between his actors' lines, rather than the lines themselves, so that audiences get to know the characters by watching them think. He seeks to inspire performances that combine the emotional honesty of the Method with the technical precision of British acting. "Helping someone understand the full range of meanings in a text liberates the actor to create a performance that's uniquely his own and truly fresh," Bergmann explains. He has worked with exceptional new talents, such as Calista Flockhart, Marin Hinkle and Bridget Moynahan, before they became well known, though some of his greatest pleasures have come from directing established performers he has long admired, but in very unusual roles, including Peter Boyle, Olympia Dukakis, Tovah Feldshuh, and Robert Vaughn who captured Bergmann's imagination as the Man from U.N.C.L.E. when Bergmann was a child and for whom Bergmann created the role of a mysterious uncle in Milk & Money. Bergmann has used digital photography since its inception, finding ways to work both with and against the limited contrast ratio of the digital medium. Bergmann prides himself on being able to obtain exceptional image quality and subtly expressive lighting on relatively low-budget equipment. The resulting images have some of the vividness of 13th Century stained glass, a major influence on both Bergmann's photographic style and his sense of narrative since he first visited [Chartres Cathedral] as a teenager. In 1999, Bergmann wrote one of the first how-to books on digital filmmaking, Trifling With Fate: How to Make a Digital Video Feature Film. He has also appeared as a lecturer and panelist at independent film conferences, speaking on the latest trends in state-of-the-art technology. He believes that the use of the latest digital technology enhances cinematic creativity by enabling filmmakers “to do much more on budgets which restrict them much less” every year or so. He has also directed many plays and worked with musicians, dancers and artists in other genres, including his wife, the sculptor and writer Meredith Bergmann, who has been the production designer on many of his film and theater projects. In 2008 he co-wrote What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeare's Sonnets with his father, Martin Bergmann. Background Bergmann is the son of two Freudian psychoanalysts and the grandson of Hugo Bergmann, a philosopher who was one of the founders of Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is also the great-grandson of Berta Fanta, a Prague