Ingmar Bergman “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.
“He confided about his irrational dreams, that he would show up on the set and not know where to put the camera and be completely 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. 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.” — Woody Allen, who met Bergman once and spoke to him many times after that, speaking to Time‘s Richard Corliss.