episode of incest that finally led Karin to realize that she "can't live in two worlds". Karin envisions God as a "spider-god". Bergman's next film, Winter Light explains the metaphor when the character Tomas, played by Björnstrand, relates the spider-god to suffering, as opposed to his previous ideas of a God of love that provides comfort. The story ends with a discussion of how God is love, a question further explored in Winter Light, which asks if understanding God is as simple as that. One Winter Light character mocks the idea of God as love, quoting the end of Through a Glass Darkly exactly. The title Through a Glass Darkly is derived from 1 Corinthians 13, which Gado observed also follows themes of "faith, hope and love". Production Development After Ingmar Bergman made notes on his ideas for the film in his diary, drawing on his personal experiences in planning to meet and reconcile with his parents Karin and Erik Bergman, Ingmar wrote the screenplay on the island of Torö in the Stockholm archipelago. He imagined it as a three-act play, where the acts serve as "mirror panels," showing the same thing from different angles. This led to the phrase from the Biblical passage 1 Corinthians 13 being used as the film's title. Bergman claimed the inspiration for the character of Karin was a woman he had lived with when he was younger. He reported she heard voices telling her to do things. The scene where David describes his attempted suicide is also inspired by Bergman's real-life attempt in Switzerland, before making Smiles of a Summer Night in 1955. Bergman explained that "while I was preparing the film, I became interested in the human drama surrounding another human being who really was in the process of slipping away". He also referred to his screenplay as "a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love, and love is God". Bergman later regretted that message as lacking truth, and acknowledged that the optimistic epilogue was "tacked loosely onto the end," causing him to feel "ill at ease" when later confronted with it. He added that "I was touching on a divine concept that is real, but then smeared a diffuse veneer of love all over it." While working on Through a Glass Darkly, he was adapting The Seagull by Anton Chekhov in the Royal Dramatic Theatre, and borrowed an idea