"The Devil's Backbone" is a Mexican/Spanish movie. Could you have made it in Hollywood?
Never. Any studio would have been horrified by the violence inflicted towards or by children. But that's the core of the movie: it has to show children as mortal figures. In American movies, they are incredibly safe and uncomplex characters, but the worst years of my life were my childhood. If you're a football-playing happy kid,听it's probably a great time. But if you're a pale, introspective, creature of the shadows - like I was - it's hell. As I jokingly say, I have spent the last 26 years trying to recuperate from the first ten.
Like all of the best ghost films, this leaves a lot to the imagination...
I think there is a very quiet power in things that are not on screen. The idea in this very paradoxical movie was that, by the end, you have understood the ghost, and therefore it's not scary any more but pitiful. It's the living who are the real monsters.
What can you tell us about directing the sequel to "Blade"?
I love the Hammer movie "Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires", and I wanted "Blade 2" to have that same mix of fun, martial arts and horror. I also wanted to reinvent a breed of vampires that was not Tom Cruise in dreadlocks, languishing by the side of Brad Pitt. Vampirism in this movie is closer to rape.
So the vampires are unlike anything we've seen before?
There are two levels of vampirism: one is the regular vampire, which is just like it has always been; and then there's the super vampires, which听are a new breed we've created. That is more like a violation, which harks back to the older vampire mythologies. It's only in modern times that we have come to glorify vampirism. I want people to go, "Oh my God, I don't want to be sucked by that thing!"
