Woman, Man, Death, God

By RICHARD CORLISS

He created indelible allegories of postwar man adrift without God. He was the movies' great dramatist of strong, tortured women and the finest director of actresses. More than any other filmmaker, he raised the status of movies to an art form equal to novels and plays. Yet when Ingmar Bergman died at 89, the popular description of him was, Woody Allen's favorite director.

What did the domineering Swedish tragedian and the nebbishy American comedian have in common? Plenty. Both created original scripts from their experiences and obsessions. Both worked fast--at least a movie a year for most of their long careers--and relatively cheap. Both forged long relationships with their sponsoring studios. And Bergman was a strong influence on Allen's work: from his New Yorker parody of The Seventh Seal ("Death Knocks," in which the hero plays not chess with Death but gin rummy) to a cameo by the Grim Reaper in Love and Death and, more deeply, the inspiration for the theme and tone of Interiors and Another Woman. Shooting his new film in Spain, Allen took time to talk about Bergman with TIME's Richard Corliss.

TIME: Young people who saw Bergman's films in the '50s were often overwhelmed with an almost religious conviction. And the religion was that film was an art.

WOODY ALLEN: I agree. For me it was Wild Strawberries. Then The Seventh Seal and The Magician. We knew that Bergman was a magical filmmaker. There had never been anything like it, this combination of intellectual, artist and film technician.

After long admiring him, you finally met him, through the actress Liv Ullmann.

We had dinner in his New York hotel suite. He was not at all what you might expect: the formidable, dark, brooding genius. He was a regular guy. He commiserated with me about low box-office grosses and women and having to put up with studios.

Later he'd speak to me by phone from his oddball little island [Faro, where Bergman lived his last 40 years]. He confided about his irrational dreams: for instance, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be panic stricken. He'd have to wake up and tell himself that he is an experienced, respected director, and he certainly does know where to put the camera. But that anxiety was with him long after he had created 15, 20 masterpieces.

You knew he was Ingmar Bergman, but maybe he didn't. He didn't get to view his reputation from the outside.

Exactly. The world saw him as a genius, and he was worrying about the weekend grosses. Yet he was plain and colloquial in speech, not full of profound pronunciamentos about life. Sven Nykvist [his cinematographer] told me that when they were doing all those scenes about death and dying, they'd be cracking jokes and gossiping about the actors' sex lives.

You worked with Nykvist on four films. And you seem to share Bergman's work ethic.

I copied some of that from him. I liked his attitude that a film is not an event you make a big deal out of. He felt filmmaking was just a group of people working. He worked very fast. He'd shoot seven or eight pages of script at a time. They didn't have the money to do anything else.

You and I, we both know he's great. But to many young people--I mean bright, film-savvy kids--he's Ingmar who? What relevance do his films have today?

I think his films have eternal relevance, because his films deal with the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality--existential themes that will be relevant 1,000 years from now. When many of the things that are successful and trendy today have been long relegated to musty-looking antiques, his stuff will still be great.

But not many artists worry about God's silence these days. In the media, the war is between militant believers and devout atheists. Very few tortured agnostics.

You're right. That was his obsession. He was brought up religiously [his father was a Lutheran minister], and he longed for the possibility of religious phenomena. That longing tortured him his whole life. But in the end, he was a great entertainer. The Seventh Seal, The Magician, they grip you. It's not like doing homework.

If someone who hadn't seen any of his films asked you to recommend just five, what would be your Bergman starter set?

The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician, Cries and Whispers and Persona.

Many directors would have been happy to have made just those five films.

Or one of them.

For more of the wide-ranging conversation between the film critic and the director, go to time.com/woodyallen