Ingmar Bergman was what you might call a filmmaker’s filmmaker, earning the adulation of his colleagues around the world — most famously Woody Allen, who went through an entire Bergman-influenced “serious” period, producing movies like Interiors. Stanley Kubrick, it turns out, was also a big fan. In 1960, the same year Spartacus premiered, a 31-year-old Kubrick wrote a letter praising Bergman (who had already made Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal by then) as “unsurpassed by anyone in the creation of mood and atmosphere, the subtlety of performance, the avoidance of the obvious, the truthfullness and completeness of characterization.” See Kubrick’s typewritten letter to Bergman, on Universal-International Pictures stationery, after the jump, and click over to Letters of Note for the transcription.
