- The theater is like a faithful wife. The film is the great adventure - the costly, exacting mistress.
- No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.
- I hope I never get old so I get religious.
- 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!"
- [on Orson Welles] For me he's just a hoax. It's empty. It's not interesting. It's dead. Citizen Kane (1941), 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. The amount of respect that movie's got is absolutely unbelievable.
- [on Orson Welles] 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 croaks. In my eyes he's an infinitely overrated filmmaker.
- [on Jean-Luc Godard] 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 fucking bore. He's made his films for the critics. One of the movies, Masculine Feminine (1966), was shot here in Sweden. It was mind-numbingly boring.
- Among today's directors I'm of course impressed by Steven Spielberg and Scorsese [Martin Scorsese], and Coppola [Francis Ford 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 (2000) is amazing. Another great couple of examples of the strength of American cinema is American Beauty (1999) and Magnolia (1999).
- [on Michelangelo Antonioni] He's done two masterpieces, you don't have to bother with the rest. One is Blow-Up (1966), which I've seen many times, and the other is La Notte (1961), also a wonderful film, although that's mostly because of the young Jeanne Moreau. In my collection I have a copy of Il Grido (1957) and damn what a boring movie it is. So devilishly sad, I mean. You know, Antonioni never really learned the trade. He concentrated on single images, never realizing 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 (1960), for example. Only indifference. I never understood why Antonioni was so incredibly applauded. And I thought his muse Monica Vitti was a terrible actress.
- I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.
- I think I have made just one picture that I really like, and that is Winter Light (1963). Everything is exactly as I wanted to have it, in every second of this picture.
- 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.
- Everything is worth precisely as much as a belch, the difference being that a belch is more satisfying.
- My basic view of things is - not to have any basic view of things. From having been exceedingly dogmatic, my views on life have gradually dissolved. They don't exist any longer.
- I'm deeply fixated on my childhood. Some impressions are extremely vivid, light, smell, and all. There are moments when I can wander through my childhood's landscape, through rooms long ago, remember how they were furnished, where the pictures hung on the walls, the way the light fell. It's like a film-little scraps of a film, which I set running and which I can reconstruct to the last detail-except their smell.
- [on Andrei Tarkovsky] When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure - The Serpent's Egg (1977), The Touch (1971), Face to Face (1976) and so on.
- [on Federico Fellini] He is enormously intuitive. He is intuitive; he is creative; he is an enormous force. He is burning inside with such heat. Collapsing. Do you understand what I mean? The heat from his creative mind, it melts him. He suffers from it; he suffers physically from it. One day when he can manage this heat and can set it free, I think he will make pictures you have never seen in your life. He is rich. As every real artist, he will go back to his sources one day. He will find his way back.
- [on Alfred Hitchcock] I think he's a very good technician. And he has something in Psycho (1960), he had some moments. "Psycho" is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more - no, I don't want to know - about his behavior with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.
- When I was young, I was extremely scared of dying. But now I think it a very, very wise arrangement. It's like a light that is extinguished. Not very much to make a fuss about.
- I'd prostitute my talents if it would further my cause, steal if there was no way out, killing my friends or anyone else if it would help my art.
- I've had to learn everything about movies by myself. For the theater, I studied with a wonderful old man in Goteborg, where I spent four years. He was a hard, difficult man, but he knew the theater- and I learned from him. For the movies, however, there was no one. Before the War, I was a schoolboy. Then, during the War, we got see no foreign films at all. By the time it was over, I was working had to support a wife and three children. Before, fortunately, I am by nature an autodidact, one who can teach himself- though it's an uncomfortable thing at times. Self-taught people sometimes cling too much to the technical side, the sure side and place technical perfection too high.
- New cities arouse too many sensations in me. They give me too many impressions to experience at the same time. They all crowd in on me. Being in a new city overwhelms me, unsettles me.
- To shoot a film is to organize an entire universe.
- [on Andrei Tarkovsky] My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly I found myself standing at the door of a room, the key to which, until then, had never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
- [on Akira Kurosawa] Now I want to make it plain that The Virgin Spring (1960) must be regarded as an aberration. It's touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa.
- Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.
- Working in this medium and being a man of the theater, I'm like the common whore. I have an enormous need for people to like me and what I'm doing. That it be accepted and praised and so forth. It's always painful to be disapproved of.
- [Interviewed for Sommar on Swedish Radio P1 in 2004] I have asked prominent composers. I have asked prominent musicians. Several conductors. Where does the music come from? What, how can it be that we are the only animals, on the entire globe of the earth that makes music? And why do we do it and how has it come to be? That is something I really would like to know because none of these people I have asked has been able to give any answer to "where does the music come from?" "Why do we have music?" Personally I have an impression, that the music is a thing we have been given as a gift. I am not a believer but I do still believe that the music is a gift, so that we might have an impression of realities and worlds beyond the world we live in.
- Directing is more fun with women. Everything is.
- My professor told me when I started in the '40s that a director should listen and keep his mouth shut. Took me a long time to understand I talked too much. Now I know you should listen with your ears - and your heart.
- [2002 interview] I watch films. I go to the cinema five days a week. At three in the afternoon, I go to the cinema. Swedish film has had a surge of power and vitality. What sometimes still worries me is that....I know Antonioni said on one occasion something really good. He said that, "A film is a curious medium, in the sense that if you have something to say, you can really say it with film and you can be as clumsy as you like." Perhaps he didn't say "clumsy". You see what I mean? And he wasn't a technician, Antonioni, God should bear witness to that. But he said one or two things. And he made two masterpieces: Blow-Up (1966) and La Notte (1961). But I think that those that are emerging are so incredibly talented. These young emerging directors. They know the job well. But it's not so often that they really have anything to say.
- [the last thing he said to actor Peter Stormare] Time and space separates us. But our souls are connected.
- [1982 interview, on the set of Fanny and Alexander (1982), on retiring from making feature-films] I will do some 50-minute TV plays, and perhaps another opera like "The Magic Flute", but I prefer to leave filmmaking to younger people. In earlier days, when I made these pronouncements about each film being my last, I said so with quite a different emphasis. I was a financial catastrophe, and I never knew when I would be forced to quit the industry. But now I need too much energy. Besides, it can never be more fun than it is now.
- Do you know what moviemaking is? Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours there are maybe only ten or twelve minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. And maybe they don't come. Then you have to gear yourself for another eight hours and pray you're going to get your good ten minutes this time. Everything and everyone on a movie set must be attuned to finding those minutes of real creativity. You've got to keep the actors and yourself in a kind of enchanted circle. An outside presence, even a completely friendly one, is basically alien to the intimate process going on in front of him. Any time there's an outsider on the set, we run the risk that part of the actors' absorption, or the technicians', or mine, is going to be impinged upon. It takes very little to destroy the delicate mood of total immersion in our work. We can't risk losing those vital minutes of real creation. The few times I've made exceptions I've always regretted it.
- If I didn't have my profession, I think I would be sitting in a nuthouse. But I have been unceasingly at work, and this has been very healthy for me. So I had no need for therapy.
- [1964 interview, asked where he got the idea for The Silence (1963)] A very big, fat old man. That's right. Four years ago, when I was visiting a friend in a hospital here [Stockholm], I noticed from his window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park. As I watched, four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of him being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind, although I didn't really know exactly why. It all grew from that seed, like most of my films have grown - from some small incident, a feeling I've had about something, an anecdote someone's told me, perhaps from a gesture or an expression on an actor's face. It sets off a very special sort of tension in me, immediately recognizable as such to me. On the deepest level, of course, the ideas for my films come out of the pressures of the spirit; and these pressures vary. But most of my films begin with a specific image or feeling around which my imagination begins slowly to build an elaborate detail. I file each one away in my mind. Often I even write them down in note form. This way I have a whole series of handy files in my head. Of course, several years may go by before I get around to transforming these sensations into anything as concrete as a scenario. But when a project begins to take shape, then I dig into one of my mental files for a scene, into another for a character. Sometimes the character I pull out doesn't get on at all with the other ones in my script, so I have to send him back to his file and look elsewhere. My films grow like a snowball, very gradually from a single flake of snow. In the end, I often can't see the original flake that started it all.
- I am very much aware of my own double self. The well-known one is very under control; everything is planned and very secure. The unknown one can be very unpleasant. I think this side is responsible for all the creative work - he is in touch with the child. He is not rational, he is impulsive and extremely emotional. Perhaps it is not even a 'he,' but a 'she'.
- I think I have just one obsession - to touch other human beings. That desire for contact, I think, was the reason why I came to this profession, because as a child I was very shy and very lonely and very afraid of other people. Of course, it was not only this very beautiful reason, but it was also a longing for power, for manipulating other people. I think that's a disease every director has - a kind of professional illness.
- If I cannot be perfect in my life, I will be perfect in my profession. You can't direct reality, and that sometimes makes me very insecure and scared. But when you direct a picture, you can decide everything. You can do everything you want, you can control every little detail. It's always handmade.
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