Stellan Skarsgård didn’t hold back when talking about his fellow countryman Ingmar Bergman at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. The Swedish actor said the legendary director “wasn’t nice,” “manipulative,” and, due to his early support of Adolf Hitler, a “Nazi.”
Variety reports that Skarsgård talked about his “complicated relationship” with Bergman at length at the annual Czech Republic festival. “He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole,” said the actor. “Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.” Skarsgård and Bergman only worked together once, on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg‘s “A Dream Play.”
After also calling the Swedish director “manipulative,” Skarsgård continued to eviscerate Bergman. “He was a Nazi during the war, and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn’t nice.”
While startling, Skarsgård’s comments shouldn’t come as a surprise to Bergman connaisseurs. The director’s early sympathy for Hitler and the Nazi party has been covered by biographers, and Bergman even spoke about the Nazi leader in a 1999 interview with the BBC and in his 1987 memoir “The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography.”
As a country, Sweden maintained neutrality during WWII, and while Bergman admits his support of Hitler as a youth, he turned away from Nazism after discovering the Holocaust’s many horror. “When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me,” Bergman said in the BBC interview. “In a brutal and violent way, I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.”
Still, Skarsgård’s comments appear to come from a personal place, and Nazism aside, calling someone manipulative and not nice speaks to inimical incidents between actor and director. Devoted fans of the director already know some of the difficulties baked into Bergman’s legacy (his five marriages for one, but also an irascible temperament), and Skarsgård’s words could cause some to reexamine their love and support of the iconic filmmaker.
But then, almost any artist (and human being, for that matter) is a complicated person: full of ambiguities, paradoxes, and unpleasant truths in their personal biographies. Bergman is no different, although Skarsgård has the right to “denounce [him] as an asshole,” a Nazi, or whatever. The actor’s words are a reminder that producers of great art may also not be the greatest people, whether we want to acknowledge that reality or not.
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