film-directors-from-spain

"I'm an artist…and I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There, the director is part of the crew, not the main creator. I'm too old to change now. I wouldn't know how to do it."

"For me today, the most important filmmaker alive, for me personally is Pedro Almodóvar. Because he takes people on the fringes of society and they are bizarre. And If you read about them in the newspapers, you would think they were criminals. But in an Almodóvar film, you forgive them and you even learn to love them, which I think is closer to godliness, than making a film about good people running around."

"But it’s one of my worries, I can’t get over it in my mind. I mean, I can’t even reconcile myself to the fact that death is real. Plus I’m an atheist, so I have no belief in the afterlife and no creed to help me out. I see the whole thing as unnatural, I know that sounds odd.” He snorts. “So yes, I’m definitely afraid of dying."

"I've had a very good relationship with my mother, but there's a whole generation of Spanish women who have struggled: very strong fighting figures who carry their families. These women are now in their 80s and feel that life has been unfair to them; they don't know how to grow old and how to be happy old ladies."

"In fact I was never the son my parents wanted. I mean, I think that they really loved me. But it’s something I realised from a very young age."

"I rely on it, it’s an addiction, the need to tell stories. If anything, my relationship with film has become more tense, more of a problem, because there is always that question: when will my time be up? Will this be the last film I make?...Perhaps this is the reason I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. Quite the opposite, I think I’ve cut back. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have. It’s finished up being both the end and the means for me."

"Whenever I've shot my previous films, I've felt phantoms of my own cinema past and personal past hovering over me. They accompanied me through those films. But this time I felt completely on my own. For the first time this film did not go hand-in-hand with my memories. The tone is different as well. It's very austere."

"I make fiction films because I like representation. That’s why I don’t make documentaries, and I don’t think I’ll ever make documentaries. The colors of my movies are not completely real, because I like that distance, that this is a movie, and reality is over there. I don’t want to make something that looks completely real. I want a representation of that. And this is what was appealing to me and why I started making movies."

"You know in childhood it is difficult to be different. I spent long times in hospitals and it was complicated, but it made me know how strong I can be, and it helped me to get my wills. A long time ago I started to shoot my little short with my own cam with friends, but in 2005 came my first professional work. I visited an FX make up workshop and took a look at what else the teacher was doing outside of classes. He was working for movies and then I offered myself for work and have them take benefit of my peculiar body."

"I’m single and my entire youth was spent enjoying time with friends, but these times I’m trying to be more responsible and take more care and use my energy in cinema. It makes me happier."

"Little Spain is a symbol of the first attempt of a successful Hispanic immigration process to the United States … Almost no one knows that there was a "Little Spain" in Manhattan, just like there's a "Little Italy." That's what's fascinating."

"With Little Spain, director Artur Balder takes good advantage of focusing on a wave of immigration that went on until the 1970s. Through archival footage and direct interviews with immigrants and their children, Balder successfully illustrates the moods, flavors and excitement of recreating a far-away home in a small radius of Manhattan city blocks. … Little Spain — the film — records a multi-dimensional perspective of integration among immigrants from different backgrounds as a key part of integration into a host country."

"I am the unknown Will, The Anger that threatens glory and ruin: Lord of Storms am I, in heaven high and caverns deep. I am the Father of the War, Odin for you, Wotan for him, Wayfarer, Wanderer, beggar, king, numen, genius, strength and ring."

"There are two moments in the life of any fag that you can never forget: your first kiss with another man and your first argument with a heterosexual friend that doesn't get the difference between being a homosexual and wanting to be a woman. On first sight I can't calibrate which will be repeated more times during our sexually emancipated lifetime. Lucky enough, I can tell which we all prefer to be repeated: the argument with the heterosexual friend... if it ends in a long , wet, passionate kiss."

"Now then, I hasten to repeat that these practices [S&M] are certainly not usual or universal among us, but rather are variants practiced by a minority that is not representative of all gay people, although they do make up an identifiable sector that I don't want to leave out (as do many politically correct gay people, who like to give the impression that gay men only sodomize each other on Versace cushions by candlelights to Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach's Suites for Cello.)"

"This pioneer of sexology [Krafft-Ebing] even came to question whether homosexuality might be innate (and people began to forgive us for living, as if it would matter to anyone if being an Atlético de Madrid fan was innate or not.)"

"I suppose not many people dress up with insults to go out. We, the homosexuals, have no other choice. Insults are for us almost an epistemological variable: we have learned to know our fellow beings -for, as much as it surprises us, they are our fellow beings- through their insults, and they, on the other hand, have learned to know us in spite of the exhausting job -a hard duty impossed by society- of insulting us."

"Inside any vigorexic queen, any muscle queen, any macho queen, any aloof queen, any of us, ultra-masculine gays, there's a flaming faggot fighting to come out. When we finally let her blossom, she'll be so busy chatting with the other internalized flaming faggots, that we'll finally be able to sexually enjoy the boring sexual macho that we all also carry inside us. Versatility, darlings, that's the recipe for success in bed (well, having a bed can also help)."

"Bourgays are the doom of queer revolution."

"I hate being referred to as a comedian. Being a homosexual and a comedian is like being a pig and P.R. of the slaughterhouse: absurd. I'd rather consider myself a satirist. According to Thesaurus: a humorist who uses ridicule and irony and sarcasm... but i also puke a lot in the face of frustration; so then again i must be a supermodel."

"Thank God I'm an atheist."

"I find it [science] analytical, pretentious and superficial—largely because it does not address itself to dreams, chance, laughter, feelings, or paradox—in other words,—all the things I love the most."

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

"The story is also a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetic. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form its substance. (The golden age)"

"A paranoiac is like a poet, born, not made. (Un paranoico como un poeta, nace, no se hace)"

"I like go to bed and get up early; in that, I am anti-Spanish."

"Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much."

"Salvador Dali seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door."

"In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."

"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."

"If someone were to prove to me- right this minute- that God, in all his luminescence, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior."

"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed."

"Frankly, despite my distaste of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers."

"Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese you dingus"