Biography

Considered his film El Sur (1983) an unfinished work. Producer Elías Querejeta suspended the project in the middle of the shooting due financial reasons. According to Erice, Querejeta promised him that he would be allowed to shoot the rest of the screenplay if he agreed to edit the filmed material. However, after the film premiered in competition at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, Querejeta never fulfilled his promise.

He was set to write and direct El embrujo de Shanghai (2002), based on a novel written by Juan Marsé. Although Marsé praised Erice's screenplay, producer Andrés Vicente Gómez rejected it on the basis that the film of the script would have been around 3 hours long. After submitting a shorter version of the script, also rejected by the producer, Erice chose to leave the project. He was replaced by Fernando Trueba. Erice published his screenplay in 2001.

Education: Escuela Oficial de Cinematografia

Retrospective at the 41th Pesarofilmfestival, Pesaro, Italy; June 25th-July 3rd 2005

BA in political science.

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.

[on Dream of Light (1992)] Antonio [Antonio López] and I didn't actually talk very much at all. Remember that the task of a painter is a solitary process, totally in contrast to a filmmaker. Time, too, is different for a painter; he has his own time and so can use it with impunity. But for the filmmaker, it's closer to an industrial process. He's surrounded by people and he doesn't have the privilege of individual time. It's collective time and counted out in pennies. I was aware that our presence - the cameras, sound people and so forth - was modifying both the way Antonio could work and his private experience with the tree he was painting. Though I tried to respect as much as possible this relationship between painter and tree - obviously very mysterious, and something which I tried to express at the end of the film - I felt that the crew, while we were only six, could not but interfere in some way. This is why I showed a film camera at the end, to show my work-tool, as it were. I even insinuate that it is our artificial lighting rotting the fruit on the tree.

The idea for Close Your Eyes (2023) was generated by the memory of my film El Sur (1983), and from the frustration that came from it being unfinished. What this new film talks about is another unfinished film as well as the whole idea of "unfinishedness" and what that means in art and life. I always had this idea floating around in my mind, but Close Your Eyes only really took shape when I concocted the character of the director. The origin, then, is not an image or an object, but a very personal experience.