The 1980s really ended for me in 1992 with the film Kika.
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.
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.