Max Von Sydow shares his Film Experience with the bloguverse.

Classify this under “wow”. Superlative, superb and outstanding. Bitchin’ even. If you’ve broken all of your fingers in an industrial accident, please find the will to live and whatever remaining motor coordination to click over to Film Experience Blog where Nathaniel is running a wonderful interview with Max Von Sydow in support of the veteran actor’s upcoming role in The Diving Bell and Butterfly.

Von Sydow is truly a fascinating actor, not to mention a stalwart figure of international cinema. This is a guy who as appeared in everything from the landmark art films of Bergman to the pulp crap of Ratner. You don’t have to look far to find historic, cinema-changing movies in his filmography. He’s fascinating to watch and brings such soul and magnetism to his work that it’s impossible not to be impressed when he sits down with a blogger to discuss his craft. And there couldn’t have been a better writer, a more reverent lover of cinema, or a more professionally prepared blogger to sit down with than Nathaniel.

It’s a terrific interview, one you should read immediately. Here’s part one of the Film Experience Blog interview with Max Von Sydow. You can find the rest of Nathaniel’s piece once you get there.

Here was my favorite bit, in which Von Sydow comments on the idea that actors have to somehow psychologically incorporate the lives, dreams, torments and miseries of their characters instead of, you know, doing their jobs “acting”:

Often people – well, often people have asked me ‘Well, isn’t it difficult to step out of the real character?’…By that I presume they mean that they think I transform myself into somebody else and I have a hell of a time to get rid of this in order to find my private self after the show is over or the film is over. Of course that’s not at all it. I am me all the time. But when the camera rolls or when the curtain rises I interpret the character I’m supposed to play and…and I do that with my – with my own experiences and with my own imagination and then when the curtain falls I cease acting and I’m…I’m again all me.

Wonderful. Simply wonderful.