I was born in the ’50s, a good time for cinema, but I fear a terrible time for Spain. If I’d been born in America, maybe Spielberg would have phoned me and given me a Super 8 camera to play with. But in Spain after the Civil War, I only had my own life and my family’s to initiate myself in the world of fiction. Fiction for me was the world of my home’s patio, the neighbors, my sisters taking lessons in the coolness with their friends, the cats, the gypsies, the flamenco-singers at the August fair, the twist, hanging and skinning a still bloody rabbit, my mother talking to her neighbors in the street door in the coolness of the long summer nights, talking about stories of suicides, incest, or singing all together. Fiction was for me all that happened in and outside the big screen of the open-air cinema, a wall, a fetish object. Behind the screen, the guys relived ourselves: Myth and physiology.
I didn’t know it, but I was learning very early the essential. My mother was always the territory where everything happened. In 1987, I asked her to take a cameo role in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” We were in the dressing room where the costume designer had chosen some dresses for her. I was attending to something else. Suddenly, I heard indirectly my mother day to the costume designer: “I don’t want black dresses, give me something brighter.” And she went on to explain her long relationship with black, something I hadn’t heard before. When she was pregnant with me, she had dressed in black, because she was in mourning. From the age of 3, she had backed one morning with another. The first 30 years of her life, she dressed exclusively in black, and she didn’t want to use that color ever again.
I didn’t imagine my mother was forced to wear black when she bore me. Frequently, people have asked about the use of color in my films. I think I used the colors of my childhood, Technicolor, brilliant explosive colors that were very difficult to achieve in ’80s laboratories. After losing my mother, I began to think about the origin of my films’ colors. I’d like to think that my passion for color is my mother’s reply to so many years of mourning, blackness. Although she was dressed in black when she bore me, in her she was gestating her vengeance towards the dark monochromes obliged by tradition. I was her vengeance, and I hope I’ve been good enough. For 35 years, I’ve been trying with all my heart.