Biography of Alejandro Amenábar | Spanish filmmaker.

(Santiago de Chile, 1972) Spanish filmmaker. Although Alejandro Amenábar was born on March 31, 1972 in the Chilean capital, only lived in his hometown until August of the following year, when his parents, two weeks before the State of Augusto Pinochet coup, decided to emigrate to Spain and settled in Madrid.

With the year and a half old that had to leave Chile, knowledge of their land had to be given through references, the accent and the customs of their elders. These and other signs of his identity, which gained more definitive forms in their subsequent travel to Chile to present their films, they keep double nationality, however feel and declare themselves Spanish. And while it seems unlikely that make political film, given the style of his filmography, it does not rule out in the future make a film about those unfortunate events that changed the history of his country on September 11, 1973.

Alejandro Amenábar

Passionate about images, rather than from the playground, Amenabar child occupied his free time between video tapes. He saw dozens of times your favorite movie, 2001: a space Odyssey (1968), Kubrick, something that surely links it to some colleagues of generation, although in his case there was a quirk: for Amenabar, images were inseparable from the background music.

An appreciation that devoted you to soundtracks, became a collector and guided him later to the musical composition and the conviction that, if it were not a filmmaker, would be musician. In fact, with your Macintosh, a multitrack sequencer, a keyboard, a mixing board and various synthesizers has composed the music not only all his films but also nobody knows anyone, his friend Mateo Gil, and the tongue of the butterflies, José Luis Cuerda.

University suspense in realization

In 1990 he began his studies of image and sound in the Faculty of Sciences of the information of the Complutense University, but already then was urged by commissioning its first projects as a filmmaker, and so did, under penalty of losing quite a few classes. When played you almost graduating, abandoned studies because of a thriller: the subject was precisely realization.

By then had already filmed his first short films, in which not only served as director, but also as screenwriter, actor, author of the soundtrack and Editor: head (1991), which was awarded the first prize of the independent Association of amateur filmmakers (AICA), and Hymenoptera (1992), whose screening at the Festival of Elche sparked praise from Bigas Luna and the interest of another director , José Luis Cuerda, who then acted as patron of the young filmmaker.

Amenabar in the filming of offshore

Rope was the producer of the next short, rolled already with greater technical resources and in 35 mm, Moon (1995), with which Amenábar began a practice common to all of his later works: the composition of the soundtrack. The film foreshadowed his taste by film genre and also the talent as a storyteller who decided to rope to Finance his first feature film.

With only twenty-three years, a team of young up to then unknown actors (with the exception of the protagonist, Ana Torrent), headed by the later famous Fele Martínez and Eduardo Noriega, and a modest but well spent budget, carried out thesis (1996), which also had space with a brief paper «Godfather» film, in a perverse character inspired by the teacher who suspended him in preparation.

This debut showed his mastery of the intrigue in a subject so morbid and macabre as the of the snuff movies (not pretended murders filming), and despite the excessive footage and some bizarre twist, after filing out of competition at the Berlin Festival in 1996 began a slow but forceful commercial career that became the great success of the Spanish delcine year , with an audience of close to one million spectators. It contributed eight nominations to the Goya awards bestowed by the Academy of Arts and cinematographic Sciences, who won seven, including the most important, as the best film and best director.

Open your eyes and the others, the confirmation

It was the moment that the tandem Amenábar-rope put hands to work for the realization of a second film, Open your eyes (1997), a film of much more loose budget and greater ambition, to treatment closer to science fiction than to psychological thriller, and a striking design of production.

Actor-producer Tom Cruise, who bought the rights to produce and star in a remake that instructed the director Cameron Crowe was fascinated by the enigmatic atmosphere of this film. The result, Vanilla Sky (2001), covered not expectations, and the criticisms were so adverse as discreet commercial career on both sides of the ocean. Conversely, the original Amenabar, only in Spain, came to double revenues from its debut, as well as serve as a platform of international release with his exhibition at the festivals in Berlin and Sundance, where had the opportunity to discover what the American actor.

Nicole Kidman in the others (2001)

The others (2001), shot with a budget of more than 21 million euros, unlike in the past, history is not articulated in the ingenuity of the outcome, but in the tension generated and dispensed throughout the film. Most shocking ghost story that terrifying, maintained with master double reading from start to finish, and the easy identification hitchcockiana in appearance and composition of the character of Grace (Nicole Kidman), as a shadowing of the Grace Kelly directed Hitchcock, acquires dyes of overt homage to the 'master of suspense', and perhaps lose forcefulness to approach more directly into the atmosphere and the plot of another twist , Henry James.

The others, with British actors, Australian Nicole Kidman as protagonist, Spanish and filmed in English in a Cantabrian mansion which is located on the island of Jersey, was the first case in the Spanish industry of a co-production of these features. This resulted in benefit of the film, considered North American in United States and Spanish in Spain, with proceeds that outperformed, respectively, 100 million dollars and 20 million euros in the first eight weeks of display.

In this sense, the director not ignores influences, at least with regard to their three favorite filmmakers, and awarded them not only the stylistic level, but the way in which each of them arose the film: «in the case of Hitchcock, is directly related to the suspense; in the case of Kubrick, the search for greater simplicity and the point of view of more accurate when it comes to tell you something, and in the case of Spielberg, it is placed in the position of the viewer and makes the film that would like to see.

Frame in Mar adentro (2004)

Judging by the success achieved, Amenabar seems to have found the fair doses of these premises. After the spectacular commercial path through the halls of half the world, the other was the big winner at the ceremony of the delivery of the 2002 Goya, with eight awards, including those granted to the best film, best original screenplay and best director. A director who has ceased to be the wunderkind of the Spanish cinema to become, at age thirty, an outstanding name among good producers of fantastic cinema on the international scene.

Offshore, Oscar

In the year 2004 Amenabar gave a new twist to your production with a title that meant an approach to death (present in all of his films from either perspective) in a completely different way. In September of that year he presented the press offshore, a film that chronicles the life of Ramón Sampedro, the quadriplegic Galician which put an end to his life, with the help of some close people, in 1998 after spending confined to bed by one accident more than 30 years.

Receiving the Oscar by the sea inside (2004)

The role of Sampedro, masterfully played by Javier Bardem, as well as that of all the actors involved in the film, was praised by critics. The film, of great emotional intensity, was chosen to represent Spain in the race for the Oscars in Hollywood and has served to resume a controversial as euthanasia in Spain. Amenábar was also the award special of the jury of the Mostra of Venice, the award for best director at the European film awards, held in December of that same year in Barcelona; and the Golden Globe for best foreign film.

All these omens were incorporated in the 19th edition of the Goya Awards, where the film got the record for 14 statuettes, winning fourteen of the fifteen categories in which it was nominated. It was also awarded in February 2004 with the award of the American independent film, the Spirit Awards, for best foreign film. But it would be in February 2005 when the film received the ultimate accolade and happened to become one of the most award-winning movie film Spanish, after getting the Oscar for the best film from non-English speaking.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas