The protective shell

I wrote my films not really understanding what I’d written. Then I shot them, and they meant certain things to me. But what they meant—that I didn’t really understand until afterwards. Long afterwards. If my relationships to my own products are so odd, it’s because often when I’m writing and shooting a film I’m inside some sort of protective shell. I hardly analyze what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. I rationalize afterwards.

—Ingmar Bergman, quoted by Eric Lax in Conversations with Woody Allen

Building the cathedral

People ask what are my intentions with my films—my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed—master builders, artists, laborers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres…

Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil—or perhaps a saint—out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts.

Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.

—Ingmar Bergman