Juan Antonio Bayona

“There is not a great Spanish tradition of ghost stories. But in the period of Franco, you'd find these ghost stories: sort of hidden political movies that were supposed to be about ghosts but were about something else.”

“The tree has been always an allegory for spiritual growth.”

“There is a company in Barcelona called Headless, and I was a huge fan. I love their style. I had been trying to work with them for years. 'A Monster Calls' was the perfect project to work on with them.”

“I think your behavior is different when you work on digital or film. It seems that... I feel most focused if I'm working on film.”

“After 'The Orphanage' and 'The Impossible,' 'A Monster Calls' is the perfect final chapter in a trilogy centred on the extraordinary strength of the mother-child bond.”

“It's always good to have a limit because it forces you to think about all the ways to get what you want.”

“As a director, you never think about how an audience would respond. You can think about that, but you will never change what you're going to do.”

“With actors, it's really about feeding them all the time. I don't get involved in their process. I try to do the opposite, feeding them, feeding them, feeding them, and you can see very easily how they react to it.”

“Every Monday night, there was a scary movie on Spanish TV, so my parents used to send me to bed. I remember lying there, listening to the TV, and imagining the movie in my head. And so probably the scariest movies I ever saw in my life were the ones I imagined.”

“Everybody has an idea of the tsunami of being a big wave. It is not a big wave. It is a huge amount of water that comes to land.”

“I always try to do more than one or two takes if we have the time.”

“I can consider myself my audience, and I'm not that weird. I'm fortunate in the things that I like, most people like.”

“I had a very happy childhood.”

“Movies by Carlos Saura and others had ghosts, memories from the past, that they used to make a political point. Things you couldn't talk about openly, you could speak of through ghosts.”

“You're watching the movie for the first time when you're working with the actors in front of the camera. You don't think about how the audience will react. You discover the film.”

“The good thing about helping an actor create a performance is, you really don't know how you're going to do it. It's a challenge every time you get to the set. That keeps the energy flowing all the time.”

“If you want to tell grown-up fairy tales, you have to look for the dark side.”

“When you're portraying a tough situation, you have to show some of the things in there.”

“Music is very helpful, not just for the actors, but the whole crew and myself. It gives you the tone of the scene. Everyone is focused on the tone of the scene when we are shooting, and we are having an emotional reaction to the music immediately.”

“I went to a festival pretending to work as a journalist to get free tickets and interview people I really admired. I remember one of these people was Guillermo del Toro.”