Ingmar Bergman Quotes: Profound Wisdom & Cinematic Insight
Theater is like a faithful wife. A movie is a great adventure, a mistress. It is expensive and demanding.
No art form goes beyond the common consciousness as the movie does. It goes straight to our emotions.
I hope I never grow old, that’s why I’m religious.
In a fight with one of my sons, I said, “I know I’ve been a terrible father.” He replied, “A father? You haven’t been even that.”
(On Orson Welles): To me it’s empty and uninteresting. It’s dead. Citizen Kane (1941), of which I have a copy, is a film loved by all the critics, but I find it a total bore. Above all, the performances are useless. The respect people have for the movie is absolutely incredible.
I never liked Orson Welles as an actor, because he was never really an actor. In Hollywood you have two categories, the actors and the personalities. Welles was a huge personality, but when he plays Othello, everything goes down the drain. For me, he is an infinitely bad filmmaker.
(About Jean-Luc Godard): I never liked his films. I always found them cinematically interesting and infinitely boring. Godard is a bore who made films for the critics.
Among the directors who impress me, I mention Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
(About Michelangelo Antonioni): He made two masterpieces and then didn’t have to worry about the rest. One of them is Blow Up (1966), which I watched many times, and Night (1961), also a wonderful film. However, I hated it and found The Scream (1957) very boring and diabolically sad. Antonioni never really learned a craft. He concentrated on isolated images, never realizing that film is a rhythmic flow of images, a movement.
Film is a dream, like music. No art passes into our consciousness the way film does. It goes straight to our feelings and touches the depths of our souls.
My view of things is fundamental: it is to have no basic view of anything. My dogmas no longer exist.
(On Andrei Tarkovsky): When your film is not a document, it is a dream. That is why it is the greatest of all. It moves so naturally in the room of dreams. It does not explain itself. What is it supposed to explain after all? It is a spectator, capable of staging its visions in the most heavy, but in a way, the most willing of media.
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