Antonio Banderas

"I’m going to go to a guy who, being American, loved Spain; actually, he’s buried physically in the land where my father was born, in Ronda, Spain. His name is Orson Welles, and the movie is Touch of Evil."

"Francis Ford Coppola; he’s one of my favorites, too."

"The Exterminating Angel is a surrealistic movie. It’s about a bunch of people from high society in Mexico who, after one night at the opera, decide to have drinks in the house of one of them, and they cannot get out. And they spend about three months there, and you don’t know why they cannot get out, but they cannot. [Laughs] It’s a very, very beautiful and interesting story — also risky, and very misunderstood at the time that the movie opened. But you know, that’s what happened sometimes; after the second World War, naturalism and realism won the battle, so it was imposed that cinema had to be realistic always. But there was a time that it was not like that; Russians were doing expressionist movies, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari for example in Germany, and all these German directors, they were doing another type of approach to movies in formal terms. And in Spain, too, we had Luis Bunuel who was doing this type of surreal movies that were very interesting. Now they can be revised in sort of a different way, with time passed. But Luis Bunuel is definitely one of my favorite directors of all time."

"I love the scope of the movie; there is something in David Lean that I like very much. He’s always of the macro worlds and the micro worlds; he didn’t only do it in Lawrence of Arabia, but repeated it in Dr. Zhivago and other movies. [In Lawrence of Arabia] he made a movie with enormous scope and events that were known in the world — the Turkish-British War, and at the time, the taking of Akaba — things that were very spectacular and very epic, but in reality he’s talking to us about the homosexuality of one of the characters and something really minimalistic and very precise. He gets into the soul of a man through this spectacular movie and this union of these two worlds. He did it again in Dr. Zhivago as I said before, because in a way he put together the entire Russian revolution, which is also very big, while in reality telling a love story. So this kind of union, joining, he does between the macro world and the micro world is something that I was always interested in, and he was a master of doing the type of job. It’s one of those movies that always remain in your mind. Also, he gave himself permission to do it in a way that probably no studio would buy in our day; just to see a man coming from five miles into the camera for two minutes and a half — no executive producer would allow that to happen! He gave himself permission to do that, and I had the luck of seeing a remastered version of Lawrence of Arabia in a theater in Spain 10 years ago, and it was magnificent because it gave you the possibility of thinking, which is unusual. We also have the performance of first time movie actor Peter O’Toole. That was the first movie that he did, which I didn’t know until I worked with Omar Sharif in a movie that I did years ago called 13th Warrior, and he told me that. At the time, he was a very prominent theater actor in London, but that was the first movie that he did. I will never forget those blue eyes on the big screen. Amazing!"