It was at Ingrid’s urging that Bergman brought all of his children together for the first time, for his 60th birthday, on Fårö in 1978, and the gathering quickly became a tradition. “He was so nervous that until the last moment, he said he wanted to cancel it,” recalls Laretei. “Many of them hadn’t met before.” By then, four of his children, all with second wife Ellen Lundström, a former dancer, had careers in the arts: Eva and Jan were theater directors, and Anna and Mats both actors who later appeared in Fanny and Alexander, as did Laretei. (Bergman wanted Liv Ullmann to play the mother and Linn the eldest sister, but Liv turned him down.) Though an absentee father for much of their lives, Bergman began to have more contact. Still, he didn’t go in for socializing, and even though Laretei shared his birthday and celebrated with a dinner for all his visitors every year at Dämba, Bergman and Ingrid would stop by later in the evening, after it was over.
The only place he would gather his brood was in his screening room. “Ingmar didn’t like spontaneous meetings with his children,” recalls Rodell, who was also Laretei’s accompanist, “but at the cinema, there was always something to talk about, and you met in some kind of structure. He liked that. Everyone lived in their own house, a little bit apart from one another, and then we met at specific hours.” As Rodell’s partner, Benny Marcel, another close friend of Bergman’s, saw it, “getting quality time with their father wasn’t easy. So on a fantastic afternoon when the sun was shining, they had to sit in a dark cinema to meet with him.”
But when they did get time with him, he was accessible, relating easily to their own children, for whom he’d concoct frightening tales about the so-called witch’s hut that stood in the forest next to his house. “It’s good for kids to be scared by stories,” he’d say. He once organized a special screening “just for the boys” when Linn’s then 10-year-old son and two other boys were visiting Fårö. The film was Pearl Harbor, and Bergman insisted on fast-forwarding past the sex scenes to focus on the action.
For a filmmaker whose subject was “the soul’s battlefield,” as Woody Allen once put it, Bergman had surprisingly populist tastes. He relished long gossipy telephone chats and was as likely to watch Fellini’s Amarcord as The Godfather, Pulp Fiction or the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera. Screening Jurassic Park one day, he marveled at Hollywood ingenuity. “Those Americans know how to put on the pants!” he said.
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