[Discovering Tarkovsky's work was akin to] a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease. I felt encouraged and stimulated: someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how. Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.
I am quoting here from the introduction by Patrick Bureau to the 2006 book Andrei Tarkovsky: Interviews, edited by John Gianvito. Bureau says he is quoting from The Magic Lantern. But turning to Bergman's autobiography yields instead the following passage, which I will quote at greater length than strictly necessary, just because it is interesting:
The rhythm in my films is conceived in the script, at the desk, and is then given birth in front of the camera. All forms of improvisation are alien to me. If I am ever forced into hasty decisions, I grow sweaty and rigid with terror. Filming for me is an illusion planned in detail, the reflection of a reality which the longer I live seems to me more and more illusory.
When film is not a document, it is dream. That is why Tarkovsky is the greatest of them all. He moves with such naturalness in the room of dreams. He doesn't explain. What should he explain anyhow? He is a spectator, capable of staging his visions in the most unwieldy but, in a way, the most willing of media. All my life I have hammered on the doors of the rooms in which he moves so naturally. Only a few times have I managed to creep inside. Most of my conscious efforts have ended in embarrassing failure – The Serpent's Egg, The Touch, Face to Face and so on.
Fellini, Kurosawa and Buñuel move in the same fields as Tarkovsky. Antonioni was on his way, but expired, suffocated by his own tediousness. Méliès was always there without having to think about it. He was a magician by profession.
Film as dream, film as music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness.
Leaving aside all there is to discuss regarding this quotation, what is obvious is that this passage must have been the source of Bureau's quote, yet the specific differences between the two seem to go beyond what can be accounted for by the possibility of varying translations from Swedish. In the Penguin edition of The Magic Lantern I have just cited, for example, there is no mention of Tarkovsky "inventing a new language", nor is there any suggestion that discovering Tarkovsky was a kind of "miracle".
Assuming that Bureau is the source of the oft-cited quotation mentioned at the beginning, it seems likely he was quoting from a French translation of Bergman's autobiography, then translated into English for the book of Tarkovsky interviews. In the "Chinese whispers" from Swedish to French to English, it is no doubt possible to traverse a fair semantic distance, although the gap between the two quotations seems to suggest that one or more translators involved (or Bureau himself) was perhaps a little too "free". Unless there is another explanation that I have failed to imagine.