By Michael Guillén

The conditions for interviewing Juan Antonio Bayona [1] at the 32nd Toronto International Film Festival [2] were less than ideal. Situated in direct humid sun in the outdoor plaza of the Intercontinental Hotel, surrounded by at least 20 other press junkets all vying for time and space, it was difficult to concentrate and focus. A media circus, indeed. Then, because they were running behind schedule, the Toronto publicists informed me at the last minute that they were cutting my time down to a mere 10 minutes.

Imagine my delight, then, when the San Francisco publicist arranged for me to have a full half hour with Bayona, as well as scriptwriter Sergio Sánchez [3], during their recent San Francisco appearance. "We've met before?" Bayona queried when I walked into the Ritz Carlton conference room. "In Toronto," I confirmed, "Bienvenidos a San Francisco!"

Following its world premiere at the 46th International Critics' Week in Cannes [4] earlier this year, Juan Antonio Bayona's debut feature The Orphanage [4] was hailed as "devastating and uplifting" (Time) and a "formidable thriller" (Variety). It was promptly picked up by Picturehouse, the distributor behind Guillermo del Toro [4]'s ravishing horror-fantasy Pan's Labyrinth [4], which competed at Cannes shortly after The Orphanage began production last year. It's important to note, however, that Sergio Sánchez's screenplay for The Orphanage and Bayona's commitment to it had already been in place years prior to Bayona's acceptance of Del Toro's production pedigree and long before Bayona ever saw Pan's Labyrinth. After reading the script, Del Toro agreed not only to produce The Orphanage but to present it as well: a kiss of faith on the forehead.

With the welcome advantage of having the screenwriter present, I felt the script was the best place to start. My thanks to Luisa Serna for helping translate when necessary.

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Sergio, can you speak to where the story for this script came from?

Sergio Sánchez: [What] sparked the idea for The Orphanage was [an illustration] on the copy of Peter Pan [5] that I read as a kid. It was [an illustration] of Wendy's mother sitting by the window, waiting for her children to come back. I thought it would be interesting to re-tell the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother. That's basically what The Orphanage is, only our Laura [Belen Rueda [5]] is a bit of Wendy and it's a bit of Jane and Margaret, her daughter and granddaughter. She was the girl who was left behind and could never go back to Neverland.

There was Peter Pan on one hand and The Turn of the Screw [6] by Henry James [6] on the other, because I also wanted to write a horror film that could be ambiguous enough to admit a double reading. You could see it as a ghost story and you could also understand that what happens in the film is the process of a woman who is gradually losing her mind because she cannot cope with the loss of a child.

Once I had that settled, I brought in my own personal stuff. I brought in my own childhood fears. I was a very sick kid when I was growing up. I spent most of my childhood in hospitals and most of the time I thought I wasn't going to make it. My mom was very old and I was also very afraid of losing her. Separation was the big fear of my childhood. That's why I developed these two imaginary friends, just like the friends of Simon in the film. Throw all of that into the blender and The Orphanage came out; a mixture of all my childhood obsessions.

Peter Pan is also one of my favorite childhood stories and I've actually remained interested in it into my adulthood. It is one of the stories that still feels relevant. I, too, remember certain illustrations from the volume I read. One where Peter Pan is floating in a boat made out of a bird's nest. And another where he is looking in the window of his mother's house and realizes he has been replaced by another baby.

Sánchez: I changed that in The Orphanage and had Tómas behind the glass holding up the key.

As I grew older I actually studied the story of Peter Pan. That's one of the main reasons I was enchanted by The Orphanage when I first saw it. One of the narrative elements that has always struck me about Peter Pan's story - something that Walt Disney [6] played with in his animated version [6] - is how Peter Pan was always running away from his shadow, which was in hot pursuit. There was a detachment between Peter Pan and his shadow.

I remember I talked a bit about this with you, Juan Antonio, when we met in Toronto. I remember questioning you about the shadow in her past that Laura was trying to get away from and you said that Laura wasn't trying to escape anything from her past; she was trying to escape her present. By returning to her past, Laura was attempting to escape her present. So what is the backstory behind that? Why did she return to this house of her childhood?

[7]Juan Antonio Bayona: I will tell you with an example. For three months, I rehearsed with the actors. I used to record all these rehearsals. I remember I was watching them with a friend of mine, an actress, and I asked her what she thought of Belen and Fernando Cayo [8] [the actor who plays her husband Carlos]. She told me, "There's something I don't believe in their performance. I don't believe they're a couple. I don't believe that they make love." I told my friend, "They don't make love. That's the problem. That's why she's going back to that house." She's running away from her present. She's looking for the happiness that she had in the past.

Sánchez: You mention that Peter Pan ran away from his own shadow. I think Laura's shadow is adulthood and she does not want to become an adult.

Bayona: Exactly like Peter Pan.

Yes, it's by avoiding his shadow that Peter Pan remains young.

Sánchez: Yes, it's the same thing. She doesn't want to have the responsibilities. That's why we never see anything of her adult life. We see her as a child and then we pick up from when she returns to the house trying to be a child again and, of course, it's too late.

The ambiguity you strived for in this script - and achieved - is beautiful and complex. You don't know if there really are ghosts in that house. Was she summoned to the house by the ghosts of her childhood? Or has she come to the house and peopled it with the ghosts of her childhood? By the fact that, as you say, Laura and her husband don't make love, with the subsequent absence of any children of their own, the theme of adoption becomes a presiding theme in The Orphanage. Are you saying that she didn't really want any children of her own because that would necessitate her being an adult?

Sánchez: Yes, pretty much. She wants to be a mother like someone who's playing to be a mother. She wants to take care of all these children, tell them bedtime stories, dress them up, cook for them, and have all these parties and play with them; but it seems like she's not really ready to face all the responsibilities that go along with parenting. She's not a very good mother to Simón. From the very first time you see her, minutes into the film, you realize she's a woman who's been hiding from her own kid the fact that he's sick and adopted. That's not a healthy thing to do. That's not the healthy approach. If you talk to a doctor or a psychologist or anyone who's going to give you a child to adopt, they will tell you to be open with the child about it from the very beginning. It makes no sense trying to hide things from your adopted son.

On the other hand that's one of the things that makes Laura so interesting. She is very much a flawed character from the beginning of the movie and still you root for her. You want her to find what she was always looking for.

Bayona: It's also not so much that she doesn't want to be an adult as she doesn't know how to deal with the responsibilities of adult life. And probably the idea of adoption is what gives her even more reason to think she's not able to deal with responsibilities.

The scene in the film when Laura turns to her husband after Simón has gone missing at the party and says, "No one will trust me with their children now" was a sad revelatory moment.

Bayona: Yeah, I really appreciate that moment when she says that because that is her problem in the movie. There's also the idea that we can say nothing about the time between the day she left the house and the day she returns. We don't know anything about her other life. That says a lot about the story of Laura. How important is her other life?

Between the two of you - who each have such strong vision - there is this script. Can you tell me how the script came to Juan Antonio? And how the two of you have worked with it to turn it into the film we see today? Has it changed much from the original script?

Sánchez: There were several drafts between the first one and the one Juan Antonio actually shot. I wrote the first draft of the script in 1988-89, something like that, and I did a short film similar in tone and story that I showed around trying to get the financing for that script, to direct it myself. Basically, every production company in Spain read it and they sent back their coverages. They all said the same thing. "You know this film is an impossible mixture of drama and horror and those two are like oil and water. You cannot attempt to mix that; it will never work." Then they had all these problems [with the script]. They wanted a big bad guy. They said, "You need a bad guy. You don't have that in your film." And: "The third act is silent; why is it silent?" All these things. Basically every thing that made the movie unique, they wanted to take that away.

So I gave up on it for a while. I thought, "Okay, this is never going to happen." I gave it to Juan Antonio because he was working for a production company. I offered them the script as a sample of my work so that they would hire me to write something that Juan Antonio might want to do. But they loved the script and they said, "No, let's go ahead and do this." Juan Antonio took it from there and he started saying, "No, let's take it back to the early stages." He told me what interested him and what appealed to him from the script - which was basically Laura's regression back to her childhood memories - was how to make of movie out of turning beautiful memories into threatening ghosts.

In the face of all these critiques Sergio received from the production companies about why his script would not work as a movie and how it needed to be changed, you picked it up, Juan Antonio, and you saw how it could be a movie. What were the particular challenges you faced turning Sergio's script into a film?

Bayona: The main challenge was to keep the ambiguity of the story. We tried to focus on two concepts in order to make the movie effective. One was ambiguity and, of course, when you have the audience wondering whether what they're watching is happening or not, then you're getting the audience to participate in the story, and letting their imagination go wild. At the same time, we wanted simplicity. We wanted to focus on a single location, not too many characters, and even the plot of the movie - it was simple but it was even more simple in the editing room. I decided to cut out parts of the story in order to keep the whole story within Laura's point of view, trying to make it more psychological.

In Toronto, we talked some about your choice to afflict Simón with HIV and - in light of what you said earlier, Sergio, about being sick in your youth - I'm intrigued by this notion that the gravitas of a longstanding illness pulls you into a death horizon. I myself am a longterm survivor of the HIV virus for 20+ years now and I can speak from experience on how it shapes your consciousness, how you become aware of things, you know things. It's difficult to explain to people a developed affinity for sorrow, an affinity for loss, an affinity for fears of abandonment and exile, all of those concerns, which - in terms of the ambiguity that you're talking about - is inflected tellingly through the figure of Simón. Simón seems to tilt these ambiguities towards the real or to suggest that - there's nothing ambiguous here - there are ghosts and because he's ill and caught within the orbit of the death horizon, he can sense their presence.

Bayona: It's very interesting that you say that because the first thing I thought about when deciding to make Simón HIV+ was that it would place focus, not so much on the HIV, but more on the mother than the child in the sense that it would present the idea of how a mother has to confront the impending death of a child. One of the scenes edited out of the movie was a scene where Benigna (Montserrat Carulla [9]) asked Laura, "Are you conscious that you will have to confront death?" But Belen's performance as Laura was so great that it was not necessary to put that sentence in the movie.

Further, HIV is a contemporary take on the idea of the advanced stages of an illness drawing you into the increased consciousness of the death horizon. What I found powerful was that - not only did you have Simón afflicted with HIV - but Laura's childhood friends likewise became sick and died of some unspecified disease. Illness itself, then, becomes a liminal space that intensifies a sensed communication across time. I praise you for that subtle, ambiguous notation.

Sánchez: Aurora, too, the character played by Geraldine Chaplin [9], is ill and she says, "Those of us who are close to death..." But it doesn't necessarily mean "those of us who are about to die." It's more like "those of us who live with death." We're aware of it. We're thinking about it. You know that someday it's going to happen. It's not like you live oblivious to it. That's, I guess, where my personal stuff came up growing up as a kid. Every time I went into the hospital, I would think, "Will I come out this time or not?" That opens your mind up to a whole set of concerns that you would never think about if you'd had a perfectly healthy life.

Absolutely. It's a resonance that informs your perception.

Bayona: We were also trying to focus on the types of fears that a child could feel. These are the kinds of fears you can find in fairy tales - deformity, illness, loneliness, abandonment - and all of these are there in the character of Simón and also in the character of Laura. Laura is transforming herself into a child throughout the movie.

What is this about childhood that is so frightening? [Bayona chuckles.] Spanish cinema has had such striking examples of childhood fears and the fear of childhood. You've gone on record as saying that you wanted to make a movie like the ones you enjoyed watching as a child. When I first read that, I assumed you were talking about Spanish films like Victor Erice [9]'s Spirit of the Beehive [9]; but, in doing my research to prepare for today's interview, I realized you were talking more about American movies from the late 70s to early 80s, like Steven Spielberg [9]'s Close Encounters of the Third Kind [9] or Tobe Hooper [9]'s Poltergeist [9]. What was it in those movies from that time that you sought to capture in The Orphanage?

Bayona: But it's also the Spanish movies as well. I feel very lucky that I grew up watching all these movies at the same time, the Spielberg movies but also the European movies - Carlos Saura [9]'s Cría Cuervos [9] and Spirit of the Beehive - all these movies with Ana Torrent [9] that impressed not only me but other filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro. In Cría Cuervos the dead mother of Ana Torrent works in the movie like a memory or like a ghost and was played by Geraldine Chaplin. That's why I came back to Geraldine Chaplin.

Interesting. I failed to make that casting connection between Cría Cuervos and The Orphanage!

Bayona: So that was how I tried to go back to those movies I watched as a child. It's a mix of the big American movies and the European movies. Movies like Spirit of the Beehive and Cría Cuervos have this weird, eerie atmosphere that I really like and, as a child, those movies worked for me like horror movies, scary movies.

Sánchez: Even though they were meant to be political commentaries. [Laughter.]

You've often said, Juan Antonio, that you want to use the camera to tell the story, which is to say you want images to tell the story. When I think back on the early Spielberg vehicles, particularly Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg's wish to do so was quite pronounced as well. In fact, as I was thinking about it on the way here to conduct the interview, the image that sprang to mind and which always conveys such menace (it still sends a shiver up my spine) is when the screw is turning and you realize Melinda Dillon [9]'s character is not going to be able to keep the aliens away from her son Barry.

Bayona: Oh my God, yeah!

So how ironic that we're likewise referencing Henry James's Turn of the Screw! And referencing that visual moment in Close Encounters that suggests such menace when the screw is turning. The final third of The Orphanage is predominantly visual with the story moving forward through images; was the script written like that?

Sánchez: Yes, it was like that. That was one of the complaints [from the production companies]. They pointed that at me like I was stupid. There's this standard format for screenplays where the description of the dialogue is supposed to be balanced and you're supposed to have half and half. Using my script they said, "See? This is wrong, wrong, wrong. No dialogue. No dialogue. Wrong, wrong." [Laughter.] It was like, "Okay, whatever."

But yeah, it was meant to be like that. Also, Juan Antonio loves telling the story with the camera. Actually, one of the exercises I had to do was to keep the dialogue to a minimum because Juan Antonio gets bored when he has to shoot dialogue sequences. He really enjoys doing the visual stuff. So it was kind of a token I had to pay. "Okay, if you let me write this very touching dialogue scene, then I promise the third act will be all visual." He was like, "Okay!" I guess that's also good when you're entering a territory like the US. It's great to have a movie with the final half hour completely free of subtitles. Then you can just watch. [Laughter.] You forget you're watching a foreign film.

Bayona: The last 20 minutes of the movie is pure cinematic storytelling. It's impossible to tell on the stage. It's a perfect mix of music, visuals, dialogue. It's pure cinema. There's no way of telling this story in some other medium.

Another image from The Orphanage that caught me and conveyed volumes without saying a word was - coming also from fairy tales - Simón leaving the shell trail for Tómas. Of course it reminded me of Hansel and Gretel [10] and this whole concern of how to avoid getting lost when destiny implies it's inevitable that you're going to become lost. It's your fate to get lost. I get goosebumps just thinking about it!

Bayona: [Laughter] Me too!

When Laura opens the door and there's the pile of shells. Chilling! I like that dread of destiny. It's as if we dread what has to happen.

Bayona: The Orphanage is a movie about regression and about going back in time. Of course, if you talk about the future, you have to talk about it in these terms, like when we talked about the shadow of Laura. Also, the image of Benigna worked for us like an image of Laura in the future if she doesn't meet her destiny.

I'm not quite catching what you're saying.

Bayona: If she doesn't fulfill her destiny, she will become Benigna. If the movie hadn't finished the way it had, Laura would have become like Benigna.

Now I see what you're saying.

Sánchez: In the film there's no real bad guy. The bad guy of the movie is fear itself.

And shame.

Sánchez: And shame, yeah. Benigna is like the dark mirror of Laura. Benigna is what Laura could become if she goes on playing her Wendy fantasy, a woman who's completely crazy because she's lost her child and she's unable to face reality. Simón has his dark mirror in Tómas, which is probably how he sees himself, this kid who has an illness which becomes a deformity, set aside from the world. I thought it was interesting to have Simón and Tómas and then Laura and Benigna side by side.

And with regard to what you were saying earlier about the dread of destiny, there is something very beautiful that Geraldine said when she read the script. She said for her the movie was about the cruelty of hope. As long as Laura has hope, [she can't face reality]. Had she known Simón was dead, she probably would have managed to keep her sanity. But as long as you keep thinking there's hope, hope can turn into a monster. The beautiful thing about this movie is that it's completely open to interpretation. When the movie finishes, there are two endings you can take away with you. You can think the film is actually about the cruelty of hope and then it's a very dark story. Or you can think it's a movie about the healing power of faith and how faith can save you, even in the darkest corner. Faith can help you to deal with the darkest aspects of life.

We've already touched on this but I want to talk a little further on why childhood is so scary. Why fairytales can be scary. Why nursery rhymes can be scary. Why a creaking merry-go-round can be so ominous. Your link with Spielberg also tracks here because he's also compelled by these themes - the horror of the suburban cul de sac - with which he plays in Close Encounters and Poltergeist. The game Laura plays with her childhood friends that she reinvokes to contact them, knocking on the living room wall and their gradually advancing from the drawing room; that's horrifying.

Bayona: I don't know; but in genre movies, the gaze is very important. If you think about a movie like Peeping Tom [10] or Don't Look Now [10], they're all about the gaze. The Sixth Sense [10], for example, is a question of point of view, the way the story is told by the director; it's happening in a certain way and then you go back and everything's different. So it's very interesting to deal at the same time with the genre, and of course with the world of children because the way children look at the world is completely different than adults. They're not as self-conscious, not as prejudiced.

Probably also there's the element of transgression. Transgression is very important in horror movies. With the world of children it's interesting to turn everything around, to turn good into evil.

Sánchez: Or what it means to be healthy and to be sick. To be normal or not. With all those disabled kids at the scene of the party where they're welcoming the children with Downs Syndrome, it's played in a way that they look more normal than the adults who are wearing masks.

My final question: Belen Rueda is so perfect in this role. Can you talk a bit about how you found her and why her chose her for the role?

Bayona: She's a huge name in Spain, but from Spanish television where she plays comedy and sitcoms. Suddenly, a couple of years ago, she did a role in The Sea Inside [10] and she was amazing. I wanted to cast someone refreshing. I didn't want to see a face I had seen a lot on the big screen. At the same time, I wanted to change the type of role that she as an actor was used to playing in order to throw the audience off a bit so they wouldn't know what to think. In that sense, Rueda was perfect. I had a meeting with her and she was terrific, the way she helped me to prepare for the role.

She's a mother. She knows how to deal with children and she knows a lot of things I don't know about with regard to being with children. She was helpful. She was wonderful. She brought a lot of emotion at the same time as intelligence. I love her. She looks like heroines from the films of the 70s, like Sissy Spacek [10], that kind of strong woman that's at the same time fragile.

You're saying she helped you with the children. Did she help you in directing the children? You directed these children so well, was that a difficult process for you?

Bayona: When you direct children, it's all about the casting. In the case of Belen Rueda, she helped me a lot working with Roger Príncep [11], the boy who plays Simón.

With the film finally leaving the festival circuit and entering into widespread distribution, do you have any sense if there's any difference in how audiences from different countries are reacting to the film?

Bayona: The movie has only been released in Spain.

Where it's doing very well, I understand?

Sánchez: The movie opened a month ago in Spain and it's made like 19 million euros in four weeks.

So much for a bad script, huh?

Sánchez: [Chuckling.] Yeah. It's going to be the highest-grossing film of the year and may become the highest grossing Spanish film ever.

Great! Congratulations!

Bayona: I think the rest of the countries are waiting to see how the film does in the States after Spain.

Sánchez: Since it's Spain's official submission to the Academy Awards, I think they're all waiting to see if the film gets an official nomination for an Academy Award, at which time it will be much easier to sell. I think that's a far stretch but they're all waiting for that.