Fernando Rey

“I was an extra in many films.  Oh, many films!  The producers always cast me as the same man.  The man in the dinner jacket.  Like David Niven and his famous Central Casting label, I was the Black Tie Type.”

“When Bunuel was casting Viridina, he wanted me.  ‘I saw him as a corpse in a film and he was wonderful.’ So Bunuellian!”

“You see Bunuel’s films, you think of a complicated mentality, maybe twisted with beaucoup complexes about religion and sex.  No!  He was clean.  Like a baby.  So clever, so clean - fresh!  Everything I do reminds me of him because he surprised me.  So did Orson Welles.  They still surprise me.  Even after their deaths and my 150 films.”

“Impossible!  But I loved him.  He was so misused, abused.  Big tragedy!  He had the metabolism of a falcon.  He burnt ideas so quickly.  We’d talk about a sequence over breakfast.  He’d start walking up and down, smoking his cigar, and in a minute he’d be changing it into another idea, and then another - in the end, he was telling a different story and possible film.  That was Orson, a genius!”