- 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.
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