Written Interview: Woody Allen (on Ingmar Bergman)

Via THR, an interview with Woody Allen in which he pays tribute to screenwriter-director Ingmar Bergman. Excerpts:

Back in the 1960s, the arrival of each new Bergman movie was treated as a major event by the film cognoscenti. But what do you think is Bergman’s status today?

The younger generation is just basically film-ignorant. Not just about Bergman, but Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Bunuel. Film is not part of their general literacy. But the Bergman films remain great. They are great films — just as are the Bunuel films, the Kurosawa films, all of the films of that great flourishing of European cinema — all those films were great, great movies. The Seventh Seal was great then, and it’s great now. They don’t know The Bicycle Thief; they don’t know Grand Illusion. And many, many of them don’t know Citizen Kane. If they do know it, they know it as something they happened to see on television. They don’t have the same general reverence — which I’m not criticizing them for — there’s no reason why they would or should. It’s just a different time. Their icons and their heroes lie in a different area.

You were in high school when you first saw Summer With Monika. What do you remember about your first encounter with a Bergman movie?

Yes, yes, I remember that. The first Bergman I ever saw was that one because there was talk in the neighborhood that there was a nude scene. This was unheard of in any American film, that level of advancement. It’s so funny to think of it that way. I saw it, and it was a very, very interesting film apart from the utterly benign nude moment. A short time after that, I just happened to see Sawdust and Tinsel. I had no idea it was done by Bergman — that is, the person who’d done Summer With Monika — and it was just a fabulous movie. I was riveted in my seat by it all. I thought to myself, “Who is this guy?” It was a sensational movie. Again, I filed it under just another wonderful foreign movie, which was a fairly common experience that one could have in those days. There were so many foreign-film houses and so many good films. And then there was a little rush in New York where there was some press heat on Bergman for Wild Strawberries and The Magician and then The Seventh Seal. They didn’t necessarily come out in that order, but those three. Those were electrifying films — they were sensational.

What did you respond to? Was it their style, or their themes, if you can separate the two?

It was a combination of three things. It was the fact that thematically, the material resonated with me so strongly. Secondly, his cinematic technique, his style, was so interesting, so intense and so riveting to me. And the third was that his approach was poetic. It wasn’t prose; it was a poetic approach. The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician were really poetic films in the same sense as that, when years went by, you see in a film like Cries and Whispers — there is really very little dialogue in it. You are hypnotically riveted by the camera moving around this red house. It’s watching poetry in motion.