I think I've been stealing all my life, like everyone else. In one way or another, I think most filmmakers are dedicated to stealing the findings of others. At first voluntarily, copying, trying to do what a teacher does, what dazzles you: a turn in a sequence, a travelin, a certain plane ... Then, while you gain confidence, you forget where you stole, even the crime, and I suppose there is a time when you still feel like an apprentice , you don't know who you're stealing from, at least not in a premeditated way. In my case it is so. I suppose that we have a capacity for learning and while we develop our own language we lose sight of the fact that we get out of the sleeve some words that we have simply adapted from others or even that are not ours, that we have directly taken them from another.

I am nothing mythomaniac, but as almost everyone supposes that I am a thief , and I suppose that my myths are those films that have left me a mark, that have helped me to think, to enjoy and better understand the world. There are many films and many directors whom I admire.

When they ask me about my references, I say that I have always been a better spectator than a director. As a director I don't know if I would be able to address any type of project, I don't think so. I would not know. As a spectator I am good, I like everything or almost everything, in almost every movie I find something. From an undisputed classic to a B or Z series. I am able to see almost everything.

Making memory, the first film that impressed me in a remarkable way, my first great filmic myth I think was The invasion of thieves bodies (1957), by Don Siegel. I saw her at my grandparents' house on an old black and white TV of small dimensions. I really was very small, I must have been seven or eight years old and I spent almost the entire movie pretending that I was not scared of the pods coming from space and the lack of humanity of the aliens so they would not send me to bed or change the channel to another one there was. My grandparents were older and, really, neither of them had too much of a good view, or just little interest in me doing something else, and they let me see her whole. I remember that the film left me thinking for weeks about the possibility of an invasion of future outer space or something much worse, that that invasion had already occurred and the aliens already inhabited among my friends and acquaintances. A silent conspiracy so close that it was completely imperceptible . And that they had control of everything and the world moved as they pleased. Something universal and always current.

I have seen the movie as an adult again and it still seems wonderful. In fact it is one of my favorite movies. It is a perfect script shot by a great director in a state of grace. Although he was completely unaware of the fact that the invasion, due to McCarthy's witch hunt in the United States, had already occurred, he felt that something was beating after the apparent plot. And have the sign or intention you have, I think you have the virtue of hitting the one who sees it.

Probably the same thing that attracted me to that movie the first time I saw it is what has really always interested me in cinema. The possibility of telling a story and that it becomes polysemic and remains rumbling inside the viewer's head again and again, secondly, until it becomes a sensation, a mood, a question . These films have always been the body of the crime in my case, the interest of the thief.

And now a list of directors whom I confess I have stolen with more or less fortune: Luis Buñuel, Howard Hawks, John Ford, John Huston, Federico Fellini, PP Pasolini, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles , Françoise Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Michael Winterbottom Sam Raimi, the Cohen brothers, Fritz Lang, Pedro Almodóvar, Bong Joon Ho, Billy Wilder, Carlos Saura, Fernando Trueba, Steven Soderbergh, Edgar Neville, Jean-Pierre Melville, Agnès Varda, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, David Lean , Alfred Hitchcock, Ladislao Vajda, Juan Antonio Bardem, Luis Berlanga, Vittorio De Sica , Claude Chabrol, Jacques Tourneur ...

And I only quote a few whom I confess that I have stolen in a premeditated manner, I run out of space if I must confess the thefts that I cannot prove myself.

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