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 think I’m Swedish because I like to live here on this island. You can’t imagine the loneliness and isolation in this country. In that way, I’m very Swedish – I don’t dislike to be alone.
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.
The time between midnight and dawn when most people die, when sleep is deepest, when nightmares are most palatable. It is the hour when the sleepless are pursued by their sharpest anxieties, when ghosts and demons hold sway. The hour of the wolf is also the hour when most children are born.
It’s so horrible to see your own confusion and understand it.
I think I am a better ghost than I am a human being.
I would have been happier if I’d been anonymous.
Here in my solitude, I have the feeling that I contain too much humanity. It oozes out of me like a broken tube of toothpaste; it doesn’t want to stay within the confines of my body. A strange feeling of weight and volume. Soul volume perhaps, which rises like clouds of smoke and envelops my body.
We make an idol of our fear and that idol we call God.
My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles the critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.
You know I feel such tenderness for you. It’s difficult to bear. I don’t know what to do with my tenderness.
I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.
On the whole, however, art is free, shameless, irresponsible, and, as I said: the movement is intense, almost feverish, like, it seems to me, a snakeskin full of ants. The snake itself has long been dead, eaten, deprived of its poison, but the skin moves, filled with meddlesome life.
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.
It is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, genetaring and degenerating itself.
Man has made himself free, terribly and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept alive for the sake of sentimentality, as a conventional politeness toward the past, a benevolent solicitude of leisure’s increasingly nervous citizens.
Our human flesh needs touch and intimacy, what we get, or should get, from a mother – Woman. Shouts and whispers.
When I was a child, I imagined the soul to be a dragon, a shadow floating in the air like blue smoke – a huge winged creature, half bird, half fish. But inside the dragon, everything was red.
Every artist who creates intense depictions of his own problems, which he believes not only to be important to him, but also to others, needs to use himself.
I have always felt lonely in the world out there. That is why I escaped into filmmaking even though the feeling of community is an illusion.
It is always the case: if your tooth hurts, your tongue keeps going there. You are always conscious of a wound.