Stellan Skarsgård has claimed that the late director Ingmar Bergman was “the only person I know who cried when Hitler died.”
The Dune star, 74, worked with the groundbreaking director several times in Swedish theatre and television.
Bergman, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of all time thanks to classics such as 1957’s The Seventh Seal and 1966’s Persona. His 1972 film Cries and Whispers was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards.
Speaking at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, Skarsgård argued that it is possible to separate the greatness of Bergman’s work from his Nazi beliefs.
“My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,” said Skarsgård, per Variety.
“He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.”
Skarsgård starred in Bergman’s 1983 Swedish TV movie Hustruskolan (The School of Wives) and a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play.
“Bergman was manipulative,” continued Skarsgård. “He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died.
“We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn’t nice.”
Bergman admitted his Nazi beliefs during his later life, but said he had disavowed them after learning of the realities of the Holocaust.
In 1936, he saw Hitler speak while on an exchange trip to Germany. “Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,” Bergman later told the author Maria-Pia Boethius, who wrote a book assessing whether Sweden was as neutral as it claimed to be during World War II.
“The Nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful,” added Bergman. “The big threat were the Bolsheviks, who were hated.”
The director said he only gave up his Nazi beliefs after seeing images of concentration camps. “When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open, at first I did not want to believe my eyes,” he said. “When the truth came out it was a hideous shock for me. In a brutal and violent way I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.”
