had made a great impression on me. From 1936 to 1939 Carné released Quai des brumes, Hôtel du Nord and Le Jour se lève, and Duvivier released Pépé le Moko and Un carnet de bal. They made a deep impression on me, and I thought then that if I ever get to be a director, I want to make film like Carné. But when I mentioned these names at that press conference a wide grin spread among the present journalists. You could read it off their faces. That ****, how could he? They had Jean Renoir as their idol, and wondered how on earth someone could say anything good about Duvivier and Carné!
They represented "le cinéma de papa", which they French New Wave, with François Truffaut in the forefront, were rebelling against.
- That's right. "Cinéma de papa!" And they worshipped Godard and so on. And then it was one hell of a blunder that I dared to give credit to these old has-beens! But I still like to see these French films from my youth, I think they are very nice, there's a sadness and a gentlenes and a sensuality in them that are grand.

In this context it's kind of ironic that your Sommaren med Monika, with its freedom feel both in Harriet Andersson's portrait of the title role and in the very narration, is perceived as an important mold for the New Wave. Godard praised Monika in Cahiers du Cinéma.
- Yes, and then you got that symbolic scene in Truffaut's The 400 Blows, where the boys steal the picture of Harriet, says Bergman today with a smile on his face. I liked Truffaut a lot, I've felt a lot of admiration for his way to address the audience, and his storytelling. La nuit américaine is adorable, and another film I like to see is L'enfant sauvage, with its fine humanism.
- Godard on the other hand, I've never gotten anything out of his movies. They have felt constructed, faux intellectual and completely dead. Cinematographically uninteresting and infinitely boring. Godard is a ****ing bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of them, Masculin, féminin, was shot here in Sweden. It was mindnumbingly boring.

But I like the third face of the New Wave a lot, Claude Chabrol, who's a wonderful storyteller in the crime drama genre. I've always been fond of his thrillers, as for his older colleague Jean-Pierre Melville, to whom I have a specific love - a hardboiled, stylised aesthetic which holds up great to his magnificent lighting and sceneries. And he was one of the first who really understood how to use Cinemascope.

Late one evening in 1971, Bergman and his friend and director Kjell Grede by pure coincidence stumbled upon a copy of Andrej Rubljov in a screening room at Svensk Filmindustri. They saw it without any subtitles. He ranks it to be one of his most startling and unforgettable movie experiences ever.

What have the Americans meant? Their dramaturgy echoed in his head when he as a 24-year old got a job at SF's script department, as soon as they could, the distribution people ran two floors down to watch the latest imports from USA, and found that writing or developing a script after any other rules than Hollywood's completely out of the question.
- My first scripts and movies are built on that. It felt good to have the American dramaturgy to lean upon in the beginning. Obviously, later, it was all about breaking loose from it. The one I've admired the most is the old Austrian-in-exile Billy Wilder. He was a virtuoso at directing actors, and always picked the ones who were absolutely perfect for his films, including Marilyn Monroe. I love Wilder.
- Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese, and Coppola, even if he seems to have ceased making films, and Steven Soderbergh - they all have something to say, they're passionate, they have an idealistic attitude to the filmmaking process. Soderbergh's Traffic is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty and Magnolia.

When talking about Swedish film after Victor Sjöström, Bergman becomes extatic about Jan Troell, appoints Lukas Moodysson "one hell of a talented guy", and speaks highly about Möte med ondskan, Reza Parsa's new short film about a suicide bomber.
- In its format it's in the same league as No Man's Land, it's the same bottomless despair and the same kind of black irony and humour in the middle of this misery. It's very deep and intense and wonderfully done. And at the same time it shows what is the big wonder about movies: the human face. The right close-up in the right moment has an enormous impact. If it's adequately composed and the lighting is good and you have a good actor, you can really stay on it forever. My dream when I was active was to make an entire feature film in one single close-up.

When I'm asking if Bergman has followed any of the criticism on his films with any kind of interest, he mentions a couple of examples from the early days. The fact that he, fifty years later, can still remember quotes by heart might mean that they left deep scars. "I refuse to write about the puke Bergman left behind this time", the columnist Filmson wrote in Aftonbladet about Gycklarnas afton. Even more unbelievable considering the status of the writer, was Olof Lagercrantz's review of Sommarnattens leende in DN: "an immature youth's bad imagination", "I'm ashamed about having seen it".
- I had one hell of mean and tough road to travel in the beginning. Nobody thinks about that anymore. I felt terrible. To have to see such reactions in print didn't exactly feel encouraging.

Bo Widerberg called you our Dala horse to the world.
- Yes, well that was a clever formulation. But I've never been angry or bitter about him for that, because after all we were in the same business, this ****ing whoring and butchering business. Bosse Widerberg was a clever bastard. He thought: if I publicly throw myself over Bergman, then I get the headlines! That's how it works in this business. Myself, I never said a bad word about him as long as he lived. Kvarteret Korpen is a completely flawless masterpiece. He was a wonderful, great film director. However, I don't think he was a good theatre director, he had no patience for that.

Speaking of theatre, when we're talking, Bergman's version of Henrik Ibsen's Gengångare is playing at Dramaten. During the preparation he wanted the ensemble to read and discuss "Doctor Romand", Emmanuel Carrère's book about the French doctor who in 1993 murdered his entire family rather than admitting his life was a lie. To Bergman the book was very useful "course literature" to a play which centers around facades and illusions and how the compact lifelong lie is eating up people from the inside. From Gengångare the conversation drifts into his legendary time at the theatre in Malmö.
- Back then, people knew they could go to the theatre because they knew they would get something out of it, either from the Big or the Little Scene. These guys who've followed, they've made the audience distrustful. They have - as my old boss Lars-Levi Laestadius said - been playing posters. German turn-of-the-century playwrights no-one's heard about. The people of Malmö have spent millions to restore Hipp, and then this young director filled with the ambition to claim his artistic quality comes along, playing one incomprehensible play after another. The audience comes, their jaws drop, they don't get it, they go home and think **** it, our millions are wasted. Things like that shouldn't be allowed to happen!

And this young director is now the newly appointed boss of Dramaten.
- Yes, but you see, now he has a great advantage after having been in Malmö for six years. He's realized that he did the wrong thing. It's a damn difference between being at Stadsteatern there and being at Dramaten here, because it's two completely diferrent kinds of audiences. Here, there's a passionate, interested audience, a real theatre audience, and he's a real theatre man. Staffan Valdemar Holm is just right for the job. He will be great for the theatre.