Even though I love my mother, I didn’t want to make an idealized portrait of her. I’m fascinated more by her defects – they are funnier than her other qualities.
The Flower of My Secret is definitely more based in true emotions. I also wanted to make something more realistic, but not naturalistic or simple.
I used this line to demonstrate how important colors are in movies: It’s not a caprice.
After the enormous success of All About my Mother, all the awards and everything, I wanted to start a movie in exactly the same place that I used to be before. I wanted to show that all of the success had not changed my perception.
Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.
The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.
There is a mysterious stillness and intimacy of a woman doing her hair and make-up which attracts me.
I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies, but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free, and then I correct it after.
The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.
Cukor is one of my favorite directors. He was a master at directing women.
When I was very young, I was already a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew. When I got out of a movie with my sisters, I retold them the whole story. In general they liked my version better than the one they had seen.
I was always storytelling, since I was a child. I remember myself at 10 years old telling stories to my sisters and brother. This is something I did through my adolescence and even through my twenties.
I’m more interested to show the darkest places of myself, and I don’t joke about it.
When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.
When I was young I thought: when I am 60 my necessities will be very different. As I get near that age, I realise they are similar to what they were when I was 25.
Never again work in the same conditions in whichyou made your first film. It’s good to take risks, but not thatmuch risk.
The 1980s really ended for me in 1992 with the film Kika.
I was born at a bad time for Spain, but a really good one for cinema.
When I’m writing, I don’t put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.
I’m really a nightmare for the fashion designer because I take away all of his authority, and I become the authority, and I turn him into my assistant. You could say I intervene, and I intervene in a very determining way in all the aspects that have to do with the visual construction of the film.
It’s a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.