After shooting “The Flower of My Secret” I took down some notes about the character of Manuela, the nurse who appears at the beginning of the film. A normal woman, who in the simulations (in which doctors who participate in the Transplant Seminary dramatize a situation in which they communicate to a hypothetical mother the death of her son) became a true actress, much better than the doctors with whom she played the scene.

My idea at the beginning was to make a movie about the capacity to act of certain people who are not actors.

As a child, I remembered seeing that quality in some of the women in my family. They faked more and better than men. And through their lies they managed to avoid more than one tragedy.

Forty years ago, when I was living there, La Mancha was an arid and machista region, in whose families reigned the Man from his armchair, upholstered in shiny sky. Meanwhile, the women really resolved the problems, in silence, having sometimes to lie in order to do so. (Is this the reason why Garcia Lorca said that Spain had always been a country of great actresses?)

Against this Manchegan machismo which I remember (perhaps enlarged) from my childhood, the women faked, lied, hid, and that way allowed life to flow and develop, without men finding out or obstructing it. (Aside from being vital, this was quite spectacular. The first spectacle that I remember seeing was a group of women talking on the patio.)

I didn´t know it then but this was going to be one of the subjects of my thirteenth film, the capacity of women to playact, to fake.

And wounded maternity.

And the spontaneous solidarity between women.

“I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,“ said Williams through Blanche Dubois. In “All About My Mother,“ the kind strangers are women.