With this silent film, I wanted to hide what was going on in the clinic. I wanted to cover it up in the best cinematic way and in an entertaining manner.

[on why it took ten years to finish the script for Mala educación, La (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.

Cukor is one of my favorite directors. He was a master at directing women.

But, although these films express many similar ideas from my previous films, I think they express these ideas in a different way.

The Flower of My Secret is definitely more based in true emotions. I also wanted to make something more realistic, but not naturalistic or simple.

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.

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

In the last decade you can count the number of Hollywood dramas that have revolved around women. The studios have forgotten that women are fascinating.

In fact, it was the women in our house who were in the saddle. If men are the gods, women are not only the presidents but all the ministers of the government.

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

The 1980s really ended for me in 1992 with the film Kika.

After the enormous success of All About my Mother, all the awards and everything, I wanted to start a movie in exactly the same place that I used to be before. I wanted to show that all of the success had not changed my perception.

I think it`s a change that I did not intend at the time but it is clear that, from The Flower of My Secret on, there is a change in my films. A lot of the journalists have very generously attributed this to my growing maturity.

Whenever I arrive on a real location, I have to move around and work out what the best angles are going to be. When I was moving around with the lens, I discovered things that the naked eye would not have.

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.

I was born at a bad time for Spain, but a really good one for cinema.

I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free and then I correct it after.

The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.

My first ambition was to be a writer. I have always been very interested in writing. But it seems to me that I have more capacity for telling a story with images. It seems I have more talent for filmmaking than for writing a novel, which is my dream. I have always found it easy to let my imagination go. You do not just need imagination for filmmaking, you also need a lot of passion. When I discovered filmmaking as a way of telling stories, I felt that I had found something that was in my nature. I am glad that I had this ambition to be a novelist because it has helped me in filmmaking.

It`s a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

I do remember having extreme physical fear of the priests. One of the things we had to do was kiss the priest`s hand, which I found revolting. The notorious abuser, who eventually had to leave, had this harem of about 20 boys.

I think decor says a lot about someone`s social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work - and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

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.

Hospitals are places that you have to stay in for a long time, even if you are a visitor. Time doesn`t seem to pass in the same way in hospitals as it does in other places. Time seems to almost not exist in the same way as it does in other places.

Yes, women are stronger than us. They face more directly the problems that confront them, and for that reason they are much more spectacular to talk about. I don`t know why I am more interested in women, because I don`t go to any psychiatrists, and I don`t want to know why.

The characters in my films are assassins, rapists and so on, but I don`t treat them as criminals, I talk about their humanity.

I don`t want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it`s to show one emotion.

All my movies are difficult to classify because they are very eclectic in mixing genres.

I don`t get involved with my actors. I don`t get so involved with the films . . . If I lived like my characters, I would have been dead before I made 16 films.

I used this line to demonstrate how important colors are in movies: It`s not a caprice.

Even though I love my mother, I didn`t want to make an idealized portrait of her. I`m fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

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.