Woody Allen: When Woody met Ingmar

Nearly 50 years ago, Woody Allen saw his first film by Ingmar Bergman and immediately became a passionate admirer. He tells Mark Kermode why the Swede remains for him the greatest director

Everything I know about "high" culture I learnt from "low-brow" art. Fact. I would never have heard of Heidegger, Kant or Nietzsche if their names hadn't featured in a rude Monty Python song, which included the wonderful couplet: "René Descartes was a drunken fart,/ I drink therefore I am." I would never have read TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men" if Marlon Brando hadn't started slurring his way through it at the climax of Coppola's Apocalypse Now (ditto Conrad's Heart of Darkness). And I certainly would not have made an early connection with the films of the Swedish auteur Ingmar Bergman were it not for the fact that my favourite American comedian, Woody Allen, kept littering his movies and interviews with allusions to the maestro.

Nearly 30 years after first rushing out of a screening of Love and Death with a burning desire to read The Brothers Karamazov and watch The Seventh Seal (I achieved one of those two goals), I remain indebted to Allen for leading me to Bergman. It's a legacy which he's finding hard to accept. "First of all I can't imagine that my films would lead anyone to see Bergman's films," he says with trademark self-deprecating bemusement, a mixture of slightly rattled and gently amused. "But if I have had some impact in that area, it was in the fact that in New York City I was a very early devotee of Bergman's work. I latched onto him in a passionate way at a young age and I did many interviews in the course of my professional life, as a comedian and a film-maker, in which I spoke of his work and his genius, and I told people to go see his films. So in that sense I may have made some minor publicity contribution."

It's a "contribution" which Allen still honours to this day: in the middle of interviews to publicise his period romp The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (now on release in the UK) he agreed to take time out to talk again about Bergman's films, a season of which are playing on the big screen at London's National Film Theatre, and on the small screen on the digital channel Film Four World, where Woody himself can be found speaking passionately about the maestro's legacy. In an industry known for its rank self-centredness (an issue which Allen has covered in some depth in everything from Stardust Memories to Hollywood Ending), such noble banner-waving may be seen as an act of unusual good grace, but it's a debt Allen has always been happy to acknowledge. When Annie Hall won the Best Picture Oscar back in the seventies, for example, it was Allen who pointed out that the uncharacteristic lack of incidental jazz was partly inspired by Bergman's declaration that film music can be "barbaric".

Significant collaborations with Bergman colleagues followed, from Max von Sydow, who plays chess with death in The Seventh Seal and gets the best line in Hannah and her Sisters (re: the Holocaust: "The question isn't why? The question is, given what we are, why not more often?") to cameraman Sven Nykvist, whom Allen enlisted to shoot Another Woman and Crimes and Mis-demeanours after being "knocked out" by his work on films such as Cries and Whispers ("It's hypnotic; the way the camera just moves slowly in and out of those rooms, and the clocks tick – you're just mesmerised.").

Where did this long-standing screen romance begin? "I was a late teenager when I saw Summer with Monika," Allen remembers with genuine affection, "and The Naked Night – which was Sawdust and Tinsel in the original title – and they were just clearly superior to other people's movies. It's like if a guy's got musical talent, real genius, and he blows into a trumpet or he plays the piano, he just sounds better than everyone around him because of that ineffable, indefinable 'greatness'.

"At first, this intense talent of Bergman's was applied to drama between people, human emotions, and it was gripping and intense and full of surprise. Then when I saw Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal and The Magician, this enormous dramatic talent was applied not just to human emotions – he didn't lose that – but also to philosophical issues that were very meaningful to me. He was dramatising things that I had read about in Kierkegaard, in Nietzsche: big questions, existential questions. Here was a director making films that confronted those issues, that were intellectually stimulating, not in a pedantic way, but in an entertaining way, as any great murder mystery, or musical, or lighter film would entertain."

It is this sense of "entertainment" which Allen believes is the great triumph of Bergman's overtly philosophical films. "The fact that he's got a mind and an intellect, and the films are about something – that they are substantive and philosophical and profound on a human level – that's great. But he's first and foremost an entertainer. So it's not like doing homework. It's not like going to see some film that you hear is great and you watch it and you figure, 'Well yes, I'm sure it is great, but I was bored stiff.' Not at all! You go and watch a Bergman film and you're gripped like you're watching a suspense movie or some incredible drama.

"If you're gonna spend your 10 dollars on a movie and you just want to have a good time, I would recommend forgetting the messages and the issues that Bergman's dealing with and just watching his films on a purely entertainment level. I've spoken to people who saw The Magician years ago, who have never read Kierkegaard in their lives, and have no idea what the picture was representing, none whatsoever. And they've said to me, 'Gee, I don't know what it was about, I think he was just having a good time, but gosh it was so gripping, I was on the edge of my seat the whole way.' And I think this is perhaps Bergman's greatest strength."

On the subject of his favourite Bergman film, The Seventh Seal, which gave the world a scythe-wielding grim reaper who has since been parodied in everything from Love and Death to Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey, Allen concludes that the beauty lies in "the simplicity of it". "People have talked about the confrontation with mortality in so many different ways. But the effectiveness of his dramatisation, his sense of theatre, is so good that the minute the film starts you never take a breath till it's over. You are just sucked up in it.

"It's the ultimate subject matter: this profound existential discourse: is there a God? Is there no God? If there's no God how do we live and what do we do? Why isn't everything so terrifying that we're simply paralysed? All these questions, in all their unanswerable profundity, are explored with enormous theatricality. So it becomes like eating a very good meal, and you're left at the end feeling very fulfilled."

Intriguingly, considering Allen's own screen trajectory from knockabout romps (Bananas, Take the Money and Run) to more philosophical musings (Interiors, September, Crimes and Misdemeanours), the only corner of Bergman's oeuvre about which he is slightly less than effusive is the maestro's own "early funny ones". Having read weighty critical comparisons between A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy and Smiles of a Summer Night ("I don't see it myself,"), does Allen think Bergman can do comedy? "Well... if I want comedy I can find it in better places," he intones in fabulously deadpan fashion. "Personally, I don't consider Bergman a 'comic master', or at least that's not what interested me about him. Even Smiles of a Summer Night, which some consider his 'comic masterpiece', is a very charming film, it has a warmth to it, but it's not my favourite. What I favour about Bergman are the dark abysses that he travelled in – the bleak landscapes and the dark themes. That's where I think he really made his reputation, and made history."

And what of the now-famous New York summit in which Woody and Ingmar finally came face to face? "Oh, I had dinner with him one night in New York at his hotel suite, years ago," says Allen dismissively, "and I've had a couple of long phone conversations with him. I found him to be not some kind of exotic, pretentious genius, but like every other good film maker I've spoken to. He speaks in regular street terms, workman's terms, about working on films and the problems with shooting, with the audiences, with the producers, with the grosses, why something doesn't do well here, but it does well someplace else. It wasn't like going to visit Fu Manchu where a gong is rung and somebody comes out in a black robe and you sit there and discuss these profound silent movies about the inability of people to communicate or find meaning in life. It's not that at all! He's a very lively, charming, vital person with amusing things to say and, you know, it was... a very pleasant experience!"

The Film Four World Bergman Season continues with 'Winter Lights' today at 4pm (www.filmfour.com).The Ingmar Bergman season at the National Film Theatre, South Bank, London SE1 starts on 1 January and runs to the end of February (020-7928 3232; www.bfi.org)