Trivia / Wild Strawberries

• Creator Breakdown: Ingmar Bergman wrote the script while in hospital for gastric problems and stress.
• Dawson Casting: Bibi Andersson, 21 at the time, as the two teenaged Saras.
• Inspiration for the Work: Ingmar Bergman got the idea for the film from a drive from Stockholm to Dalarna during which he stopped in Uppsala, his hometown. Driving by his grandmother's house, he suddenly imagined how it would be if he could open the door and inside find everything just as it was during his childhood.
  So it struck me — what if you could make a film about this; that you just walk up in a realistic way and open a door, and then you walk into your childhood and then you open another door and come back to reality, and then you make a turn around a street corner and arrive in some other period of your existence, and everything goes on, lives. That was actually the idea behind Wild Strawberries.
• Referenced by...:
  • Ingmar Bergman fan Woody Allen did his own version with Deconstructing Harry. Allen previously used the "visit your old home and walk back into your own past" device for a scene in Annie Hall.
  • Harry and Tonto took a lot of cues from Strawberries, and three decades later Alexander Payne clearly used elements of both films in About Schmidt.
• Underage Casting: Naima Wifstrand, who played Isak's 96-year-old mother, was actually a decade younger than Victor Sjöström (who was about the same age as Isak).

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