"Reality Doesn't Change No Matter How Much We Tell It"

"Too much biography for these blue eyes," wrote Francisco Umbral about Marina Saura. In just six words, the writer encapsulated the painful episodes that form part of the actress's biography: the traumatic separation of her parents, the Franco-Swedish Gunhild Madeleine Augot and painter Antonio Saura, the death of a sister in a car accident at twenty-one, and the suicide of her other sister some time later. Saura touches on all this in 'Cara de foto' (De Conatus), where she reconstructs an identity through personal and external photographs in a sort of "life-fiction," as she prefers to define it: "It's not an autobiography, nor a cathartic book because the pains are always there, reality doesn't change no matter how much we tell it." But there's so much to tell about her reality that we skip the aperitif and go straight to the main course.

–Photographs are the thread that runs through 'Cara de foto'. Where did this idea originate?

–Images have always fascinated me, and I suppose the idea stems from my concern about identity. Who is one? How is an identity constructed? A child first begins to be through the gaze of their parents; later, through the different people who matter to them. I exist because someone looks at me.

–Your father looks at you through the camera. It's a distant gaze.

–That's the gaze of Olga's father, the protagonist; my father wasn't like that, he was a very endearing, very close man. I use elements of my life to make the reader feel involved, but in the construction of the girl's identity, the father has very little to do because she doesn't build herself with the father's images, but with those of the women around her.

–Women living in a difficult era.

–We're talking about the 60s, when women couldn't do anything, they went from father to husband. Meanwhile, Olga is straddling two worlds, because she grows up in the 70s, when freedom, hippies, or contraception; things that suddenly allow one to be free, but, of course, with a very complicated Catholic and restrictive education. She explores all these new elements in conflict with the old ones.

–"Not smiling was my mother's act of passive resistance," you write, but you smile a lot. Is it your act of active resistance?

–Yes. For me, smiling is a mask, a shield, a way of asserting that I won't let myself be invaded. When you smile, you're not inviting someone, but a sad face does invite compassion, help. And I've always seen sadness as a weakness.

–What have you clung to in order to overcome the most difficult episodes of your life?

–I don't think my life is more tragic than that of many other people, but, in the most terrible moments, I've always clung to the thought that we don't choose our destiny, nor our name, nor our sex, and that some of us have more capacity to overcome things than others. I consider myself very much wanted by my parents, very loved, and I've been able to dedicate myself to what I liked. I don't feel like a victim of anything, but not out of bravery, rather out of lucidity, out of modesty, because I see people around me so badly off that I think "how lucky I am."

–In your book, you recount a relationship you had at sixteen with a man eleven years older. Today we don't see it the same way as back then.

–Yes, and it's very good that it's not seen the same way because children need to be protected, and I'm absolutely against lowering the age of sexual consent. I was very lucky because I wasn't abused, it was totally voluntary on my part. I was very stubborn, and I liked that guy a lot and wanted to have my first sexual experience with him. It was important that it was an older person because I had tried with some young men, but it didn't work. In my case, it was lucky that nothing bad happened to me; it could have been disastrous, but it wasn't, it was wonderful. And I'm still friends with that person today.

–It's strange that, being an actress and the niece of Carlos Saura, you didn't work together.

–Actors never work with whom they wish. I asked my uncle for an audition, but he laughed and said "I don't have a role for you." He didn't audition actors, he picked them when he saw them for a role. I think he didn't see me because he already had Geraldine Chaplin, my aunt Gerarda, whom I love very much. She was the exotic element, the foreign girl, and since I fit that profile a bit... you see, when I was young, in Spain, no one looked at me on the street.

–But you have an imposing presence.

–But I scared the boys. Back then, you had to be petite, with very Mediterranean forms, and I was so tall, so strange, so different... However, if I had been young in this era, I would have fit in because now there are actresses of very different appearances.

–Do you consider returning to acting?

–I haven't been offered, and I've tried a few times. I'd love to, but it would have to be that a director took a fancy to me for some reason. Like Elizabeth Costello, the writer protagonist of J. M. Coetzee's book, I feel like a "secretary of the invisible," of that reality that doesn't exist but that I'm going to translate and make corporeal on stage. I think that's where the author and the performer are very similar.