Ingmar Bergman Quotes - Page 3

I have thus decided to make a certain film and now begins the complicated and difficult-to-master work. To transfer rhythms, moods, atmosphere, tensions, sequences, tones and scents into words and sentences in a readable or at least understandable script. This is difficult but not impossible.

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.

The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other.

Today we say all art is political. But I'd say all art has to do with ethics. Which after all really comes to the same thing. It's a matter of attitudes.

To humiliate and be humiliated, I think, is a crucial element in our whole social structure. It's not only the artist I'm sorry for. It's just that I know exactly where he feels most humiliated.

One of ennui's most terribel components is the overwhelming feeling of ennui that comes over you whenever you try to explain it.

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

Self-portraiture is something one should never get involved in, since it is wrong to lie even though one endeavours to tell the truth.

I don't watch my own films very often. I become so jittery and ready to cry... and miserable. I think it's awful.

Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bunuel move in the same field as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness.

Say anything you want against The Seventh Seal. My fear of death - this infantile fixation of mine - was, at that moment, overwhelming. I felt myself in contact with death day and night, and my fear was tremendous. When I finished the picture, my fear went away. I have the feeling simply of having painted a canvas in an enormous hurry - with enormous pretension but without any arrogance. I said, 'Here is a painting; take it, please.'

I write scripts to serve as skeletons awaiting the flesh and sinew of images.

Tarkovsky for me is the greatest [director], the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.

This damned ranting about doom. Is that food for the minds of modern people? Do they really expect us to take them seriously?

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence.

I was a very unpleasant young man. If I met the young Ingmar today I'd say, 'You're very talented and I'll try to help you, but I don't want anything else to do with you.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

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.

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 want knowledge. Not belief. Not surmise. But knowledge. I want God to put out His hand, show His face, speak to me.

I am conscious about myself and everything, and then suddenly, or slowly, my conscious fades out. Switches off. And it's not existing, and that's a marvelous feeling. That from existing, I am not existing. And at that moment, nothing can happen to me.

I have a lot of tics and phobias. I hate to travel. I hate to go to festivals. I hate it when somebody gets close behind me. I'm scared of the darkness. I hate open doors.

Either I did away with that fear through writing, or in the course of writing, I discovered it was no longer so intrusive or threating. The bottom line is, it's gone.

Artistic license sneered through the thin fabric.

For me, in those days, the great question was: Does God exist? Or doesn't God exist? Can we, by an attitude of faith, attain to a sense of community and a better world? Or, if God doesn't exist, what do we do then? What does our world look like then? In none of this was there the least political colour.