In the prologue to the book, he writes that if he had had money, he would have made his debut as a director with the stories of ‘Juana, Sleeping Beauty’ or ‘The Mirror Ceremony’, from the late 60s. One mixes ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and Juana la Loca, and the other vampirism and mysticism, do you like the genre?
Comparing them with the stories that I have written in this century, in the 21st, those are basically of the fantastic genre. I remember one, which I have not included in the book, inspired by ‘Blade runner’, written the day after seeing the movie. It’s about ‘replicantas’ and pleasure units, a story I even developed into a script but didn’t finish. It is what I wrote the most in the 70s and 80s. I did it with a clear intention of misrepresenting everything that my education had entailed. That’s why ‘La visita’ is a story of revenge against the priests who ruded me. ‘Redemption’, which is a biblical genre, is written to deactivate the education they gave me. In this century, autofiction has gained me, without being totally that, but the fact of taking myself as a starting point.
‘Memory of an empty day’ is very confessional. It is set on a Holy Thursday and he writes that he is an expert loner, but that he has reached that situation because he has not worked on true friendships or neglected the ones he had.
In this story I feel very exposed. Many of these stories I had never read again, and some are from 1968 or so. One of the pleasant sensations I had when I finished editing the book was discovering that I was already who I am now, the one who wrote those stories at the age of 18. Another sensation is that of feeling more exposed in the stories than in the movies, and it would have to be the other way around, because a movie is a screen, it is alive, they are characters, while a book lends itself more to the reader’s imagination. I am a modest person, and in the stories that speak of my loneliness I expose myself more than in my films, although I do it in them too.
“In the stories that speak of my loneliness I expose myself more than in my films”
In ‘Pain and Glory’, for example.
But, curiously, in ‘Pain and Glory’ I don’t direct Antonia Banderas as if she were playing me. She directs him with distance and I don’t feel interpreted by him. However, in this story of Holy Thursday it is me, launching myself directly into writing about what I am feeling at that moment. And the story of my mother’s death is also very intimate. But they are already there and now they belong to the reader.
When you talk about ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and the John Cassavetes film ‘Opening night’, which is the basis for the story ‘Too Many Gender Changes’ and ‘All About My Mother’, you assure that you appropriate them and he mixes them up as his own. Isn’t it more of a game of mirrors between Cassavetes’s film and yours?
My film is dedicated to Bette Davis, Gena Rowlands and Romy Schneider, who were actresses who had played actresses in ‘Naked Eve’, ‘Opening night’ and ‘The important thing is to love’. It is not an imitation or a theft that I do to Cassavetes or Mankiewicz, but I make it my own because I start from my experience as a spectator. It inspires me, I don’t hide it, I pay tribute to it and I integrate it as an active part of my films. I don’t hide the fact that Eloy Azorín’s accident in ‘Todo sobre mi madre’ is inspired by ‘Opening night’, but I continue on my way.
Life is imperfect in itself and it needs fiction to fill all those gaps and make it more enjoyable.
‘The Last Dream’, the story written after his mother’s death, is very beautiful: it reveals that she taught him that reality needs to be completed with fiction.
We lived on a very precarious street, with a lot of illiterate people, and my mother read the letters to them. I then wrote the reply letters. I realized that when reading them he made things up. I was very young then and I came to scold her for it. She invented very pertinent things that could be real. Years later, when I reflected on it, I thought it was the best lesson a storyteller could be taught. Life is imperfect in itself and it needs fiction to fill all those gaps and make it more enjoyable.
He has not touched up any of the stories with the exception of ‘Life and death of Miguel’, which is the surprising story of a man’s life told in the opposite direction, full of very suggestive descriptions.
I think I wrote it in a town in Cáceres, before going to Madrid. I was surprised when I read it again because I did not remember that there was that reflection in it about something that is very important to me, memory, and also the futility of things, their disappearance as if they had not existed. It starts with the fact of being born in pain, which is already a tragedy in itself. The story explains the same thing, but it needed some formal touch-ups.
You associate it with David Fincher’s later film, ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’, which was based on a short story by Scott Fitzgerald.
With this type of coincidences I have found a lot. I had written a story about human-like mermaids long before ‘1, 2, 3… splash’, and I wanted to take it to the movies. Obviously, time passes and someone comes to have a similar idea. In ‘What have I done to deserve this?’ I was told that he had copied the ham hock from the Roald Dahl story and the Hitchcock episode, but had neither read the story nor seen the episode. In the story inspired by ‘Blade runner’ I put all kinds of extraordinary women, there was a demoniac, something of a ‘poltergeist’, the replicants did the housework and they were the ones who naturally made the best techno and electronic music&mldr ; One of them was written for Chus Lampreave. In the story he touched on many rhymes that decades later have been treated in the cinema.
The protagonist of ‘La visita’ is a writer, and the protagonist of the film in which it is inspired, ‘La mala educación’, is a filmmaker.
I always mix everything I read, what I see in the cinema, my own life, what I write, and all of this is a single indivisible thing. Sometimes a story becomes a different movie years later. In 2004 I no longer have that feeling towards the church; the church is no longer a problem for me.
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Was there no chance in the 70s to publish a story in magazines like ‘Star’?
Yes, in ‘Star’ I published one, then another in ‘Vibraciones’, and in ‘El Víbora’ the long story ‘Fire in the bowels’ and the fotonovela ‘Toda tuya’ came out. At that time I used to go to Barcelona a lot to put on the shorts I was doing on Super 8 and I immediately connected with Nazario, Mariscal, Ocaña and those who made ‘El rollo enmascarado’. There was a lot of ‘underground’ activity.