Bergman kept the Faith

The story is very simple.

Marianne Vogler, played by Lena Endre (right, with Michelle Gylemo), is a successful actress, happily married to Markus (Thomas Hanzon), a celebrated orchestra conductor. They have a nine-year-old daughter and their best friend is a film director (Krister Henriksson).

But Marianne has what should be a "simple, fun, exciting" affair with David and destroys everything in her life. The film is told in flashback through Marianne's story as told to an elderly film director named Bergman.

It is a morality tale which does not moralise, written by Ingmar Bergman with Lena in mind for the role. I suppose you could call it a modern-day emotional thriller about passion, infidelity and deception. When Ingmar approached me to direct it and told me it was semi-autobiographical I almost turned him down. We had lived and worked together for too long. But the script was so personal and revelatory I could not say no.

The story is stomach-churning stuff and I wasn't sure it was the sort of message with which I wanted to enter the new millennium - but I committed and laid down the rules. Ingmar wanted to play the director Bergman in the film but I told him he was a lousy actor - I'd once seen him as an extra in a movie playing a monk - and Erland Josephson, who co-starred with me in Scenes From A Marriage in 1974, took the role.

We also made a deal that he would not interfere in the film-making process or post-production. He actually thought it would be interesting to see somebody else's version of his very personal tale. I could draw on biographical elements he couldn't bring himself to write in the script but I knew he wanted in the film.