Original subtitles

Eloy de la Iglesia was absolutely an extraordinary director.

And by saying this, I am not saying he was great, or brilliant,

or a genius, I mean extraordinary in the most literal sense of that word.

He came out of the blue.

His family was from the north of Spain,

called Basque Country.

He studied film and philosophy in Madrid.

And he made an impact with his first movie.

The most crazy and unusual thing is that Eloy de la Iglesia started

his movie career with a family movie, FANTASY 3 (1966).

That was the title because it had 3 episodes.

This is not too surprising because at the end of the 60s, there were

very important grants in Spain for family movies.

So significant that they covered almost all the budget for the film.

So many Spanish directors started that way at that time, making family movies.

But Eloy de la Iglesia's second film really revealed the way he is and was.

Titled ALGO AMARGO EN LA BOCA (1969), it was a psychological drama ancl

a rugged, tough film.

Eloy de la Iglesia's movie style was defined

from his second movie.

THE CANNIBAL MAN was born with the intention to make

the most shocking film ever in Spanish cinema.

With a purpose of political ancl social criticism,

including the homosexual element in a determinative way.

Back in the clay, censorship was a huge deal in Spanish cinema.

The movie was filmed in a very unusual way.

They started to film without the proper permit for 3 weeks.

Then they had to get the permit.

But when they went to get the permit, they requested it based on

the script they were filming, and of course it got denied.

They asked, "What do we do now?" They suspended the filming.

They had to rewrite the script, and based on that much lighter script

they resumed production.

Total madness!

But the censors didn't want the first version of the script to be made

because it was too excessively shocking

and harsh for that time.

It's a logical question.

How they dared to make a very harsh and transgressive movie,

knowing how hard censorship was?

It happened that the director, Eloy de la Iglesia,

had a big commercial success with a sexy thriller a year before,

titled THE GLASS CEILING.

That encouraged him!

On the other side, the male protagonist was Vicente Parra.

He was a very popular actor and very much in demand.

He was very loved and had the image of a handsome, sweet guy,

because he always starred in comedies and dramas.

So he was very enthusiastic to be involved in the project

also as an associate producer.

He risked his own money because he wanted to make

a completely different movie from all of his previous work.

So thanks to those two things,

they were motivated to make a really shocking movie.

The first problem with the script that affected the movie

with the censorship, was Eloy de la Iglesia

wanted the lead roles to be around 18 or 19 years old.

Both the killer and the rich neighbor,

but the censors wouldn't allow it.

The homosexual situation was very clear.

The censors would allow homosexual tendencies between both characters

only if they were mature, but not if they were teenagers.

That wasn't going to happen,

so they changed it ancl made the characters older,

for one thing. And for another thing, they didn't accept the ending at all.

It was an open ending,

where you didn't know what happened to the killer.

So they imposed an ending where the killer, over the course

of one week, kills a person per clay, and decides to turn himself into the police.

That was imposed by the censors.

At that time, censorship in Spanish cinema had two phases.

The first phase was the script,

ancl the second phase was when the movie was finished,

the imagery.

I mentioned earlier the biggest inconveniences

for the script, but then when the movie was finished and they watched it,

they raised hell, and they were scandalized.

What happened? The movie broke the record for the most censorship cuts

in the history of our cinema.

62 cuts, no less.

Here a few minutes, there some seconds, here a whole scene...

It was a total massacre!

For example, they shot this oneiric scene of homosexual love

between the two protagonists,

between Eusebio Poncela and Vicente Parra.

They totally suppressed it!

It was an oneiric, poetic, and lyrical scene. With it the director

Eloy de la Iglesia created a clash with all the roughness

and sordidness that everything else had.

And why? Because Eloy de la Iglesia,

Vicente Parra, and Eusebio Poncela were gay.

So what does this mean?

To them that scene had a meaning of power and reaffirmation of their

personal sexual orientation, ancl at that time it was absolutely transgressive.

The fact that Vicente Parra dared to take this unusual role

in his career, playing an insane and possibly gay proletariat,

really benefited him in terms of the industry.

Why? Because they gave him an award for the best actor of

the Cinema Writers Circle.

Those were very important awards, which means Vicente Parra

proved that he was able to play different kinds of characters.

Even when the movie wasn't a commercial success in his career,

this personal achievement was especially valued.

This movie also introduced Eusebio Poncela.

Poncela is an important and personal actor from his generation.

Distinguished by his participation in unusual,

different and unconventional movies, he also believed in working

with young people, new people, and even with debutants.

All the problems with THE CANNIBAL MAN didn't affect the friendship between

the director Eloy de la Iglesia and the actor Vicente Parra.

They were such good friends that they made another film together,

NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM (1973).

It was a very interesting thriller and very different than THE CANNIBAL MAN.

It doesn't have the sleaziness, but it does strive for

an elegant and cosmopolitan look.

NO ONE HEARD THE SCREAM also marked another important point

in Eloy de la Iglesia's career, in that he again cast

the actress from the movie that he'd made before CANNIBAL MAN,

Carmen Sevilla, and she was a diva of Spanish Cinema.

In the GLASS CEILING, she did the same thing that Vicente Parra

did in THE CANNIBAL MAN, she broke her image,

the sweet and cloying persona that she had in the movies as a folk actress,

and reinvented herself as a sensual, mysterious, and disturbed woman.

She did great, and she participated with excitement.

Doing a different film with a young, gay, communist director... how interesting!

Eloy de la Iglesia was a very different and transgressive director.

At the beginning of his career, even big Spanish movie stars with contrary

political views wanted to work with him, and were delighted to do so.

In the case of Carmen Sevilla, she was a Folk diva from Francoism.

And even Vicente Parra himself and Eloy de la Iglesia

had a great relationship, even though one was a communist

and the other was a right winger.

I don't know, maybe they got along well because they were both gay.

I want to highlight that this is not a movie in the serial killer genre.

It's not a slasher at all.

The lead role is not a criminal psychopath who kills

due to obsession, addiction, or sadism at all.

The protagonist is a proletariat, not too smart, an uneducated man who has a sad life.

He's sleazy and miserable, and kills someone by mistake.

And in order to cover up that initial crime, he must kill other people.

That's it.

And these people, which is also one of the main points of the movie,

represent all the repression he has.

Sexual repression, family repression,

social repression, financial repression,

and even political repression.

The three essential ingredients of CANNIBAL MAN are

the social criticism, the homosexual vindication,

and the extreme sleaziness, but all that magnifies and marks

a fourth element, that is the documentary quality.

This is a film that reflects in a physical way how Madrid

was at that time, and in this sense we need

to recognize the set decoration director Santiago Ontafion.

Santiago Ontafion was truly a genius. A prolific man who was friends with Lorca.

They worked together in the 1930s.

He had all kinds of phases, but here he does brilliant work.

For example, the rural house where the protagonist lives,

the interiors, all the sets, and decorations.

It's a total masterpiece in the art direction of cinema.

The Director of Photography for THE CANNIBAL MAN was also a very interesting man,

Raul Artigot, a very sensitive man.

He also got to direct. He made three movies as a director.

He was a versatile man and very good at his job.

He lost himself, but in his case, it was alcohol.

He turned into an alcoholic, and people stopped calling him.

His career ended up very sad.

He was also a writer, a multi-talented man,

Raul Artigot. But he lost it to the alcohol.

Due to all the censorship problems and shooting conflicts, etc.,

the film premiere was delayed.

It took two years to premiere, and by the time the movie was out,

nothing happened. No success.

No noise, although a few lucid critics favored it. They didn't say it was

marvellous, but they highlighted that it was an unusual film,

and that it was like no previous Spanish film.

Over time it became a cult film inside and outside Spain, but in a

misconstrued way, in a false way, because it started being sold as a "Video Nasty."

It started to get the reputation of a sleazy, violent, nasty film,

when it's not like that at all.

It is a sleazy drama, a critical film, where violence has a meaning,

more than a cheap spectacle.

It's a severe expression of dramatic violence.

He went for a sleazy style, showing a series of perspectives and realities

that weren't shown by any Spanish director before.

I knew Eloy de la Iglesia well.

I was even a part of the tribute that was held at the San Sebastian festival in the 90s.

I'm also one of the five authors of a book about him.

Eloy de la Iglesia was an educated man, ancl highly intelligent.

To the point where he always justified the stupidest things, and the biggest barbarities,

his most personal insanities, with such brilliance that

he would convince you to believe him!

In that sense, he had a fabulous skill.

He was very well spoken.

When Eloy de La Iglesia was young and started

doing movies, he become famous right away.

Not only for his fascination with those sleazy and strange stories,

but for his political views as a communist,

of course, at that time it was clandestine,

and for his homosexual orientation, which he didn't hide.

He was addressing guys all the time,

even minors from bad neighborhoods.

The more uneducated, the more rough and the more rude,

the more attraction he felt.

In that sense, Eloy de la Iglesia was like Pasolini.

His big problem was that he had a drug addiction.

He was engaging with different kinds of drugs

until he got really bad, and then he disappeared.

Nobody knew anything about him.

Everyone thought he'd died in a very obscure and sleazy way,

but then he appeared selling Kleenex at a traffic light.

S0 an old acquaintance saw him and said, "Eloy, get in the car."

And some friends paid for his rehab treatment and a room

in the gothic old part of Madrid, near the Plaza Mayor.

So he got better.

Diego Galan found out, and the people from San Sebastian festival,

and a resurrection was prepared

with that tribute and book.

Thanks to this resurrection, he was able to make another movie,

but he died shortly after that.

He couldn't get past all the damage that the drugs had caused

over all that time, and he died young.

He was around 62 or 63 years old.

Whether one likes him as a person or not,

what can't be denied is that Eloy de la Iglesia

had two important virtues of a filmmaker:

his own unique personality and talent for the movies.

Ultimately, he can be liked more or less for what he did.

I believe in his career, even if he didn't make a 'perfect' movie,

he made many very interesting movies, and he was a very prolific filmmaker.

Like I said before, Eloy de la Iglesia was a good person

with personality and talent.

I met him, spent time with him, and wrote a book about him.

I'm satisfied that he is now turning into a worldwide cult figure.

He really deserved it, and he dared to do all that.

He had more success than any other director of his generation.