Coixet graduated in history from Barcelona University in 1983 and headed into the world of advertising, eventually working all over the world for a range of companies. But she was simultaneously developing her film career: her first script, zombie-horror flick Morbus, was made into a film in 1983 and Coixet’s directorial debut came the following year with the short Mira y Verás.
As her career progressed, what marked her out from contemporaries such as Pedro Almodóvar and Julio Medem is how she increasingly shot features away from her home country and her native languages. Two Spanish-language films (Demasiado Viejo para Morir Joven, 1989 and A Los Que Aman, 1998) were interspersed by her first feature in English, Things I Never Told You (1995). She started to gain greater international attention with the 2003 movie My Life Without Me, which grew with 2005’s The Secret Life of Words, her segment in Paris Je t’aime (2007) and this year’s Elegy (adapted from the novella A Dying Animal by Philip Roth).
But she has not forgotten, or been forgotten by, Spain. Secret Life of Words won three awards (film, director and original script) at the 2005 Goyas, she has contributed to social documentaries and she created party political broadcasts for the Spanish Socialist party in this year’s general election.
While the scope, locations and themes of Coixet’s films have varied, they tend to share certain features that stamp them as her work—she often uses voice-over, takes an unhurried hand with the camera and is clearly fascinated by the idiosyncracies of the on-screen characters. Her next film will be shot in Tokyo, in Japanese and English.
What is it about the ‘Anglo-Saxon sensibility’ that attracts you?
The world is wide, no? I did my first film here, because I was living here and I wrote a story that happens here. Then, eight years after, there were two years that I was working in the States; I did lots of commercials in the States, I worked on the two coasts and I wrote the story, Things I Never Told You. You know, I was working there, I was living there. Things I Never Told You is a story about all the people I knew in that moment in my life. I crossed the country several times, I went to the most strange and isolated places on Earth, and for me it was so natural. It was afterward, when everyone was asking, “Why do you want to do a film in English?” that I thought, “Ah? It’s weird?”
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