As a child, Ingmar Bergman's parents locked him in a dark closet when he disobeyed. To amuse himself, he beamed a flashlight with a colored light onto the wall and pretended he was at the movies.
Now 71, the famed director has written a screenplay about his father, Erik Bergman, an insecure and depression-prone pastor, and his mother, Karin, a woman of iron self-discipline who cringed at any show of love.In "Good Intentions," Bergman casts back his memory and his imagination to the first 10 years of his parent's turbulent relationship and marriage.
The play is a six-hour chronicle in four acts, to be shown as a four-part television series and a two-part movie. Production begins late next year, and the scheduled premiere will be on Swedish television Channel One in 1992.
"I feel a great need to tell the story of these two people who are in my blood, my nerves and my genes," Bergman said.
Bergman gave up film direction after his 1982 "Fanny and Alexander," which won four Academy Awards. Since then, he has been busy producing stage plays at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, which once rejected him for a job when he was an aspiring 21-year-old production assistant.
For "Good Intentions," Bergman vacated the director's chair to Danish filmmaker Bille August, whose "Pelle the Conqueror" won the 1989 Academy Award for best foreign film. Bergman said that after he saw "Pelle" six times, the choice of the 40-year-old Dane was obvious.
August called the screenplay "one of the best love stories I have ever read. It is a great drama and an honor to take part in delivering."
As evidenced in his confession-like autobiography, "The Magic Lantern," Bergman has been grappling with confusion for many years over his feelings for his parents.
They have appeared on screen before, in some of the best of Bergman's 50 films. In "Fanny and Alexander," a soft-spoken clergymen slowly exposes himself as consumed with fanaticism and hatred.
The 1973 film "Cries and Whispers" is about three sisters and a servant girl. Bergman has said they represent four aspects of his mother, whom he was seeking to understand through his characters.
He nurtured the idea for "Good Intentions" ever since completing "Fanny and Alexander." In his memoirs, he wrote about his parents from his childhood perspective, which was often brutal and angry.
It left him unsatisfied. "I started writing about all the dreams and memories of my parents. Finally, I had a script," he said. It took him five months last year to write it.
The new film promises a sympathetic look at a young couple, a theology student and a somewhat spoiled young woman from an affluent home. The characters have fictional names, which allows Bergman to play with facts.
The movie covers the time of the couple's meeting in 1909 to the year of Bergman's birth in 1918.
In his memoirs, Bergman wrote about his failure to reach his parents and his own attempts to hide despair by burying any display of feeling. His emotions, he said, "inhabited a closed room and were produced on command, but never rashly."
He was raised according to "the concepts of sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness and grace - concrete factors in relationships between children, parents and God."
He described his father, a Lutheran minister, as "nervous, irritable and depressive. . . . He was always fretting and given to violent outbursts of temper."
His mother "was always tense, slept badly and used strong remedies which had side effects causing restlessness and anxiety. Like Father, she was haunted by a sense of inadequacy."
The book barely touches on his parent's feelings for each other, but a stormy picture emerges when it does.
As a child, he recalled seeing them in a fierce argument and scuffle. "We didn't know that Mother had gone through a passionate love affair or that Father suffered from severe depression. Mother was preparing to break out of her marriage, Father threatening to take his own life."
Divorce in those days was almost unthinkable, especially for a respected pastor, and the church stepped in to reconcile the couple.
Yet the reconciliation was mostly for show. "What was outwardly an irreproachable picture of good family unity was inwardly misery and exhausting conflicts," he wrote.