In France, in Apt, start your script.

Although he is the son of two emigrants from Hego Euskal Herria, the first language I have spoken well is French. I studied at the pompous French public school in the '60s, breathed and drank culture... French culture weighs heavily on me. Thus, in 1969 the hard thing was to land in the Escorapios of Pamplona: to dress the uniform, to learn the creed with desire... It was “Spanish” in France and “gabatxo” in Pamplona. I've never been where I am. Later, when I moved to San Sebastian, they called me “Navarro.” At first it's painful, your bowels are inflamed, but it's not bad watchtower to look at the world. It gives you the distance to the society you live in, the ability to place the camera in the corners where the natives don't arrive.

The difference is between seeing the corner where the camera is held and doing the bottom tasks of the camera.

We lived in France when I saw L'Adieu aux Armes, I. A violent film about the World War, which put the French children into thinking that the Germans were bastards. As I got stuck, when I finished elementary school, I made an effort to learn something related to film. But it was in vain. There was none of that around and in a family as humble as our own it was unthinkable to go out and study film. Discouraged I started another career, I played military service, and I wrote poetry to fulfill my creative passion. All of a sudden, I created a strange piece that was too long to have a poem, I thought it could be a movie, and I won a contest without having any idea how a script was written. Luck gave me back to the movie world, luck gave me a chance to make a couple of shorts. It was enough to turn my eyes to convince me that I was more clumsy than writing. The elaboration of scripts is a craft of its own, as beautiful and complicated as to not dedicate itself to anything else.

What is a good writer?

Someone who writes like a writer and thinks like a filmmaker. Everything you write has to be image. To do so, it needs a great self-demand and a capacity to survive this self-demand. Breaking and restarting is our day to day. A script is written with a silk sheet on one hand and a sharp axe on the other. Both are essential to order a story in images. You can't fall into self-indulgence, you have to be clear that you're working for the benefit of the film, rather than putting the film in your favor. The trade has taught me that security consists of not saying “ended!” too soon, that the faith in reaching the eternal is to seek. In addition to the head and hands, the scripts are also written with the ass.

What does the screenwriter's look like?

Those of us who make films and those who watch films share a broad field: life. This is our battlefield. How does sadness reflect? Record on the hard drive the image that has enveloped you in the street and use the scripts when you ask for sadness. We are sponges that absorb feelings and images in connection. So creativity is an attitude. Because you don't know what you're going to fish, you're always ready to fish. When my mother was about to die, I was visiting her on the bus. It was February, a winter full of bad weather conditions, and my previous 7-year-old girl was wrapped in a heart that K. wrote in an evaporated crystal. The innocence of the young woman, the death of our mother, a smile on my sadness... My stomach turned around, and what things are all about, the picture I put in a movie a few years later. Gestures, ways to speak... Always be attentive. I don't know if I get a light bulb changed or I get the source fixed, my friends get angry because I don't listen to them, but the cinematic details of life barely escape me.

As we talk about film details, how do you create a character?

Starting from the archetypes and the observation of life, the key is to dress the character with nuances depending on the needs of history. You have to imagine how your character would react to any situation, what it would feel and how it would act. Develop your psychology and make it your own. There are writers who don't develop too many characters so it's not an obstacle to the evolution of history, but I like to write about the character. It is not by chance [Enrique] that in the works that we have carried out Urbizu and I have the age of the protagonists. They all have something of ours, some footprint of ours. However, the key is that psychology becomes an image, whatever appears and what is kept. For example, if a man blackened in a suit appears to be sleeping next to the train window, and when the plane goes down, at the height of the thumb of each foot, if he has two holes in his stockings, what happens to the viewer's head? Collage is cinema, playing with topics. The writers are not talking about a theoretical structure, but about a cerebellum. Success is the balance between reason and intuition. The more balance there is, the more chances the viewer will move home to make this film so deep.

Can you write emotions beyond reasoning and intuition?

You can write images that convey emotions. You can intuit where people will cry, when they will burst out of laughter, but every time you present a job, you're afraid of people's reaction. Sometimes what you believed happens, but most of the writers have taken great sustenances and dislikes. As long as you don't get rid of your job, you don't know exactly what you've done. That's why it's a great school to go to the movies and watch your movie. As people watch the movie, I see people's movie. However, we must not forget that the script ends at the mounting table, that a bad casting can spoil a good script, the direction... There are many variables that influence the script. That's why teachers say that with a good script you can make a good or a bad movie, but with a bad script there's nothing to do.

Inspiration also has nothing to do, no work and no trades.

Film making is an industrial production, you work for a director or a producer, and your stupid idea costs a million euros. Do you think that this is compatible with waiting for what is giving the cigarette a whiff in front of the white page? I leave no room for the mysticism of inspiration, which is nothing but deceiving oneself. In that path, the discovery was the book The Grammar of Fantasy by Giani Rodari.
I realized that my imagination was as repetitive as it was flat, and it helped me to educate my opening. Since then, every time I create a new project, I do exercises with photos, words, alphabets or semantic spaces, stimulating ideas that wouldn't come to me by themselves. There's nothing else, if you don't tell your imagination, you always open equal paths, you get bored.

Is credibility one of the conditions for not getting bored?

Credibility is a very technical element that can be built. What counts needs pores to discredit the credibility, an authenticity that the viewer can take away. That's right, not everything has to be absolutely credible. The film closes a deal with the viewer, and whether it's because what's coming attracts them or just because it's happening right, the viewer is willing to believe it amazing. The writer has to measure at all times what level of demand he has, where he has to tie the details, when he can play quieter. So research work for a movie doesn't have to be obsessive. To make a movie about lepers, you don't have to go live for two months with lepers. If it's not for a hyper-realistic film, the proverb says you have to do enough research to have fun for two hours on an airplane, no more, no less.

Is criticism always hyper-realistic?

I know it is an important criticism, I read it, but I have little respect for it. How can a note of 0.5 and a note of 9.5 for the same film? It's an alarm of subjectivism, not criticism. It is a disgrace that someone who lives from commenting on the work of others can throw away the work of life or death of another without lowering the pulpit in the bathroom for the past five years. It is enough for a criticism to appear to think that there are all the things that have to be said about that film. I do not think that is serious. Moreover, when the criticism is more or less long depending on the size of the announcement that day, when you cannot squander the film produced by the company of your same communication group... We don't all play the same thing. “When they hit you, they don’t listen to you, nor when they praise you!” says an American writer. Perhaps the formula is also valid for prizes. They're very dangerous if you're young. You can completely confuse it, deflect it from its runway. Thankfully, I've won the 50th birthday. The neighbors have served me to confirm that I was a writer. Since then I have been reassured, I am not the alleged arms dealer who leaves the house just to go shopping.

Reviews, prizes, always be on the second line... What is the writer's ego like?

Very special. The bet on living from the script requires a strong ego, but you must be clear that you work for others, that your place is not the red carpet. If the writer and the writer are invisible, the better. I know that I have to push through a large family, that at the end of the month I'm piled up a lot of bills to pay, and fortunately, I don't like the front line. When I'm going to watch a movie that has my little bit of sand, I care about a radish that you don't know me. Imagine, I think I'm presenting myself too much, I have more reputation than I should have. I'm fine where I am. If I wanted to live in Fokupa, I would do the movies myself.

The fiction was also ETB, but...

At the time I was working for ETB, if I suggested the possibility of a roundtable program, “we have to do TV, not nonsense!” they revolved around you. Now I see nothing but misery. Although Bilbao's headquarters look like CNN's, there's a lack of resources, but above all, there's no ability to measure our strengths. Why don't you invest in creativity and talent? If you do not risk it, we will have an increasingly worse, increasingly gray television, which erodes your credibility until it jeopardises your existence. However, if for two years a blind wager on research and creativity was made, the hearings might increase, perhaps there would be opportunities to sell programs to other TVs... Didn't they break the market with Vaya Semanita? But no, those who have the ultimate goal of their lives are sent to be ETB director, and those people don't want to run a television, they want to be TV director. It doesn't make sense. Those who are talented play their necks every day and many of those who are insured until retirement without any passion or attachment. Those who are going to risk, who risk it once and for all.