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GENESIS
"La flor de mi secreto" is a film of "good feelings", this not being any kind of sentimental concession. It's a film about hard drama and, even though I love melodrama, this time I've opted for dryness and synthesis; thorns instead of roses, tears that bring no relief but distress. Pain at its best.
This flower gives off an intense and painful smell. However, there are no evil characters, they're all good, like in a Capra's film. But despite their lack of evil and as if by dimness, irresolution or cowardice -or simply because humans are imperfect beings- they all end up causing pain all around. Most of them make their living out of imposture, pretending they are someone else. Leo is the only one that expresses herself out in a sincere way. It takes strength of character to lie or dissemble, and she's too weak.
One other definition that I'm afraid of giving the film (apart from "good feelings") is something like "this story is full of humanness" or "its characters ooze humanness." But it is so, even though too much misuse or abuse has taken the meaning out of these expressions.
I remember perfectly the first pages of every single screenplay I have ever written, those that kind of boost and breed a future film. My first thought is usually to shoot a short with those first pages, but I always wind up turning it into a feature film -not only because it is more profitable, but also because those first pages made me feel so curious about the characters and their experiences. If I want to know how they got there and what happened next, it is up to me to find it out and put it on paper. And as I research in these characters' past and future, I end up finding the story I wanted to tell but didn't even picture initially.
Given this random creation methodology, the first sequences I write usually fit in the middle of the film they produce.
The first part I wrote for "Kika" was the whole chapter of the rape, from Paul Bazzo entering until he fades out the window. In "Tacones Lejanos" (High Heels) it was the part where Victoria Abril, on the TV news, admits having committed the crime she has just informed of. In "Atame" (Tie me up, tie me down) it was Antonio Banderas' statement after immobilizing and isolating Victoria Abril: "I'm 23 and have fifty thousand pesetas. I'm alone in this world, I'd like to become a good husband for you and a good father for your children."
The first thing I wrote for "La flor de mi secreto", the part I was dying to see on a screen, was the husband's visit. In the almost eight different versions I wrote for the screenplay, "the visit" is the one block that has barely changed, it came out just like that. It goes from the husband ringing the bell to him turning around the stairway. One could say I shot "La flor" because I wanted to shot the husband's visit, and his farewell.

THE LOOK OF FAREWELL
The stairs taking him away from Leo sound like bells tolling for the dead. And that's what they announce, the death of their love.
Leaning on the landing corner, a frozen Marisa-Leo listens to the sound of Paco's steps. One by one, stair by stair (two full floors of an old Madrid building), until he reaches the street. And she weathers it on an X-ray close-up that goes as long as the sequence would last in real time. It's the stormy look of farewell.
I didn't want to take a single still out, not a single stair, not a tear. From that moment on, Leo and Paco walk in opposite directions. The same stairs that lead Paco towards a new life push Leo towards death. Leo needs to kill the love she feels for Paco, and the only way of doing it is by killing herself, the inseparable container of that love.

THE VOICE OF LIFE
When Leo goes to sleep and closes her eyes to the world after taking a lethal dose of tranquilizers, the moment her consciousness darkens, the phone rings. It's her mother. She has quarreled with Leo's sister (they live together in the suburbs) and is calling Leo to complain and say good-bye. She wants to go back to her hometown, away from Madrid… "I would have loved so much to say good-bye…" her mother's voice sounds depressing as it's being recorded by the answering machine. Leo can hardly move, she opens her eyes, the phone is in the living room. And the living room is far, in the other end of the house. A never-ending hallway separates it from the bedroom. The mother's sad voice runs down the hallway like a rush of air, reaches the bedroom door and shakes her daughter's weakened consciousness until she reacts.
The idea of making a film about my mother has tempted me for years. It came out after a conversation with one of my sisters: "Mom has asked me to take her to a psychiatrist. She doesn't want to go insane like her aunts," my sister told me. "Mom's not insane," I said, "she just wants to speak." "Yeah, but I can't spend the day chatting with her," she claimed right.
I had never thought about it, but the conversation with my sister revealed my widow mother's solitude and her indirect search for an interlocutor. And I thought I could do something about it. All I had to do was sit with her and let her talk.
I've discovered my mother as if by chance, listening to her talking to other people.
For example, as I was readying "Mujeres..." (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), I learned that she had worn black from three to thirty-something years old.
We were in a department store looking for the dress she would wear in "Mujeres..." (she played a TV news presenter) when I heard her tell the salesgirl (who insisted on dark colors): "Show me something colorful, I don't want to dress in dark, I've spent my life wearing black. Ever since I was three, when my father died, until I became pregnant of him (pointing at me). I chained one mourn to another".
I didn't say a word, but the finding shook me. I had never imagined my mother wearing black during my gestation. I learned that I was the reaction against such anti-natural tradition. That, despite the blackness of her dress, my mother gestated inside her her vengeance against black: Me, someone whose life was to be defined by color and expressed via its excess. As I heard her talk to the salesgirl, I understood the reason for my natural tendency for bright colors.
After talking to my sister I thought I should go with my mother for a few days and let her talk. I would listen. The summer was the best time because she spends it at home. I would go home and take a camera with me to register her words -I don't trust my memory.
But I didn't and don't think I ever will. Something more complex than laziness prevents me. But the idea is still there, anyway. It moves back and forth. Two films have brought it up again lately: "El sol del membrillo" (Victor Erice) and "Under Olive Trees" (Abbas Kiarostami). Both films made me feel again the need to go with my mother, to listen to her and to build a film with her words. I guess it was the basic and emotional clearness both films breathe that reminded me of my mother. Should I ever plunge into the project about my mother, both Erice's and Kiarostami's films would definitely be the ideal and natural stylistic reference. But as I say, I never tackled it. Instead of talking to her I turned into my own interlocutor and wrote -and shot- "La flor de mi secreto."
I didn't go home in the summer, but I made Leo go with her mother to Almagro, a village 20 miles from mine and one which represents the quintessence of "lo manchego" (everything related to La Mancha). For their arrival, I chose a street that's similar to the one my mother lives at -as I remember it.
I wrote dialogues for Chus Lampreave my mother has repeated one and a thousand times. And I took pictures of the red, endless fields directly attached to the sky. Fields of that horizon-less La Mancha that marked my look, as a child.
And the women stitching bobbin lace in the patio, talking about women who committed suicide diving into the well; the last, black and crystal mirror (the water) in which the manchego suicide is ever reflected.
And I saw pass from the car the ash-colored olive trees, backstitching the infinite land. And as they near Almagro, "My village", Chus reads a poem my mother usually recites (last time she did it before the BBC 2 cameras, for a documentary they made on me).
And Leo regains the will to survive under the patio grapevine, open-air roots telling her where she comes from, the first door she trespassed to go out to the white street, the blinding white.

LIKE A COW WITHOUT ITS BELL
(The Roots)
Without knowing, the initial "husband's visit" has become the pretext for making my most manchego film. I would have never done it consciously. Without permission, the abandoned-Leo's pain has transported me to my origins. And the effect has been as soothing as unexpected. I think that the film about "my mother's words" is contained in "La flor de mi secreto". And I'm not talking about the drastic, non-stop verbosity of Chus Lampreave's character, but something more abstract and essential. An unconscious return to my roots -and the first root is the mother.
There is one scene that best synthesizes the film I didn't make about her: through the lace curtains -let me point out again that Almagro is the "Home of Needlework", the only place in La Mancha (which is like saying the only place in the world) where women still sit in the sun to make bobbin lace; sheets, curtains, tablecloths, placemats, handkerchiefs…, they spend a life on it- Jacinta, Leo's mother, comes to the bed where her daughter lies, pale and inappetent. The mother feels he daughter's drama and laments: "What a pity, my child. So young and there you are, like a cow without its bell!"
There's not the slightest comedy in the comparison. At Leo's puzzled look, the mother explains: "…lost, with no course nor bearings, with no one to control you… Just like me… I'm also like a cow without its bell, but that's more common at my age. When us women are left without our husband, because he's either died or gone with someone else -same in the end-, we have to go back where we were born. We need to visit the hermitage, sit around with our neighbors, pray with them, even if we don't believe, otherwise we're lost out there like cows without their bells..." The bell, like marriage, implies a commitment. A heavy load sometimes, but it also means, and that's what the mother is referring to, that you're not alone. A cow with its belt never gets lost, the shepherd will find her by the ding-dong. A cow with its bell carries her own lighthouse on her neck.
After listening to her, Leo looks at her mother and sees herself. For different reasons, they are alone. Without their bell.

FEMALE SOLITUDE
Finally, I arrive to the main topic of this film - "La flor de mi secreto" and the one I would have built with my mother's words: Solitude.

THE MAP
I was born in a very bad time for Spain, but a good one indeed for the film industry. I'm talking about the fifties. I was still a child when I first stepped into a hometown theater. It looked sort of like the one portrayed in some sequences of "El Espíritu de la colmena" -if my memory serves me right, there is a theater in that film by Erice. Time has made me realize that the memories I have of the films that struck me don't usually agree with the actual film, but rather with the visual impact it had on me.
Apart from the chair, the first time I went to a theater I also took a can of coal with me to fight the cold during the projection. In time, the heat of that makeshift hearth has become the paradigm of what movies meant to me back then.
When I was eleven, in Extremadura, there was a theater on the same street where I studied. At school, the priests would try to form my soul by distorting it with religious tenacity. Fortunately, up on the same street and stuck into the theater seat, I would come to terms with the world -with my world. A world ruled by evil emotions which I was sure to belong to. Soon, at twelve maybe, the time came for me to choose, and I did it with the kind of resolution that only inexperience can produce. If I was to go to hell for watching "Johnny Guitar", "Picnic", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" or "Splendor in the Grass", there was no other alternative than taking the punishment. I didn't know what genes were, but there is no doubt that, like cattle, I was marked with the stigmata of the rural film lover. I was much more sensitive to Tenessee Williams' voice, coming out of the lips of Liz Taylor, Paul Newman or Marlon Brando, than to the mellow, bore whisper of my Spiritual Headmaster. There was no doubt about it: The call of the light projected on me from the theater screen sounded much louder than any other.
What I didn't know is that, decades later, some of the images projected on my childhood screens would carry my name on them and be marked by those first films in which T. Williams was my actual spiritual headmaster.

THE BED AND ITS SURROUNDINGS
The Bed is very important in any love story -that's relatively speaking, since lovers only need to have their bodies ready to express themselves love, and they do it on any surface). But in a sad love story, the Bed is definitely essential. Its little use is extremely revealing, it's the thermometer that best measures the temperature of relationships.
In "La flor de mi secreto" there's only one Big Bed Scene for Leo and her husband, one in which they don't actually lie on the bed, but where it acts as a witness.
Paco has just arrived from a trip, Leo takes him to the bedroom speaking all the time, feeling him with her hands, but he wants to take a shower first (claiming he's too sweaty from the trip). Leo and her husband evolve around the bed, as she unbuttons his shirt one by one saying the prayer of her immediate desires in time with the unfastening buttons: "… first you take a shower, since it seems to be so necessary (first button out)… then we fuck (second button)… then we cool off (third button)… then we fuck again (fourth button) and then, who knows! (fifth button and shirt out). Everything next to the bed, as if they were next to an altar. An altar that is to become an abyss as deep as the Grand Canyon -and equally dangerous to fall into.
After the shower, Leo waiting with hungry eyes and a towel on her hands, a terrible quarrel occurs as sudden as a tropical storm… Paco explains to her that he doesn't have a full-day leave as he promised her, but just two hours after which he has to go back to the airport. Leo groans frustrated. But Paco is a soldier, and he says "I don't need to explain you what my obligations are." "You're my husband " Leo remarks, "do I have to explain you what your obligations with me are?".

The quarrel worsens in the bedroom where Paco puts on his clean underwear. The Bed witnesses the enormous abyss opening within the couple. Mute, intact and enormous, the Bed just hosts Leo's bottom sitting with her back to Paco. With the routine of the pain macerated over months, Leo states her opinion on the Peace Mission that separates them: "You went to solve a war away from the one you had here, at home. And I'm the sole victim of this war." Leo remains seated with her back against Paco, so she can't see him leaving the bedroom and sneaking into the bathroom. She doesn't know he's not even listening. Leo steps from a Williams' character, strong women loaded with reasons even when they make tremendous mistakes, into one of Cocteau's, abandoned women even when they have before themselves the object of their desire -because the object at issue has fallen asleep (the indifferent Adonis) or simply he's not present.

I tortured the actors rehearsing this scene. After this process, my only problem was what to put on the bed. It may sound stupid, but it wasn't just an aesthetic problem.
The image you hang over the headrest dominates the room, watches us in dreams, keeps the doors of our privacy, symbolizes one's beliefs, it brings confidence, it shelters and protects us. It's a sacred place. Since my characters are not strong believers, it was extremely delicate to decide on the image to hang over their bedrest. I finally came up with the idea of hanging a large map of Spain neatly framed in gold, one of those maps with cyan seas on the background of our yearbook photo.

I never had the chance of having that photo taken, I wasn't given it and I feel as if they had taken a precious toy away from me, one whose rights I owned as much as any other kid my age. I think the day I had the appointment was the one I couldn't go to school because I was migrating with my family to Extremadura, searching for prosperity.
The catholic school, the bad religious education, Geography and movies: it's all mixed in my life like chickpeas, bacon and potatoes in a cocido madrileño. My bad relation with Geography went on at my school in Extremadura. The only things I learned with the Salesians was being afraid and singing delicious mass in Latin. I was the soloist of a renowned infant chorus. The priests let me skip my Geography class so that I could rehearse and, at the end of the year, they never failed me. I grew up on the idea that the universe was a fantasy. Fifteen years later I started travelling restlessly, but blindly. I never knew the distance separating the places I visited, amazed and struck by the fact they existed.
I'm mentioning all this because I want to make clear to what extent I have always regarded Geography and maps as something wonderful, mysterious and abstract. It was for this reason that I hung a map over Leo and Paco's bed.
One finds protection only in what he ignores (isn't that what religion is?), something whose ignorance he finds fascinating. Something we lack or didn't had when we needed it. I have taken the place belonging to God and his Saints and given it to a Map of Spain. That map (and that knowledge) I could never access as a kid and which was doomed to preside the mother scene of "La flor de mi secreto."

BLACK AND PINK
The colors of literary genres are not just a label differentiating and simplifying them. The color of literature is as important (and defining) as a woman's hair color -even if she's dyed it, the more a woman resembles what she's dreamed herself to be, the more genuine she is.
There are blondes, brunettes and redheads, but women are different from one another not just by the color of their hair, but also by their attitude, sensibility and style. A blond is doomed for failure and annoyance if she doesn't act like blondes do. She'll just provoke confusion within and around her.
Should a pink novel writer, by mishap or pain, look at herself in the black mirror of reality, she would get her look all wrong (a writer's look is essential) and she would have trespassed the limits dividing such opposite and neighboring genres as Black and Pink.
Detectives in black series and heroines in pink series are characters with more affinities than differences. Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade are a couple of fucking sloppies. Ethylic cynicism is what protects detectives from sentimentality -or so do the disappointments suffered justify. Cynicism becomes an auxiliary raincoat concealing a wounded heart of gold. Disappointments are rather more melodramatic than detective signs. Their critic attitude towards the society they happen to live in is also particular of those. In a pink-colored universe, social awareness is absent, almost forbidden. But not in melodrama.
In fact, socially aware melodrama is the definition of neo-realism.
Even though they share some aspects, pink literature is not to be taken for melodrama; all pink literature is melodramatic, but not all melodrama is pink, no way.
It's also true that all genres, literary and cinematographic, complement one another. They influence one another, divide and subdivide themselves and mingle more and more often. This general and generous promiscuity between genres (eclecticism, crossbreeding) is characteristic of a lazy century that takes stock before passing on to History.
Back to our protagonist. The change taking place in Leo's life is one of color, almost a transfer of colors between life and writing. First she writes pink literature but her life is so black. And it finally turns all the way around completely, her life expectations are much warmer (not exactly Pink, that would be unreal), rather orangish, like a sunset or a hearth fire. Regarding her writing, even though that's not specified in the film, I can foresee it will be black and bizarre, inspired by the reality published in the accident and reports section of a newspaper. Leo has several folders filled with press cuttings telling about extraordinary events. They pass unnoticed in "La flor...", but they are laid on her desk. I put them there.
The Heroin in Pink Literature and the Anti-hero in the Black one are both alone at first but end up differently. The Anti-hero remains sad and lonely in the end (I believe that anti-heroes ultimately enjoy chaos and solitude. A woman would wind up putting some order in her house and life, and that's exactly the only difference between an anti-hero and the average person).
On the contrary, by the end of the novel the Pink Heroin is always with someone, sometimes with the wrong person, but that's not the point. In pink literature, solitude is beautiful at first and forbidden by the end.

BLUE AND GRAY
(A Good Investment))
Some films we have heard of so much are mentioned on newspapers and TV so often that one has the feeling of having seen them many times. But in fact, one has seen them just once, if at all, but so long ago that it's as if one would have never seen them.

Something like that happened to me with "Casablanca." I had seen it twenty years ago, but was tired of hearing about it and didn't quite feel like seeing it again. However, I saw it by chance two years ago on TV. And I discovered it, of course.
I wrote some lines down. I'm terrible as a film lover, I never remember the sentences that strike me, the ones I can use to make an impact on people. Notes are of little help because I always loose them in the end. But that was not the case with "Casablanca." The next day someone called me from "El Mundo" to write something about the film industry for the anniversary of its "Cinelandia" section. I decided to talk about the importance of costumes in films, so I turned to a line H. Bogart says in "Casablanca" (the one I wrote down on a post-it note). In their first re-encounter, Ingrid Bergman asks Bogart if he remembers the last time they met, in Paris. Impassive, Bogart answers: "I remember that day perfectly (it was the day the Germans took Paris). Germans dressed in grey and you did in blue." It's impossible to express more emotion. But Bogart was just commenting on the clothing colors. Apart from being body containers, costumes are emotion containers. Containers and transmitters.

Months later, "Kika" was released in London. The party turned into a pretext for raising money for an AIDS foundation. An auction was arranged with costumes by famous designers (Gaultier, Mugler, V. Westwood, etc.) and some articles given away by different personalities. It was the average good-intentioned coarse party, all the city's tops were there. The only serious person was the man conducting the auction, an actual auctioneer from Sotheby's. I had given one of the wonderful titles Juan Gatti designed for "Mujeres..." In fact, it was my title: screenplay writer and director. I was supposed to be giving the original version, but I admit here it was only a copy you couldn't tell through the glass. I put it in an enormous handmade golden frame that cost me 100,000 pesetas. The only truly precious object (apart from my gesture) was the frame -but I didn't tell, of course.

From all the chaos and sweat, after thirty-something interviews yelled out in English, an incisive and rude interviewer asked me if fashion was really something else apart from a toy for hookers and fags to feel "divine." I took a good look at him before answering, with that dead calm you feel when you are right and know how to explain yourself. Once again I turned to Bogart and his timely comment on the Germans' grey and Bergman's blue. I told him that, in films, costumes not only make girls look good; they also define the time and set the characters' sex and social status. And should that not be enough, as I proved to him with Bogart's line, costumes contain emotions.
Months later, on the third or fourth version of "La flor..." I thought that an alcohol-driven Angel would loose his discretion and also turn to Bogart's line to express the emotion he contained: "Germans dressed in grey and you did in blue" he finally tells Leo when she asks him if he remembers "Casablanca", etc. Leo stares at him puzzled. They are by themselves in an enormous Plaza Mayor. This solitude is more theatrical than real. Leo asks what her friend means by Bogart's line. "You were dressed in blue the day you ran away from your life and into mine ", says Angel with a lump in his throat and tears in his eyes.
Averse, Leo separates from him. She's spent months trying to forget that moment (it was the day her husband left her forever. She hadn't thought about it, but she was actually wearing blue jeans and coat)... However, Angel will never forget it... This is one of my favorite scenes. And I owe it in great part to Bogart's line. I wonder how would I come with the idea of seeing "Casablanca" again. Taking a simple note on a yellow post-it sometimes takes an investment that is as extraordinary as unpredictable. I had never profited so much from a simple note.