Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman: The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.

Billie August: One day, I got a call from a man, and he said "This is Ingmar Bergman and I've written a piece about my parents and I've decided at this point in my life I don't want to direct anymore and I would like you to do it if you are interested."

Billie August: I spent almost 3 months with Bergman, four hours every afternoon. We sat and went through the whole script. To be honest, most of the time we talked about life and other different things. It was really a wonderful time.

Jackie DeShannon: I think Ingmar Bergman, Francoise Truffaut - all these people created images in my mind, beautiful pictures, I loved what was known at that time as the foreign film.

Ingmar Bergman: 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.

Ingmar Bergman: No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

Ingmar Bergman: In a quarrel with one of my sons, I said: "I know I've been a lousy father." He said: "A father? You haven't been a father at all!"

Ingmar Bergman: I hope I never get so old I get religious.

Ingmar Bergman: Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

Steven Spielberg (about Ingmar Bergman): I have always admired him, and I wish I could be a equally good filmaker as he is, but it will never happen. His love for the cinema almost gives me a guilty conscience.

Ingmar Bergman: I want very much to tell, to talk about, the wholeness inside every human being. It's a strange thing that every human being has a sort of dignity or wholeness in him, and out of that develops relationships to other human beings, tensions, misunderstandings, tenderness, coming in contact, touching and being touched, the cutting off of a contact and what happens then.