Andrés Vicente Gómez called and
offered me the possibility of choosing between filming "Cómo ser
infeliz y disfrutarlo" (How to be Miserable and Enjoy it) and
"Cuernos de mujer"(Infidelity), since he was going to produce both
movies. I chose the former because, as a friend told me, the story
narrated the absolute empty life of a widow, and that gave me the
clue to get inside the character. I was aware of the fact that I
didn't have a solid story, so I tried to work the interior side of
the character with Carmen Maura from the notion that the woman, the
widow, was at the beginning of the film in a position of "absolute
zero" so to speak. The void she felt following her husband's death
gave me the clue to enter her world. It was the portrait of a woman
who was supposedly liberated, but who felt compelled to play the
role of a man. She ends up "hollow" because, although in the
professional field she is successful, in her personal life she is
like a desert and this doesn't have its origin in literature. It
originates in women I know, who I see on a day-to-day basis and who
find themselves in similar situations. That is where the idea came
from to make a straightforward film that went to the heart of the
matter without obstacles and angles, a still camera and scant
music…"a Zen approach," is how I used to describe it during the
shooting to make myself understood by Bingen and the
decorators.
ENRIQUE URBIZU