'As a producer I was quite aware of the financial risk in a motion picture with so serious a theme. I placed the refused screenplay for The Seventh Seal in his lap and said, 'Now or never, Carl Anders!' He said, 'Sure, sure, but I have to read it first.' 'You must have already read it since you turned it down.' 'That's true, but maybe I didn't read it carefully enough.ĭymling eventually gave his consent to the project, yet only granted Bergman a minimal budget and a particularly limited shooting time: 36 days.ĭymling's own recollections differ somewhat: I found him sitting in a hotel room in Cannes, overexcited and out of control, selling Smiles of a Summer Night dirt cheap to any horse trader who happened to show up. Then I flew down to see the head of Svensk Filmindustri, Carl Anders Dymling. Bolstered by his recent success, he made a new attempt:

Photo: Jens Gustafsson © Stiftelsen Ingmar Bergmanīergman had already passed on his screenplay to his production company Svensk Filmindustri, but it had been refused. Handwritten script for Death and the Knight. Paradoxically enough, his 'difficult' existential dramas of the latter half of the 1950s became far more successful with international audiences than the more accessible comedies he had served up previously. Whether it was this negative reception on the home front or the international success that led Bergman in a new direction is hard to say, but it is clear that The Seventh Seal marks a turning point in Bergman's career, both in artistic and commercial terms.

Before that, the film had been totally panned by Dagens Nyheter's influential arts editor Olof Lagercrantz, who declared himself ashamed of having seen it. When he wrote the words above in his workbook (the Bibi he names is his partner at the time, the actress Bibi Andersson) he had just had his first international success: his comedy Smiles of a Summer Night had won the jury's special award at the Cannes Film Festival for its 'poetic humour'. With hindsight, therefore, it might seem hard for many people to believe that he enjoyed his first major triumphs as a director of comedies. The typical view of Ingmar Bergman is of a brooding intellectual agonising with his inner demons. It's better to do this than a bad comedy. I mustn't let myself get scared off any more.

Bergman 7th seal