The Director

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 terrorised 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.

‘What a great read it is! It creates a very compelling world, and a world that somehow smells right, with all the frustration, and wavering confidence that goes along with any act of attempted creation. The writer seduced me into this world through his tale in much the same mesmerising way that Bergman might do in one of his films. A wonderful novel.’ Jeremy Irons