Max von Sydow Quotes

The most difficult part of playing Christ was that I had to keep up the image around the clock. As soon as the picture finished, I returned home to Sweden and tried to find my old self. It took six months to get back to normal.

People seem to think I`m a very religious person, very serious, that I`m an old man by now - and that I play a great deal of chess. Actually, I`m a family person. I`m rather private. I enjoy my work very much when it`s interesting and, fortunately, it`s been mostly interesting. I like nature and being outdoors. I`m a gardener at my summer home. I like to travel. I`m not as serious as they think I am - I don`t even play chess. And I really don`t know myself too well.

Movies give me an opportunity to go places. I`m not only a Swede but an American, not just a man of my time, but I`ve been living 2,000 years ago-and not just in a new country, America, but in the Holy Land, too.

Many persons believe that an actor must identify himself with his role. I do not do that, although I do become involved with my parts while I play them. But I find it a virtue to do things which are not of myself. This is the Swedish concept of an actor.

Playing the role of Christ was like being in a prison. It was the hardest part I`ve ever had to play in my life. I couldn`t smoke or drink in public. I couldn`t.

Producers are not gamblers. They want a good return on their investment.

In Hollywood they usually cast me as villains or priests.

I`m getting too old to play some parts, but I`m still greedy.

I`ve never been in a barroom brawl in my life. I just don`t do such things.

I admire people like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, who seem to be so very real-I don`t know how they do it. When I was young I admired Leslie Howard enormously, in films like The Scarlet Pimpernel, Gone With the Wind, and Pygmalion. Also Gary Cooper; perhaps he was not a great actor, but he had a great presence.

Filming is repetition and many takes.

I just feel I shouldn`t work too much, because there are so many other things to do.

In this country, you have movie actors and theatre actors and television actors.

Spielberg knows his craft so well, he can also improvise, and that is a lot of fun.

Sometimes I receive strange letters, and occasionally people come up to me in the street and say odd things. They want to be deceived, so it is difficult to disabuse them. At times it is tiring not to be allowed to be a private person. If you are really marked out as a film star in the United States, then it must be absolutely exhausting and hard to maintain your integrity. Fortunately, Swedes are very reserved as a people and seldom show their emotions or feelings in public, so one is not subject to that kind of pressure in the country where I come from.

The studio rented a house for my wife in Los Angeles under a phony name to keep reporters away. Whenever I wanted to visit her and my children, I would have to sneak in the back door after dark.

He is a friend I love dearly as perhaps you can only love someone you have both worked with and known personally. It is a double relationship mixed into one. We haven`t worked together for several years and I miss that very much. - Liv Ullmann, 1979

There are those who want to believe but can`t, and there are those who believe as children and it`s no problem for them at all.

I`m not in retirement. I just don`t want to work so much, and I don`t get that many offers any more.

I have been brought up as a stage actor and there is where I feel at home, but I still feel that the cinema has one great advantage over the theater. Namely, proximity to the audience. Of course in a film an actor always has only himself as an audience while on a stage he can achieve a result along with his audience. However, when you stand on a stage, you can never work with your face in the same way as you can in front of a camera.

I remember those days with Bergman with great nostalgia. We were aware that the films were going to be quite important, and the work felt meaningful.

Acting is such a weird profession. It`s such a futile thing. Even when it`s there on film, there`s nothing really to it. It is not like making a piece of furniture or writing a book.

I am considered to be an intellectual actor and I also am one inasmuch as I want to be aware of what I am doing. But I never try to influence the writing of the manuscript.

I accept a role only if it`s something I really, really like.

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.

If I watch my old films, for example The Seventh Seal, I realize I do a lot of stage acting there; I have always been disturbed by the declamatory fashion in which I speak in a film like that. But then TV suddenly swept through Sweden, and we were all soon accustomed to realism, from newsreels, talk shows, and then of course there was the Method school of acting, which exerted an influence in Europe also. Today, theater actors, and film actors with a stage background, use a different style to the one we subscribed to during the 1940s and 1950s. Bergman`s dialog in those days was very stylized, so it would have been difficult for me to speak those lines realistically.

In a theater, the part is mine and I can control it as I want to. In the movies, I don`t have direct contact, and I am fighting technical machinery.

The theater is more a medium for an actor than the cinema is. You are totally responsible for what you do on the stage; in a film, someone else can come in and edit you and do something totally different to what you had in mind originally, and they can cut you out, play around with the scenes or the chronology of the story. This happens always-more or less-in the cinema. On the stage, you deliver a performance and that is your responsibility. So film-making is much more a director`s medium than it is an actor`s.

I don`t believe in devils. Indifference and misunderstandings can create evil situations. Most of the time, people who appear to be evil are really victims of evil deeds.

It`s important to me to work in my own language now and then. I love English, but you can never learn to master a foreign language if you`re not brought up with it.

I don`t think they (Bergman`s roles) were written for me as a personality. Many of his characters through the years have been related: there are those who want to believe but cannot, and there are those who believe like children and it`s no problem for them at all, and there are those who do not want to believe, and there are the strains between these various characters and their conflicts, which are all probably conflicts within Ingmar himself.

When I finished the role of Christ, I felt as though I`d been let out on parole. A man who has served 18 months isn`t eager to go back to prison.

Perhaps I scare people. I don`t know why.

I want people to think, `Maybe there is something more there.` I want to be a mystery. (on how he wants people to perceive him)

All my life I`ve been looking for diversity.

The offers I get are for grandfathers, uncles - and they often die very quickly in the script.

The idea of working with Steven Spielberg was very attractive. He`s such a master. He knows the language of the camera and of filmmaking, which gives him a great freedom.

Only very rarely are foreigners or first-generation immigrants allowed to be nice people in American films. Those with an accent are bad guys.

I began imagining scenes in public which some drunk would come up to me and slap me in the face. Nothing like that ever happened, but I often wonder if I would have turned the other cheek.

A vacation spot out of season always has a very special magic.

Playing Christ, I began to feel shut away from the world. A newspaper became one of my biggest luxuries. I noticed that some of my close friends began treating me with reverence.

If Jesus came back today, and saw what was going on in his name, he`d never stop throwing up.

The more I had to act like a saint, the more I felt like being a sinner.

Bergman has a very special eye for people. His background taught him to listen and to feel.

There`s an enigmatic relationship between Max and myself. He has meant a tremendous amount to me....As an actor, Max is sound through and through. Robust. Technically durable. If I`d had a psychopath to present these deeply psychopathic roles, it would have been unbearable. It`s a question of acting the part of a broken man, not of being him. The sort of exhibitionism in this respect which is all the rage just now will pass over, I think. By and by people will regain their feeling for the subtle detachment which often exists between Max and my madmen. - Ingmar Bergman, Bergman on Bergman (1968)

You have to get more involved in a Bergman film than you do in others, because it deals with much deeper and more philosophic questions than the average movie. He also establishes a much closer relationship with his actors and technicians than would ever be possible on larger productions.

At home (in Sweden), the actor`s profession was not considered particularly reputable, but being an actor or star in a Hollywood film was something very important in American eyes. Then I slowly realized that as an actor in Sweden you were allowed to be involved in some kind of artistic project which could be a flop and yet still be justifiable if it carried artistic weight and ambitions. In Hollywood, on the other hand, if you do not succeed you are nobody. You become a mere piece of paper with a figure on it. You are just as good-or bad-as your last film was financially. And while Sweden remains sufficiently small for you to work in, say, Malmö and still make films in Stockholm, in the States you either work in Hollywood or you live somewhere else and you work for the legitimate theater.