Juan Antonio Bayona Quotes

I always try to do more than one or two takes if we have the time.

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 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.

I think your behavior is different when you work on digital or film. It seems that… I feel most focused if I’m working on film.

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.

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.

I had a very happy childhood.

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.

If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.

When you’re portraying a tough situation, you have to show some of the things in there.

You’re watching the movie for the first time when you’re working with the actors in front of the camera. You don’t think about how the audience will react. You discover the film.

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.