A rising star in the Spanish film scene, Alejandro Amenábar began shooting features in 1996, when he was only 23. The result, Thesis, was a smart, sophisticated, low-budget horror film that might have been labeled "the thinking person's 8MM" if it hadn't predated that stinker by several years. In Thesis, Ana Torrent (The Spirit Of The Beehive) stars as a graduate student whose research on media violence leads her to discover an underground snuff ring. Amenábar's follow-up, 1997's Open Your Eyes (Abre Los Ojos), scrambles traditional chronology to tell the expertly convoluted story of a vain Don Juan (Eduardo Noriega) whose unfaithfulness leads his girlfriend to drive them both off a cliff, killing her and severely disfiguring him. In a scenario that may or may not be real, he wakes to a psychiatrist's questioning and discovers he's been accused of murder. Open Your Eyes is currently being remade as Vanilla Sky by director Cameron Crowe, with stars Tom Cruise and Penelope Cruz. (Cruz played a crucial supporting role in the Spanish-language original.) Amenábar's latest, The Others, is an elegant, creepy, and resolutely old-fashioned haunted-house movie starring Nicole Kidman as the mother of two young children who claim they're communicating with the supernatural "intruders" occupying their spacious mansion. Amenábar recently talked to The Onion A.V. Club about violence, suspense, and the film culture of Spain.
The Onion: How were you able to break into filmmaking at such an early age?
Alejandro Amenábar: When I was a child, I started writing and illustrating stories and composing music for them on a keyboard. So I guess all of that ended up leading to my career as a film director. Later, when I was in college, I found film to be a particularly stimulating subject, because it was a synthesis of those early creative experiences. I started making short films at the university. Then, one Spanish film director saw one of my shorts when I still hadn't finished my studies, and he encouraged me to write a long feature out of it. So I wrote Thesis when I was in my fifth year. I sent [the script] to him, and he called me and told me that he wanted to look for money to produce it. He did, and I never finished my studies as a filmmaker.
O: Thesis asks, "What's the difference between people's attraction to real violence and to pretend violence?" How do you deal with the issue?
AA: I try to draw the line between actual violence and simulated violence. I understand the concern about violent films, but for me the moral position of the writer is most important. In the case of Thesis, it's not so much about the violence we see in films, but what we see on television every day. That's what really used to shock me. I still can't believe there are shows that play not with Hollywood-style violence, but with people's real feelings. It's considered normal now in America and elsewhere, but I still can't get used to it.
O: Was The Others a reaction against explicit violence? If I recall, it has no blood or very little blood in it.
AA: I just think that, rather than spilling a lot of blood, it's much more interesting to focus on the faces of the actors. Then the audience takes note of what that means, the act of seeing. Related to that, I still think not showing the monster is much more effective, because you project your subconscious onto the unknown. This is something that many people say, but I haven't seen it too often in horror films over the last few years.
O: In that sense, The Others seems more in tune with old Val Lewton movies, or stuff like The Innocents and The Haunting...
AA: By The Haunting, you mean the old one, not the new one, right? [Laughs.] The new one shows everything. Actually, The Innocents was a big inspiration, specifically the lack of music and the use of silence. That's what I tried to do with this film. There are moments of complete silence that try to get the audience's attention by depriving them of the sound they're used to hearing. Nowadays, the prevailing wisdom is to try to bombard the audience with special effects and sound effects. But, to me, it doesn't work anymore. It's boring. So I tried to approach the genre in a direct and simple way.
O: What were some of your formative experiences as a moviegoer?
AA: I started listening to soundtracks, actually. That was the first thing that impressed me when I was a child, which doesn't make any sense, but I really got interested in them and sort of backed into film that way. Then, I started to watch films on TV, though not too many, because my parents wouldn't allow my brother and me to watch too much TV. So I spent most of the time reading and writing and doing drawings. Later, I watched films on video, most of them Hollywood movies and horror movies. Steven Spielberg really got my attention when I was a child. When I was a teenager and started going to the theaters, I got interested in Hitchcock movies and Kubrick movies. And I think that's how I learned to make films, like training. I would watch all that stuff, then when I tried directing films myself, I would copy concepts that I had seen and try to create new things from them.
O: What did you want the puzzle structure of Open Your Eyes to accomplish?
AA: That was something I had rejected in my short films, because I'm not very fond of jumps in time and flashbacks and flash-forwards. In this case, it was inevitable. I could have made the movie in a linear fashion, but I felt that would have resulted in three stories that were not integrated. So my co-writer Mateo Gil and I decided to mix them up so we could have the whole puzzle integrated. Then the task would be for the audience to put all the pieces together. But that wasn't really my style, playing with time. While I was shooting it, I decided that my next film would have the same kinds of questions for the audience to answer, but in a completely different form, with a very simple line through the narrative.
O: How do you keep viewers disoriented while still holding their attention? Was that the big challenge of making a film like Open Your Eyes?
AA: Yes, but I don't know if I actually achieved it. [Laughs.] I know the film made a lot of money in Spain and struck a chord with a lot of young people. In Open Your Eyes, it wasn't as easy to play with suspense as it was in my other two films. I tried to create a hypnotic atmosphere in every single scene that would lead the audience through a deliberately confusing story. Also, the film is strongly tied to the main character's point of view. It's much trickier, but when you're telling a story in a straight line through time, you don't have to worry as much about losing the audience.
O: How supportive is the Spanish government of national cinema?
AA: It's supportive, though less so in the last few years. The basic problem for Spanish films isn't financial, but in promotion and distribution. One of the big paradoxes we have in Spain, as well as in many other countries, is that many directors have a relatively easy time finding money to get films made, but have problems putting their stuff in theaters. I think the situation could be compared to independent films in America. They have to fight against a big market force in films that come from Hollywood. For instance, my first movie was mainly supported by the government, or else it probably wouldn't have been made.
O: Should limits be imposed on how many Hollywood films are allowed in Spanish cinemas?
AA: There was a legal policy about it, in which [theaters] had to exhibit a certain percentage of Spanish films, so the market could be controlled. I think France still has such a policy in place, but in Spain, it's becoming less and less enforced. Hollywood market share is huge anyway. Spain is one of the biggest global markets, I believe. So if their films are represented at, say, 70 or 80 percent, then why shouldn't we keep at least 20 percent, so that we can see different films—not just from Spain, but from all over the world? As Fernando Trueba [the Oscar-winning director of Belle Époque and Calle 54] used to say, "I love paella. But if I had to be eating paella all the time, I would really be stuffed." [Laughs.] I feel the same way. I love many Hollywood pictures, but it's not the only cuisine out there.