Biografie

Die Lady von Shanghai (1947) is one of his favourite films.

Turned down an offer to direct Sister Act - Eine himmlische Karriere (1992).

By his own admission, he usually starts writing his movies with a really important scene that ends up placed in the middle of the movie.

Was approached to direct at some point both Brokeback Mountain (2005) and The Paperboy (2012).

Has been romantically involved with photographer Fernando Iglesias, whom he frequently casts in small roles in his films, since 2002.

All my movies have an autobiographical dimension, but that is indirectly, through the personages. In fact, I am behind everything that happens and that is said, but I am never talking about myself in first person singular. Something in me--probably a dislike of cheap exhibitionism--stops me from approaching a project too autobiographically.

Already when I was very young, I was 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.

Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

[on his experience in the Catholic boarding school he lived in as a young man and on which La Mala Educación - Schlechte Erziehung (2004) is based] The education we received was about guilt, sin, punishment.

[on why it took ten years to finish the script for La Mala Educación - Schlechte Erziehung (2004)] [It] deals with my own biography . . . it took time to remove myself from it. Now it's not me. I changed the tone of the story, but the main situation is the same.