Quotes

Everyone has the capacity to create and recreate within them. And a film doesn't exist unless it is seen - if there are no eyes to look at the images, the images don't exist. When I've finished a film, it's no longer mine - it belongs to the people. I'm nothing more than an intermediary in the process.

[on The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)] How do you arrive at a story? Chance intervenes. I believe a great deal in chance. I'd received a proposal to make a film about Frankenstein, but actually in that genre. It was to be a completely commercial project. I was desperate to make my first film and I'm very obedient, so I started writing a conventional Frankenstein movie. But then chance intervened in my favour because that kind of film needs a lot of sets, and well-known actors, and the producer had to admit he didn't have enough funds. So I then proposed a Spanish version of Frankenstein - not so extravagant, without big sets, only four weeks filming. He liked that idea. But now I found myself with a major problem. I wasn't sure what to do. On my work desk I had a picture I saw every day, which I'd cut out, from Whale's Frankenstein (1931): the moment when the monster and the child are together. Then I realised that everything I needed was there in that image. So I called upon my own personal experiences. But I felt that the identification with the child - and with the film - would be far greater if the child was a girl. And so gradually the story began to unfold.

[on El Sur (1983)] Shooting was interrupted for financial reasons. That apart, the production went well, and even in the state it's in, the film had a lot of commercial and critical success, especially in Spain. It should have been one hour longer, though many critics applauded the fact that the south - of Spain - was never actually seen. My taste's a little more commonplace. I wanted to show it, especially as I was born in the north but have lived for many years further south. This was a wonderful opportunity to have north and south coming together in the film: it was a metaphor for the divisions that become apparent in the Civil War and also for the divisions in an individual who can't reconcile two aspects of his own being. The father in El Sur is divided between two loves: his romantic passion and his mundane life with his wife. He wants to go to the south but never manages to go. He never manages to get on the train, he returns home, and he dies. But in a sense he leaves a mandate because, when he's about to die, he leaves under his daughter's pillow a symbol of communion. So it's as if his last impulse is to provoke the daughter to make the trip he was never able to make - and so she does what he could never do. In the part that was never filmed, the girl does reach Andalusia, where her father was born and spent his childhood, so it completed the story of her father's death. In this way she was able to reconcile herself with the image of her father. This was the original dynamic of the film. As it is now, the girl is still under the weight of the pain, whereas the visit to the south was to bring redemption and she would become an adult. I can't say it would have been a happy film, but there would have been energy and vitality.

[on Dream of Light (1992)] Antonio [Antonio López] and I didn't actually talk very much at all. Remember that the task of a painter is a solitary process, totally in contrast to a filmmaker. Time, too, is different for a painter; he has his own time and so can use it with impunity. But for the filmmaker, it's closer to an industrial process. He's surrounded by people and he doesn't have the privilege of individual time. It's collective time and counted out in pennies. I was aware that our presence - the cameras, sound people and so forth - was modifying both the way Antonio could work and his private experience with the tree he was painting. Though I tried to respect as much as possible this relationship between painter and tree - obviously very mysterious, and something which I tried to express at the end of the film - I felt that the crew, while we were only six, could not but interfere in some way. This is why I showed a film camera at the end, to show my work-tool, as it were. I even insinuate that it is our artificial lighting rotting the fruit on the tree.

The idea for Close Your Eyes (2023) was generated by the memory of my film El Sur (1983), and from the frustration that came from it being unfinished. What this new film talks about is another unfinished film as well as the whole idea of "unfinishedness" and what that means in art and life. I always had this idea floating around in my mind, but Close Your Eyes only really took shape when I concocted the character of the director. The origin, then, is not an image or an object, but a very personal experience.

The marketing of Close Your Eyes (2023) says it's been 30 years without a film but that's not true. My shorts are also my films. I've done work for installations and exhibitions. I've spent time on projects that haven't seen the light of day. I've done workshops around the world. I'm not this mythical person who lives in the Himalayas and comes down the mountain to make a film.

[on Close Your Eyes (2023)] The truth is that for this film I've had to use a convention that is used in thrillers. Discovering something that happens that is unknown, and thus being inspired to take a journey. And I used this device consciously, to get more financial support. My previous film, Dream of Light (1992), was very radical: it had no actors, had no script whatsoever, but it was a really modest production. But for this film I needed a lot more financial support; I had to go through the various TV stations, the ministry of culture, and I had to play their game. And as such, they wanted to see a script in advance. And so it's the same as someone like Pedro Costa - we both used to work outside of the system. And with this film, I am inside the system. And it's the concession I had to make to be able to talk to people again. The challenge for me in this film was how to move from the idea of the enigma - which is something that's missing - to the mystery - which is something unanswered and beguiling. This is a strategy to get funding. A friend of mine jokingly said that by doing this I was entering 'enemy territory'.

The first time I went to the cinema I was five-and-a-half years old. It was a revelation. I had an experience that was exactly the same as Ana in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). It was an experience of horror; of complete terror. The film I watched wasn't James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), it was Roy William Neill's The Scarlet Claw (1944), a Sherlock Holmes film, but it was a very similar experience. I documented all of this in my short film The Red Death (2006). So we're talking about 1946, it was postwar Europe, and the landscape was in a complete state of ruin. I could see in my country and in the streets of my city the direct consequences of this horror. And it wasn't just the Spanish Civil War, but World War Two as well. The Scarlet Claw, a fictional work, just took me to reality. I could see the continuity, the relationship between film and the suffering and desolation that was present in the streets. In that film, people dressed like people in my city. If it had been a film set in the Roman Empire and the actors were wearing period costume, maybe I wouldn't have felt such a strong connection, but because it was so real I felt it straight away. Also of note is that the murderer in the film was a postman, and he dressed exactly like the postmen in my town. So whenever the postman came, I would hide in the corner. For me, cinema was an introduction to reality. All my films have a history of something that happened in reality.

One day as an adolescent I went into a cinema and saw a film made about five years earlier but only projected in Spain belatedly: de Sica's Bicycle Thieves (1948). I was deeply moved by it and, at 12 or 13, realised there was a whole side to cinema I'd had no idea about. For the first time I saw realism in cinema: faces like those I saw in the street, situations I could recognise. So that's probably the point where I left innocence behind for a more conscious approach to cinema. I became a desperate cinephile, went to all the cine clubs. And I came to understand that films were not just for fun, they could also be an act of resistance. Then when I went to university in Madrid, I had another important experience with another Italian film. Someone had managed to get hold of a film from the airport for just a few hours; it was one of the films banned in the Franco era - Rossellini's Rome, Open City (1945). It was screened secretly in a projection booth for 20 people. And it was a radical experience for me, not only because of the quality of the film itself, but because of what we were living through under Franco. It confirmed my feeling that a film could be an act of resistance, and I'm deeply indebted to that experience. In my own way I try to continue to resist and use film in that way.

The places where spectators go to watch films are disappearing. Now people watch film on TV, computers and mobile phones. The true place to watch a film is in the cinema. But the big corporations are getting rid of them. I think they should be kept. It draws me back to the middle-ages where poetry was spoken in public rooms or squares, and I see cinemas as serving a similar function. When I was a child, seeing a film meant being out of the house, with my family, with my friends, socialising. It is possible that cinemas are residual now, and that’s what happening. It’s an anthropological change.

I feel that the language of painting belongs to the dawn of our time and civilisation, and, in a similar way, cinema belongs to the sunset. On the whole, cinema has a youthful image, but in fact I think it's exactly the opposite. Once I was speaking with Antonio [Antonio López]. "Have you seen," I said to him, "how quickly the cinema has become old? Like a child that has become prematurely old, in only one hundred years it has covered a huge amount of ground, which it's taken other arts centuries and centuries to achieve." Then Antonio replied, and it's something I'll never forget: "Ah, but you see, cinema was born when man was already very old."

My life and work have always been about watching films, analysing films, writing about them, and making them. It's a total, lifelong relationship, not just a career.