50 Fun Facts About Luis Buñuel

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

He said that in Calanda 'the Middle Ages lasted until World War I'; the family soon moved to Zaragoza.

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

Leonardo Buñuel left home at 14, returned rich at 43 and married the innkeeper's 18-year-old daughter.

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

The three formed the nucleus of the 'Generación del 27'; Buñuel mourned Lorca's murder in 1936 for the rest of his life.

Which Fritz Lang film left Buñuel 'completely transformed' and set on a career in cinema?

At 72 he was still enthusiastic enough to ask the elderly Lang for his autograph.

Which French director employed Buñuel as assistant, then fired him for insulting Abel Gance?

Epstein's parting shot: 'You seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people.'

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

The eye was actually a calf's, bleached and lit to look human; the rotting donkeys later on mock a children's book both men hated.

Who financed Un Chien Andalou?

The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in Cadaqués from two dreams: swarming ants and a sliced eye.

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

He expected hecklers; instead the avant-garde audience he meant to insult adored the film, and he and Dalí were admitted to Breton's Surrealist circle.

What did the de Noailles, patrons of L'Age d'Or (1930), do with the prints in 1934?

The film was not seen again until 1981; a fascist mob had earlier hurled purple ink at the screen and wrecked the surrealist paintings next door.

Dalí took no part in shooting L'Age d'Or after Buñuel, at a dinner party, tried to throttle whom?

Gala was then still the wife of the poet Paul Éluard; the two men also disagreed over whether the film should attack all bourgeois institutions or just Catholicism.

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

He spent the rest of his contract at home collecting his paycheque, and left after insulting Irving Thalberg's Spanish-accent project.

Buñuel's 1933 pseudo-documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread) was funded by an anarchist friend who had won the money how?

Ramón Acín's 20,000 pesetas paid for a film that was banned by both the Republic and Franco.

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

The film has been called one of the first mockumentaries and a 'surrealist documentary'.

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

His first job there was to cut a shortened version of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as a demonstration.

What did Buñuel plan to do to Dalí after Dalí's 1942 autobiography cost him his MoMA job?

He did not carry out the violent part; Dalí replied that he wrote the book 'to put ME on a pedestal'.

Which Argentine actress-singer co-starred with Jorge Negrete in Buñuel's flop Gran Casino (1947)?

'I kept them singing all the time,' he recalled; it was two years before he directed again.

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

The image became the film's final scene; the shoot took 18 days and the hairdresser quit over a scene she found un-Mexican.

Which painter refused to speak to Buñuel after the hostile 1950 premiere of Los Olvidados?

A poet's wife had to be physically restrained from attacking him, and there were calls to revoke his Mexican citizenship.

Which future Nobel laureate, then a Mexican diplomat, campaigned to get Los Olvidados to Cannes and paraded outside the cinema with a placard?

Buñuel won Best Director at Cannes 1951, and the film ran for two months on its Mexican reissue.

Los Olvidados was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in which year?

UNESCO called it 'the most important document in Spanish about the marginal lives of children in contemporary large cities'.

Buñuel's first colour film, shot in English and Spanish in Manzanillo in 1954, adapted which novel?

Its little-known star Dan O'Herlihy funded his own Los Angeles run and earned his only Oscar nomination.

During his 18 years working in the Mexican industry, roughly how many films did Buñuel make?

Many were genre melodramas made to local taste, but Él, Nazarín and The Exterminating Angel are among them.

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

The Vatican newspaper denounced it within days, Spain banned it for 17 years and sacked the official who accepted the award.

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

The scene was a major reason for the Holy See's denunciation.

How did Buñuel get the finished Viridiana out of Spain before the censors could see it?

The censors had approved the script with minor changes; the replacement ending Buñuel devised was, he said, 'even more immoral'.

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

Sheep and a bear wander the mansion; the guests end up roasting the sheep on a fire in the salon.

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

Buñuel said her husband Gustavo Alatriste gave him more creative freedom than any other producer.

Simón del desierto (1965) is loosely based on a 5th-century saint who lived for 36 years where?

The film's Simón has spent six years, six weeks and six days on his platform when the Devil, in female form, arrives to tempt him.

Which screenwriter, hired in 1963 partly for his wine-growing family, co-wrote all of Buñuel's late French films?

The producer had to tell the deferential young Carrière to contradict Buñuel; 'he needed an opponent', Carrière said.

Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) starred which French actress, chosen over his Mexican leading lady?

Buñuel refused to watch Jean Renoir's 1946 version for fear of being influenced by a director he venerated.

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

Buñuel felt the 22-year-old star had been foisted on him by the producers and her lover François Truffaut.

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

The Golden Lion came with the Pasinetti Award; Deneuve later said she preferred working with Buñuel on Tristana.

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

Italy banned it, only for the Catholic Church itself to intervene on the film's behalf.

Tristana (1970) was adapted from a novel by which Spanish writer, whose books Buñuel had long wanted to film?

The censors worried it encouraged duelling; Deneuve and Franco Nero were imposed on him by the producers.

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

One of them is the ambassador of the fictional South American republic of Miranda, whom a Maoist terrorist keeps trying to kill.

Which honour for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie made Buñuel sneer at '2500 idiots'?

Producer Serge Silberman skipped Cannes altogether to concentrate on the Oscar campaign.

How many actresses play Conchita in alternating scenes in Buñuel's final film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)?

Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina share the part; Buñuel claimed the idea came to him after two dry martinis.

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

He also introduced Buñuel to producer Serge Silberman in 1963, launching the director's late French period.

Buñuel's 1982 autobiography, written with Carrière, is titled what in its US translation?

The UK edition was called My Last Breath; in it he wished he could rise from the grave every ten years to buy the newspapers.

Buñuel's wife Jeanne Rucar had won a bronze medal at the 1924 Paris Olympics in what?

They stayed married for life and had two sons, Juan Luis and Rafael.

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

Seven of his films made Sight & Sound's 2012 poll of the 250 greatest films.

Buñuel died in 1983 in the capital of his adopted country. Which capital?

He died in Mexico City; his wife said the cause was complications of diabetes.

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

They were among the wealthiest families in town, thanks to the fortune his father had made in Cuba.

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

Seven years of strict schooling there fed the anticlerical streak that runs through his films.

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

He kept a pugnacious streak: he once tried to throttle Dalí's girlfriend Gala at a dinner party.

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

He insisted his name stay off the pictures, apparently fearing damage to his reputation as a surrealist.

With which old Surrealist friend did Buñuel write the scenario The Sewers of Los Angeles in the 1940s?

The unmade story was set on a mountain of excrement beside a highway, pure Buñuel.

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

The Vatican threatened its Catholic patrons, the de Noailles, with excommunication over the sequence.

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

His first job was turning the Barbara Stanwyck picture My Reputation into El Que Dirán.

Which New York archbishop denounced Buñuel to MoMA as 'the Antichrist' over L'Age d'Or?

Combined with Dalí's autobiography and a Hollywood trade-paper campaign, the row cost Buñuel his museum job.