Mind you, he could be very helpful. Here’s director Thomas Vinterberg (Festen) on some fatherly advice from Ingmar: “He asked me if I'd decided what to do after my film, and when I said no, he said, ‘Well you're fucked,’ and I said, ‘Why?’ and he said, ‘One thing that can happen is that you fail, and it won't be good for your self-confidence. It's much worse if you have success - you're absolutely paralysed by it. So you always have to decide your next movie before the opening of the present one.’ And he was so right. You don't turn into a career pilot, trying to navigate by success or failure, instead of deciding from your heart.”

Bergman has said that his films grew ''like a snowball'' from some insignificant fleck of an event, often triggering a memory. Filmmaking was therapy. ''I have been working all the time,'' he said, ''and it's like a flood going through the landscape of your soul. It's good because it takes away a lot. It's cleansing. If I hadn't been at work all the time, I would have been a lunatic.''

''When Ingmar was younger, there was a bitterness to his films,'' said Harry Schein. ''With Fanny and Alexander, there's a greater sense of harmony. I think Ingmar has it personally as well. In many ways, I feel he still lives a very difficult life - he talks of Angst, of that anxiety where you wake up in the middle of the night - but superficially he seems more harmonic. On the surface, he is nice and charming and almost civilized.''

The '50s Bergman, bent on establishing himself, was the archetypal angry young man, a temperamental, bohemian poseur. He split home, after coming to blows with his father. He read Sartre and Camus. He signed his letters with a scribble of a little devil. He even wore a beret and a scruffy beard. He tore telephones from the wall. He threw adolescent fits of temper. Once he chucked a chair right through the glass of a control booth. ''I was a package of emotions on two legs — my life was completely chaotic.'' Since those halcyon days, said producer Jorn Donner, Bergman tried hard to change. ''Ingmar has been trying to fight the bohemianism in himself by leading a well-ordered life. When you think you are a bohemian or a lazy person, you have to fight that and impose a discipline - it's a little puritanical. He is very much the bourgeois today - he likes to see Ingrid and himself as the proprietors of a small French restaurant - you can't get more bourgeois than that.''

His wife Ingrid - a steady, kindly woman who looked exactly like his mother — helped him get together with his brood of eight children from various marriages and liaisons. Later in life, his grown-up children and four grandchildren gathered at Faro every July for his birthday.