The good thing about helping an actor create a performance is, you really don't know how you're going to do it. It's a challenge every time you get to the set. That keeps the energy flowing all the time.
From Juan Antonio Bayona
With actors, it's really about feeding them all the time. I don't get involved in their process. I try to do the opposite, feeding them, feeding them, feeding them, and you can see very easily how they react to it.
There is a company in Barcelona called Headless, and I was a huge fan. I love their style. I had been trying to work with them for years. 'A Monster Calls' was the perfect project to work on with them.
The tree has been always an allegory for spiritual growth.
There is not a great Spanish tradition of ghost stories. But in the period of Franco, you'd find these ghost stories: sort of hidden political movies that were supposed to be about ghosts but were about something else.
Movies by Carlos Saura and others had ghosts, memories from the past, that they used to make a political point. Things you couldn't talk about openly, you could speak of through ghosts.
Every Monday night, there was a scary movie on Spanish TV, so my parents used to send me to bed. I remember lying there, listening to the TV, and imagining the movie in my head. And so probably the scariest movies I ever saw in my life were the ones I imagined.
After 'The Orphanage' and 'The Impossible,' 'A Monster Calls' is the perfect final chapter in a trilogy centred on the extraordinary strength of the mother-child bond.
Everybody has an idea of the tsunami of being a big wave. It is not a big wave. It is a huge amount of water that comes to land.
It's always good to have a limit because it forces you to think about all the ways to get what you want.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives