Good talk between Woody Allen and Richard Corliss in Time about Allen’s relationship with Ingmar Bergman.

Woody Allen recounts how Bergman would confide in him his irrational fears about directing:

W.A.: He’d tell me, for instance, 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.

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

W.A.: 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.

Allen goes on to say that Bergman’s films have eternal significance because they deal with “the difficulty of personal relationships and lack of communication between people and religious aspirations and mortality, existential themes that will be relevant a thousand years from now.

We’re not sure we agree entirely with this statement. The themes themselves–the hardships of personal relationships, communication breakdowns, religion, morality–will probably become all the more significant in the next 1000 years, but perhaps not so with the films. It is one thing to say the films will be relevant and another to say the themes will be. Bergman’s films were just one vehicle for those themes, and perhaps not the most durable.