At the age of ten I suffered in my childhood a true and furious passion for cinema. I began to frequent the double programs, first trying to combine it with the afternoon classes and then abandoning all modesty to take refuge in the cozy darkness of the cinema and live unforgettable hours in ambush in one of its seats.
Carlos Saura fell in love with the seventh art as a child. So much so that he didn't mind skipping classes or stealing money from his parents to pay for the tickets: “I became a thief.” But his vocation would come to him much later. “I leaned towards engineering. I wanted to be a flamenco dancer. I ran a printing press. “I thought about dedicating myself to racing motorcycles,” recalls the director, who died last February at the age of 91, in his posthumous memoirs You also live by images (Taurus), which he wrote during confinement in 2020 and which have just reached the bookstores.
The young Saura abandoned those ambitions one by one and opted for photography, a field in which he was developing a promising career until “the advice of my brother Antonio, the painter, took me to the old Madrid Film School.” I think in 1952, when I was 20 or 21 years old. There I found my true calling.”
During the years of learning, the future director was dreaming of a contract as a photojournalist in a prestigious magazine. “When I was preparing Los golfos, my first feature film, in 1959, I received a proposal to join the magazine Paris Match. That night I didn't sleep. My dream had come true, but cinema prevailed and I have never regretted it.”
With that decision, Spain may have lost a great photographer, although Saura never renounced this discipline, but it gained one of the most prolific filmmakers of his generation, with almost fifty films behind him, and the director who modernized Spanish cinema. Success came to him with that first film, which he wrote with Mario Camus and Daniel Sueiro, which he financed “Pedro Portabella, friend of my brother Antonio”, and which he had to deal with censorship. Los golfos had its reward from the first minute because it was selected to participate in the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. An event that brought Saura two great gifts: “being able to continue making films and meeting Luis Buñuel.”
Buñuel, from Aragon like Saura, became one of the young filmmaker's great friends along with Emilio San de Soto, Alberto Portera and Elías Querejeta, for whom the director showers affection in the pages of De imagens also se vivir. Querejeta was the producer of The Hunt, “a risk-taking film, made with four actors, in four weeks,” which underpinned Saura's career by winning the award for best director at the 1960 Berlinale. It was at that festival where the director met Geraldine Chaplin.
Saura had married the journalist Adela Medrano in Barcelona in the 1950s. In 1967, “after the success of The Hunt, I started filming Peppermint Frappé, my second color film. During filming I fell in love with Geraldine and, not without sadness, as usually happens on such occasions, I left my wife to go live with her.” The Spanish director thus became the son-in-law of Charles Chaplin, who, “when he saw the film, he sent us a telegram in which he told us that it was one of the best he had seen and that José Luis López Vázquez was one of the greatest actors.” ”.
López Vázquez was also one of Saura's favorites for being "credible", the same as José Luis Gómez, Imanol Arias, Juan Diego, Juan Echanove, Fernando Fernán-Gómez, Paco Raval and Fernando Rey. “Among the actresses, Victoria Abril, Carmen Maura, Geraldine…” The filmmaker also remembers Antonio Gades with great appreciation, “because meeting him marked the beginning of a great friendship and the beginning of my long filmography dedicated to the musical,” which began with Bodas de sangre (1981), he continued with other unforgettable titles such as Carmen (1983), El amor brujo (1986) or Sevillanas (1992) and which also made Saura an opera director.
, the entertaining, although unfinished, memoirs of Saura, who in addition to being a filmmaker and photographer was a writer, there is space for memories of the Civil War, which marked his childhood and supported another of his best-known films, ¡Ay, Carmela (1990) ; for his father, a Treasury lawyer during the Republic and Franco's regime; for his mother, a pianist, from whom he inherited his love of music; for his other couples, Mercedes Pérez and Eulàlia Ramón, and for other films that boosted his career such as Cría Cuervos (1976), Elisa, Vida Mía (1977), Deprisa, Deprisa (1981) or El Dorado (1988). .
“From my past life, the children (Carlos, Antonio, Shane, Manuel, Adrián, Diego and Anna), the photographs and the memories remain.” The public is left with his films, which renewed and modernized Spanish cinema, and now these memories, which the director has left as a legacy to share his experiences with all film fans.
