Ana Torrent (Madrid, 55 years old), a legendary Spanish film actress, was playing alone at recess one day when she caught the attention of a film director and a producer, Víctor Erice and Elías Querejeta, who had gone to school where Querejeta’s daughter, Gracia, was studying to look for the protagonist of Erice’s new movie, The spirit of the hive, which would become one of the best in the history of Spanish cinema. Ana Torrent was seven years old. There is a generation for whom it is impossible to hear her name and not think of the huge eyes of that girl in the movie in which she believed that Frankenstein was hiding in a small town in Franco’s Spain, as it was. In all.
Question. Sorrentino on Maradona: “The future does not exist for someone who is condemned to live in everyone’s memory.”
Answer. It is difficult to do works that mean as much as The spirit of the hive, but I refuse to think that the future does not exist or has not existed. Not long ago a journalist told me: “Since you already did it, you already did it …”, in the sense that I was already calm because I have already left works, but no, nobody is calm.
P. What did you say when you got home after that break when you met Erice?
R. To my parents? That some gentlemen had taken some photos of me at school. They put on a face … Erice came back another day, he talked to me, I told it at home and my parents thought it was my fantasy.
P. His father helped him a lot.
R. Not to grow up before time. Querejeta, at one point, said: “Well, what do we pay? What salary do we give this girl? ”He asked my father. And my father: “Salary? No, what I want is for them to take care of her and for a person we trust to accompany her on the set ”. “But, man, something will have to be given!” Added Querejeta. So my father said, “Okay, some presents. But to her and all her brothers alike ”.
P. What did you do?
R. Querejeta took us to El Corte Inglés one morning and told us: “You can take whatever you want.” We were four brothers.
They wanted to cover something up for Anna Magnani and she said: “Don’t even think about touching these wrinkles: it took me a lifetime to get them.”
P. After Erice, roll Breeding ravens (Carlos Saura) and The nest (Jaime Armiñán), among others. Cows, Julio Medem’s debut. And in 1996 his gaze was once again installed in the Spanish imagination, this time tied to the chair of a snuff-movie on Thesis, the first feature by Alejandro Amenábar.
R. I was in the United States. They called me and said: “There is a director who wants to count on you for a movie. It is filming now, at the end of August ”. I asked what he had done and they told me: “He has not done anything.” I asked what references there were to him and they told me: “He has no references.”
P. And he asked for the script to be sent to him.
R. I wanted to come to Spain to meet him. I had an interview with him. He was 23 or 24 years old. I saw a boy with very clear ideas about how he wanted to shoot, with a powerful story, with an interesting character. I knew it was a risk, but I wanted that risk. I wanted to do something that was not done at that time in Spain, completely new. I also didn’t have many doubts when I read the script and when I met him. AND [José Luis] Rope behind, and a good technical team.
P. The movie went off the billboard and came back.
R. He stayed in the slutty session of the Ideal or the Alphaville of Madrid. Then the Goya came out [Tesis arrasó con siete premios] and came back again. He was there for many months. I was surprised, but we had already seen a good reaction at the premiere, which was very quiet.
P. Why quiet?
R. That day another well-known film was premiered next door. At our premiere it was not even God, we were four cats. I think it was, but I’m not sure, one with Ariadna Gil and Gerardo Herrero [se trataba de Malena es un nombre de tango, basada en la novela de Almudena Grandes]. It opened three blocks away. There was everyone. We were four friends. But the reaction was very good. And it was what it was later.
P. Thesis connects her with a new generation.
R. But that generation is not the one of now, huh. 25 years have passed. But with all the years that I have been… Man, it would have been great to have always been where I have been, but it’s okay: there have been moments up and down.
P. Almost no one is 30 years in the top.
R. I have lived other things. Thanks to that I have been able, really, to know other lives that many very famous people find it more difficult. And I have been very free many times, I have had a lot of freedom.
P. Sacristán said that success is being able to say no.
R. The races are also formed by the times you said no.
It premiered and I was going to go unnoticed in the United States
P. Have you regretted any of them?
R. Some that I prefer not to comment and that would have been good. But most of the time I have not regretted it. When I have intuited something that is not, I have decided that I was not in the moment to do it, and that’s it.
P. You said that the people who were gallants to you continue to be gallants as if they were thirty years younger.
R. Of course.
P. Time passes differently for men and for women, in the cinema and in life.
R. And it’s very obvious with us. From an age the characters and stories plummet. Then you look back and it has always happened with the cinema. Women with wrinkles or a certain age no longer fill as before, they no longer take as many close-ups … There is something like that you don’t want to see.
P. You rolled Veronicaby Paco Plaza. I don’t know if you already saw The grandmother, the new film by this director. One of the most shocking scenes is the shot of an old woman taking a shower. The naked body, his close-ups.
R. I defend the beauty of a face at any age. I don’t understand why they haven’t sold us that. But it is not only in the cinema: everywhere, absolutely. They are not there, they do not exist.
P. He has complained that the wrinkle is an insurmountable obstacle, something negative. We talk about the interpretation and the wrinkle expresses subtleties.
R. And it helps to count things. Allow more registrations. They wanted to cover something up for Anna Magnani and she said: “Don’t even think about touching these wrinkles: it took me a lifetime to get them.”
P. Could it be said that, having started at the age of seven, she is an actress by chance and not by vocation?
R. I would not have dedicated myself to this. Not really. Because of my personality. I see actors who say that they acted in school plays from a young age. I was the opposite. She was sickly shy and reserved. Also, my inclination wasn’t even there. I am more of science. I liked mathematics much more than literature.
P. About the salseo, the social life of a film actress.
R. It is one more job of many people, of leading the career and selling, and being, and appearing. I have not been good at that. Can work. But it is a type of energy and career that is not mine, and that I do not know how to do well. Socially I am a bit clumsy. I haven’t, no. Upside down. Sometimes I wonder if my career could have been better if I had done more of that. But I have done the opposite of what had to be done. When I had to release a leading film, instead of taking advantage of it and going to one premiere and another, and an interview and another, to appear here and there, I would disappear. It premiered and I was going to go unnoticed in the United States. I don’t know if I’ve done it right or wrong, huh? It is my choice for how I am. Nor do I say that this is good or bad. It is another type of career, or way of being, and I have been like that. I don’t know how to do the other thing.
P. But the cinema does like it.
R. Yes of course I like it.
P. Well, everyone likes it, but …
R. It has accidentally become one of my favorite things. Not the only one. But I really like it, and I like to interpret. At first I didn’t understand it either and I didn’t enjoy it either, because since I had no training or anything, it was like “being me”. And you have no weapons for that, nor do I feel safe doing that. When I begin to discover, at the age of eighteen or twenty, what it is to interpret, and when I begin to study, there I enjoy more and discover what it is to be an actress.
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