Alejandro Amenabar is the soft-spoken filmmaker behind such haunted fare as The Others and Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), the film remade in America as Vanilla Sky. His newest movie is The Sea Inside, a film about Ramon Sampedro, the Spaniard who fought for 30 years for the right to die.
Amenabar, 32, saw Sampedro on television several times during the 1990s and says he was engaged by the man's calm voice and humour. Then he read Sampedro's books.
"I thought it was brilliant, the way he put you on the line between life and death," says Amenabar. "There was a real contradiction there, because the more he wrote about death and dying, the more alive I felt. So I thought it would be great to put all these words of poetry and philosophy into a movie -- but I didn't know how to make it into an attractive movie. Then I researched more about Sampedro's family and his friends, and they told me the love stories, about all the women who fell in love with him."
The Sea Inside played here during the film festival in September, bringing Amenabar and his film's star, Javier Bardem, to Toronto.
Amenabar says of Bardem, "He is the best actor in Spain." Then he adds, smiling, "On the other hand, he didn't have the age, he didn't have the accent, he didn't have the body, he didn't have the features, he didn't have the eyes. So how could he possibly become Ramon Sampedro? But we just trusted each other. He thought about it. He developed his character. One day he just played Ramon for me, and I could tell he wasn't playing the character. He was being the character."
Like Amenabar's previous movies, The Sea Inside is a huge hit in Spain. The filmmaker not only writes and directs his movies, but also scores them. He says the route to movie-making was organic.
"As a child, I liked reading and writing and composing and making drawings, and the summary of all that is making movies. When I was 10, I started to get really interested in specific works from Hitchcock, Spielberg and Kubrick."
The Sea Inside is Amenabar's fourth movie. He started his career making short films, one of which was seen by Spanish filmmaker Jose Luis Cuerda. Amenabar, a university student at the time, when asked by Cuerda to write a script, came up with Thesis, which concerns a female student who is marked for death when she discovers snuff films being made at her university. The film was made when Amenabar was 23 and it won seven Goyas, the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar.
He then made Open Your Eyes, which was an even greater box-office success and which attracted 10 Goya nominations.
Still, he's the last person you'd imagine writing twisted psychological thrillers.
"I used to be an easily scared little boy," he says, smiling. "But writing horror stories helped me somehow get through that."
Open Your Eyes was a film that attracted the attention of Tom Cruise. He starred in the U.S. remake, Vanilla Sky, and his former wife, Nicole Kidman, starred in Amenabar's English language ghost story, The Others. Not that Amenabar's gone Hollywood ...
"People think I've crossed the ocean, but I haven't. We crossed and took Tom and Nicole to Spain," he says, smiling again. "I never felt I lived in Hollywood. We took talent from the United States to make a film in Spain. This was a journey for all of us."
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