As director, producer, editor and cinematographer on most of his movies, Jan Troell has managed to exert a rare degree of control over his work. He talks to Film Correspondent MICHAEL DWYER.

MARIA, THE central character in Jan Troell's enthralling family saga, Everlasting Moments, is a downtrodden woman married to an abusive alcoholic and living on the poverty line in early 20th- century Sweden. She somehow remains resilient, lovingly caring for her ever-growing family and eking out a pittance as a seamstress. Her life is changed when she wins a box camera in a raffle, although she does not realise it at the time.

“Not everyone is endowed with the gift of seeing,” the local photographer tells Maria as he discourages her from selling her prize. Detecting her natural talent, he introduces her to the magic of photography. Her prowess with the camera provides her with a lease of life and with an unexpected source of vital income in this moving, richly accomplished film.

As it observes and empathises with Maria in all her humanity, perseverance and inner strength, the film celebrates the beauty of photography in still and moving images. It is shot in a series of impeccable visual compositions distinctively captured by director Troell himself, one of the few filmmakers who choose to operate the camera on their movies.

“We used natural light as much as possible,” Troell says. “We shot a lot of the film on location, although for the interior scenes we had to have the big lamps outside the windows to give the impression of natural light. I almost always operate the camera because it gives me a chance to improvise. I don’t have to decide in advance exactly what I want to do.”

Now 77, Troell has sought to maintain his staunch independence as a film-maker throughout a distinguished career that has spanned five decades. As the director, producer, cinematographer and editor on most of his movies, he has exerted a form of control over his work that is rare in the present era of test-screening films and tailoring them for the demands of multiplex audiences.

In marked contrast to those assembly line movies, Everlasting Momentsis classically formed cinematic storytelling.

“I felt this was a love story between four people – Maria, her husband, the photographer and the camera,” Troell says. “That part of the story was very important for me because I experienced something similar to Maria, in discovering the miracle of photography when I was 15. I had two cameras, one very simple when I was around 11, and then a bigger one I got from a friend of my parents. It was just like Maria’s camera with the plates and red light – very different from digital cameras today.”

The film is set in Limhalm, the suburb of Malmo where Troell grew up. “Of course, it’s changed so much since then,” he says. “When I was a child, it was a working-class area where most of the men worked in fishing. Nowadays most of their houses have been bought by middle-class people. I don’t feel so at home there anymore, although the cinema just across the street from where we lived – it was called the Centrum – has just reopened after 25 years. I’m very pleased that my film will be shown there. It has been running for months in Sweden and has been seen by over 160,000 people. That may not sound very much, but it’s very good for that kind of film.”

The son of a dentist, Troell came from the only middle-class family on his street. “We lived in a house,” he says, “whereas all my school friends lived in small apartments. In a way, I always felt like I was in between the two, working-class and middle-class. After my military service, I was an elementary school teacher for about nine years, but I was already very interested in photography as a hobby. When I got a chance finally to make short films for television, I left teaching.”

In 1966 Troell made his feature film debut with This is Your Life, an ambitious and expansive picture following its teenage protagonist (Eddie Axberg) when he leaves his foster home and takes on labouring jobs before he's hired as a projectionist with a travelling cinema and he develops an acute political awareness. Ingmar Bergman, the great master of Swedish cinema, described it as no less than "one of the uncompromising masterpieces in Swedish film history".

FIVE YEARS LATER, Troell reached a wide international audience with his two-part saga, The Emigrants, set in the mid-19th century with Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann as an impoverished Swedish couple who embark on an arduous 10-week voyage to the US. It received five Oscar nominations – for best picture, director, actress, screenplay and foreign-language film – and was followed by the companion piece, The New Land,which charted the experiences of the immigrant couple in their new home of Minnesota.

"We shot the two films at the same time," Troell explains. "Sometimes we could shoot scenes for one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, depending on where we were, which actors were present and what season it was. It's wonderful when you can work with actors of that quality, and Max and Liv both have such quality. The first time I worked with a professional actor was when Max acted in a short film I made, Stopover in the Marshland.I was a complete amateur.

"I suggested Max for the part, even though I thought that would be as hard as bringing down the moon, but to my surprise, he said yes. He had just finished shooting The Greatest Story Ever Told, in which he played Jesus, and had started on a Western in America.

“Luckily, the Western went over time because we had a contract with Max whereby they would have to pay us a fine if he was delayed. So Hollywood paid a fine that was much more than our film cost.”

Hollywood noted the critical and commercial success of The Emigrantsand The New Landand Warner Bros invited Troell to direct the 1974 Western, featuring Liv Ullmann as a mail order bride acquired by a gruff rancher played by Gene Hackman.

“I was surprised to be sent the script and I turned it down at first,” Troell says. “It seemed like a B-movie to me, even though B-movies can be wonderful. It was based on a novel and I asked if I could read that. The novel was actually very good and we got a different screenwriter, Mark Norman, who wrote a very good script. “The biggest difference for me about working in America was the number of people around the camera. In the centre, it’s the same, the relationship between the director, the actors and the camera. I had been almost promised that I could operate the camera myself, but that wasn’t possible. The unions threatened to fine the cinematographer and the camera operator $500 every time I used the camera.”

Troell's second Hollywood movie was the problem-plagued Dino De Laurentiis production, Hurricane(1979), with Timothy Bottoms, Mia Farrow, Jason Robards and Trevor Howard. "That was very different," Troell says. "We were shooting everything in Bora Bora. Dino had a complete hotel with many bungalows built for the film. He had a steamship running between America and the island for the equipment. There was a huge tank filled with water and a lot of wind machines and fighter planes. The great Swedish cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, was working on the film, but I didn't feel I was doing a good job. Dino was in Bora Bora and he was changing the script all the time. It was a fascinating experience, but not a happy one."

However, affirming the adage that every cloud has a silver lining, making Hurricaneprovided Troell with such a large fee that it helped finance his next films in Sweden. And he met Swedish journalist Agneta Ulfsater when she was sent to Bora Bora to write about the making of the film. They have been married since then and collaborated on the screenplay of his new film, Everlasting Moments.

That evolved when Agneta was researching a book on her grandfather’s sister, who is the basis for Maria in the film. “Maria’s eldest daughter, Maja, who is also the storyteller of the film, lived until she was 90,” Troell says. “My wife interviewed her many, many times during the last six years of her life. She recorded over 100 cassettes of their conversations.

“Maria’s story all happened in Goteborg, but I wanted to change it to Malmo. I feel at home there and I felt the need for many years to make a film that returned me to my childhood in one way or another. This story provided the opportunity for that and to deal with events in Malmo during the period covered by the story, such as the strike at the shipyard, which I worked into the film.”

PROMPTED TO REFLECTon spending more than 40 years of his life as a film-maker, Troell says he feels more or less the same about his work as when he started. "I was insecure about my work then and I still am, and every time I make a film, I want to make another. Now I'm working on a script for the next one.

"It's about a Swedish newspaper editor who started a one-man war against Adolf Hitler. His writings were very controversial because he was one of the few who dared to stand up against Hitler. The threat of Germany occupying Sweden was very real then, and the Swedish government was very worried that what he wrote in his newspaper would infuriate Hitler enough to make an attack. The title is a quotation from an old Icelandic saga: Everybody Dies."