The Director (Paperback)

The Director is Ingmar Bergman; the time is 1961; and the setting is the shooting of Winter Light, a film about how his life would have been had he followed his father's wishes and become a priest. As actors and crew gather to film this alternative destiny, Bergman tries to draw his father into the process, but quickly finds himself plunged back into the emotions of his childhood - both terrorized by his brutal and dominating father, and desperately longing for his approval - and reality gradually begins to crack and crumble, tipping him into a world of false memories and dangerous fantasies. Compelling and breathtakingly original, The Director mixes biographical fact with a wild kaleidoscopic imagination to reveal the boy and the man behind the great film-maker.