“I’m looking for something that doesn’t exist, a movie I want to see for the first time.”

Fear is a facilitating emotion when we experience it in a controlled way, and that is what happens when we see a movie of this kind. Through stories, movies, and television, we can face our fears. The most complicated thing about fear is to understand it, because it can be an unpleasant emotion that we fight and suppress. Personally, I think that everything we suppress, everything we suppress, does not disappear, but later turns into something worse. There is something magical about meeting a group of people at the cinema and dealing with those fears in a safe way. Your body needs to get rid of fear. You cannot shut yourself down within yourself. That’s why I think horror movies work.

Without a doubt, in your films there is an enormous burden of symbolism.

—My relationship with symbolism has grown little by little, in the sense that it has become more organic in how it appears and what it means. As I write, I try to find connections between the conscious and the unconscious. A big part of telling a story and shooting a movie starts with inspiration, something you don’t know, and then trying to figure out what it is, because it’s always about something you’ve been trying to tell yourself. The writer does not decide what symbols to use, but should let them appear.