48 Fun Facts About Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel was born in 1900 in Calanda, a small town in which region of Spain?

Aragon. Calanda is known for its Good Friday drums, beaten through the day and night, and Buñuel ended his film Nazarín with their thunder.

Buñuel's father had made his fortune running a hardware business in which city?

Havana. Leonardo Buñuel came home to Calanda a rich man at 43, shortly before Cuba's independence, and married an 18-year-old from the village.

At Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes, Buñuel befriended Salvador Dalí and which poet?

Federico García Lorca used to read Buñuel his poems on the grass behind the Residencia, and Buñuel said that through him he discovered a whole new world.

Which director's silent film Der müde Tod convinced the young Buñuel that he had to make films?

Fritz Lang. Buñuel never forgot the debt: at 72 he called on the director, by then past 80, and asked him to sign a photograph, something he said he never did.

Which French director fired Buñuel from The Fall of the House of Usher for belittling Abel Gance?

Jean Epstein. Giving Buñuel a lift afterwards, he warned him to keep away from the Surrealists, the very group Buñuel joined soon after.

Buñuel's 1929 debut with Dalí, Un Chien Andalou, opens with a razor slicing what?

A woman's eyeball. The eye the razor really cuts belonged to a dead calf, and the man holding the blade on screen is Buñuel himself.

Who financed Un Chien Andalou?

Buñuel's mother. By his own account he asked her because no producer would touch such a script, and then spent part of her money in cabarets before shooting.

At the premiere of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel stood behind the screen with his pockets full of what?

Stones. He meant to throw them at the audience if the film was a failure, but the crowd applauded and he quietly let them fall to the floor.

After the 1930 scandal over L'Age d'Or, what did its patrons, the de Noailles, do with the prints?

They withdrew them from circulation. A far-right mob had wrecked the cinema and the police banned the film, which reached French screens again only in 1981.

At Cadaqués, as he and Dalí fell out over L'Age d'Or, whom did Buñuel try to throttle?

Gala, Dalí's girlfriend, was then still married to the poet Paul Éluard. Dalí went down on his knees and begged Buñuel to let her go.

Which star had Buñuel ushered off the first MGM set he visited in 1930?

Greta Garbo. After that he stayed at home and went to the studio only on Saturdays to collect his pay, and for four months nobody there troubled him.

Buñuel's documentary Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread) was paid for by an anarchist friend who got the money how?

In a lottery. Ramón Acín had promised to pay for the film if he ever won, and when his number came up he handed Buñuel 20,000 pesetas.

Las Hurdes pairs scenes of misery with a detached narrator and thundering, inappropriate music by which composer?

Brahms: his Fourth Symphony. Parts of the 'documentary' were staged too, since the mountain goat that falls to its death was shot by the crew, and gun smoke drifts into the frame.

At which New York institution did Buñuel edit anti-fascist propaganda films for Latin America in the early 1940s?

The Museum of Modern Art. As a trial he cut Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will down by half, to show American officials what film propaganda could do.

Which cocktail did Buñuel credit with sustaining his reveries, giving his own exacting recipe for it in his memoir?

The dry martini. His recipe chills the gin, glasses and shaker for a day and adds a dash of Angostura, and he claimed two of them gave him the idea that rescued his last film.

What kind of film was Gran Casino (1947), Buñuel's first picture in Mexico, starring Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque?

A musical. Both stars were famous singers, and Buñuel, directing for the first time in years, recalled that he kept them singing all the time, like a championship.

Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950) was inspired by a newspaper report of what?

A boy's body on a garbage dump. Buñuel had spent months touring the slums for material when he read the report, and he made the image the film's final scene.

In which Woody Allen film does a time-travelling writer pitch the young Buñuel a plot he would film decades later?

Midnight in Paris. Owen Wilson's Gil, visiting the 1920s, hands Buñuel the idea for The Exterminating Angel, and the puzzled young director cannot see the point of it.

Which poet, then a diplomat in France, handed out his own essay defending Los Olvidados outside its Cannes screening?

Octavio Paz. After his campaign the film won Buñuel the best director prize, and it went back into Mexican cinemas, where it had first failed, as a hit.

In 2003 UNESCO added Los Olvidados to which register?

Memory of the World, UNESCO's register of documents rather than places. Half a century after the film's release, an archive in Mexico turned up a forgotten 'happy' ending that the nervous producer had ordered.

Buñuel's first colour film, shot in English and Spanish on Mexico's Pacific coast, adapted which novel?

Robinson Crusoe. Shot in 1952, it waited two years for release, yet its little-known Irish lead, Dan O'Herlihy, ended up nominated for the best actor Academy Award.

Buñuel's 1961 return to Spain, Viridiana, shared which prize at Cannes?

The Palme d'Or. Days later the Vatican's newspaper attacked the film, and Spain banned it and dismissed the official who had gone on stage to collect the prize.

The beggars' banquet in Viridiana pauses for a group photograph parodying which famous painting?

The Last Supper. The beggars strike Leonardo's pose in the middle of a drunken banquet set to Handel's 'Hallelujah Chorus', sacrilege that helped get the film banned in Spain.

Who smuggled the negatives of Viridiana out of Spain so that its censors never saw the finished film?

Buñuel's son. By Juan Luis's own account he drove the cans over the border in a bullfighter's van, hidden under the capes and swords, then took them on by train.

The Exterminating Angel (1962) is about wealthy dinner guests who find themselves unable to do what?

Leave the room. Nothing visible holds them, yet they stay trapped for days, until hunger drives them to roast the sheep that stray in from a cancelled party prank.

Which actress starred in three 1960s Buñuel films bankrolled by her producer husband Gustavo Alatriste?

Silvia Pinal. Her husband gave Buñuel a free hand over the story of the first of them, Viridiana, and the director later said no producer had allowed him more freedom.

Simón del desierto (1965) is loosely based on a 5th-century saint who lived for decades where?

On top of a pillar. The real Simeon Stylites went up to escape the crowds of pilgrims who pestered him, and Buñuel's film opens with admirers offering Simón a taller column.

Which screenwriter co-wrote all of Buñuel's late French films, starting with Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964?

Jean-Claude Carrière. He also plays the village priest in that first film, and Buñuel, who wrote six screenplays with him, called him the writer closest to him.

Which French star played the title role in Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)?

Jeanne Moreau. Buñuel reset the story in the 1920s, which let its far-right marchers end the film chanting 'Vive Chiappe!', the police chief who had banned his L'Age d'Or.

In Belle de Jour (1967), Deneuve's housewife Séverine spends her afternoons doing what?

Working in a brothel. One client opens a little box whose contents we never see, and Buñuel, asked for years what was in it, said he had no idea himself.

Belle de Jour won the top prize at which festival in 1967?

Venice. The Golden Lion went to a film based on a novel Buñuel thought melodramatic, and it turned into one of the biggest commercial successes of his career.

The Milky Way (1969) follows two vagabonds on a pilgrimage to whose tomb?

St James at Santiago de Compostela. The Milky Way was an old nickname for the pilgrim road, because the band of stars seemed to point walkers from northern Europe towards Spain.

Tristana (1970) and Nazarín (1959) were both adapted from novels by which Spanish writer?

Benito Pérez Galdós. Buñuel had wanted to film Tristana for years, but Spanish censors kept blocking the project, complaining, of all things, about a duel in the story.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) is about a group of friends who repeatedly fail to do what?

Have dinner together. The idea came from the film's producer, who once invited friends to dinner and forgot; they arrived to find him out and his wife in her bathrobe.

Which award did Buñuel joke he had already paid for, weeks before The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie won it?

The Oscar, for best foreign-language film. He told Mexican reporters he had paid $25,000 for it; the headlines said he had bought the award, his producer was furious, and three weeks later the film won.

Which Spanish actor starred in Viridiana, Tristana and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie?

Fernando Rey. He won his best-known Hollywood part by mistake: the director of The French Connection wanted the Spaniard he had seen in Belle de Jour, Francisco Rabal, and the wrong man was signed.

Buñuel's 1982 autobiography is titled what in its US translation?

My Last Sigh. British readers got it as My Last Breath, and it ends with Buñuel wishing he could rise from the grave every ten years to buy the newspapers and read about the world's disasters.

Buñuel's future wife, Jeanne Rucar, was a keen practitioner of which sport when they met in the 1920s?

Gymnastics. Buñuel's memoir even gives her a bronze medal from the 1924 Paris Olympics, but only men competed in gymnastics there, and women first competed for medals in 1928.

Buñuel was twice nominated, in 1968 and 1972, for which honour outside cinema?

The Nobel Prize in Literature. Lars Forssell of the Swedish Academy put him forward in 1972, and because nominations stay sealed for fifty years the fact emerged only decades later.

Which psychoanalyst praised Buñuel's Él, the story of a pathologically jealous husband, as a true picture of paranoia?

Jacques Lacan saw Él at a screening for psychiatrists in Paris and praised its psychological truth, some consolation for Buñuel, since audiences at home had laughed at the film.

To which city did the Buñuel family move when Luis was four months old?

Zaragoza. By Buñuel's account his father had grown restless in the village, and the family, among the richest in the city, took a vast apartment lined with balconies.

Which religious order ran the Colegio del Salvador, where Buñuel was educated from age seven?

The Jesuits. Buñuel refused to go back after one of the staff kicked and insulted him just before an exam, and he told his mother he had been expelled.

Besides playing the violin, at which sport did the young Buñuel excel?

Boxing. He billed himself as 'the Lion of Calanda', though by his own account his amateur record was one win by default and one defeat spent protecting his face.

For which Madrid company did Buñuel anonymously produce popular films in the mid-1930s?

Filmófono. Buñuel kept his name off its crowd-pleasing commercial pictures, though colleagues later said he chose the shots and ran the editing himself.

With which Surrealist friend did Buñuel plan, in 1940s Hollywood, a film set on a vast Los Angeles rubbish tip?

Man Ray. Buñuel recalled coming across the tip while out driving and finding people living in huts at the bottom of it, but the two friends could not raise the money.

L'Age d'Or's blasphemous final scene visually links Jesus Christ with the writings of whom?

The Marquis de Sade. A Christ-like duke leads the libertines out of the castle of The 120 Days of Sodom, and the scandal cost the film's patron his place in the Jockey Club amid talk of excommunication.

In 1944 Buñuel returned to Hollywood as Spanish dubbing producer for which studio?

Warner Brothers. He had run the studio's dubbing in Madrid ten years earlier, but Hollywood dubbing was dying as each country began doing its own, and the job ended in 1945.

Which New York archbishop is said to have pressed for Buñuel's dismissal over L'Age d'Or?

Spellman. He is said to have seized on Dalí's 1942 memoir, which painted Buñuel as an atheist, though Buñuel's own account blames a Catholic lobbyist in Washington; under the pressure he resigned.