50 free Luis Buñuel trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Luis Buñuel trivia for cinephiles, surrealism fans and anyone who has watched a razor approach an eyeball and never quite recovered. The quiz starts in Calanda and Zaragoza, with the Jesuit schoolboy who lost his faith at 16, the Madrid student residence where he befriended Dalí and Lorca, and the Fritz Lang film that made him decide to devote his life to cinema. Then Paris: the six-day script written at Dalí's house, the pockets full of stones at the premiere, the ink hurled at L'Age d'Or, and the Vatican's threat of excommunication. The middle rounds follow his exile: the fake documentary Land Without Bread, the anonymous musicals in Madrid, the MoMA propaganda job in New York, and the plan to shoot Dalí in the knee. Then Mexico: Los Olvidados and the rotten egg thrown at the lens, Frida Kahlo's silence, the Cannes prize, Robinson Crusoe in colour, and Silvia Pinal. Later questions cover the great late run of Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Belle de Jour, Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and That Obscure Object of Desire, plus the martinis, the memoir and the Nobel nominations. Questions run from easy to expert and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our film directors and Salvador Dalí quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Luis Buñuel was born in 1900 in Calanda, a small town in which region of Spain?
Aragon
He said that in Calanda 'the Middle Ages lasted until World War I'; the family soon moved to Zaragoza.
Q 02Buñuel's father had made his fortune running a hardware business in which city?
Havana
Leonardo Buñuel left home at 14, returned rich at 43 and married the innkeeper's 18-year-old daughter.
Q 03At Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes, Buñuel befriended Salvador Dalí and which poet?
Federico García Lorca
The three formed the nucleus of the 'Generación del 27'; Buñuel mourned Lorca's murder in 1936 for the rest of his life.
Q 04Which Fritz Lang film left Buñuel 'completely transformed' and set on a career in cinema?
Der müde Tod
At 72 he was still enthusiastic enough to ask the elderly Lang for his autograph.
Q 05Which French director employed Buñuel as assistant, then fired him for insulting Abel Gance?
Jean Epstein
Epstein's parting shot: 'You seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people.'
Q 06Buñuel's 1929 debut with Dalí, Un Chien Andalou, opens with a razor slicing what?
a woman's eyeball
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.
Q 07Who financed Un Chien Andalou?
Buñuel's mother
The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in Cadaqués from two dreams: swarming ants and a sliced eye.
Q 08At the premiere of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel stood behind the screen with his pockets full of what?
stones
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.
Q 09What did the de Noailles, patrons of L'Age d'Or (1930), do with the prints in 1934?
withdrew them from circulation
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.
Q 10Dalí took no part in shooting L'Age d'Or after Buñuel, at a dinner party, tried to throttle whom?
Gala, Dalí's girlfriend
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.
Q 11Which star had Buñuel ushered off the first MGM set he visited in 1930?
Greta Garbo
He spent the rest of his contract at home collecting his paycheque, and left after insulting Irving Thalberg's Spanish-accent project.
Q 12Buñuel's 1933 pseudo-documentary Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread) was funded by an anarchist friend who had won the money how?
in a lottery
Ramón Acín's 20,000 pesetas paid for a film that was banned by both the Republic and Franco.
Q 13Las Hurdes pairs scenes of misery with a detached narrator and thundering, inappropriate music by which composer?
Brahms
The film has been called one of the first mockumentaries and a 'surrealist documentary'.
Q 21Buñuel's first colour film, shot in English and Spanish in Manzanillo in 1954, adapted which novel?
Robinson Crusoe
Its little-known star Dan O'Herlihy funded his own Los Angeles run and earned his only Oscar nomination.
Q 22During his 18 years working in the Mexican industry, roughly how many films did Buñuel make?
21
Many were genre melodramas made to local taste, but Él, Nazarín and The Exterminating Angel are among them.
Q 23Buñuel's 1961 return to Spain, Viridiana, shared which top prize at Cannes?
the Palme d'Or
The Vatican newspaper denounced it within days, Spain banned it for 17 years and sacked the official who accepted the award.
Q 14At which New York institution did Buñuel edit anti-fascist propaganda films for Latin America in the early 1940s?
the Museum of Modern Art
His first job there was to cut a shortened version of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will as a demonstration.
Q 15What did Buñuel plan to do to Dalí after Dalí's 1942 autobiography cost him his MoMA job?
shoot him in the knee
He did not carry out the violent part; Dalí replied that he wrote the book 'to put ME on a pedestal'.
Q 16Which Argentine actress-singer co-starred with Jorge Negrete in Buñuel's flop Gran Casino (1947)?
Libertad Lamarque
'I kept them singing all the time,' he recalled; it was two years before he directed again.
Q 17Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950) was inspired by a newspaper report of what?
a boy's body on a garbage dump
The image became the film's final scene; the shoot took 18 days and the hairdresser quit over a scene she found un-Mexican.
Q 18Which painter refused to speak to Buñuel after the hostile 1950 premiere of Los Olvidados?
Frida Kahlo
A poet's wife had to be physically restrained from attacking him, and there were calls to revoke his Mexican citizenship.
Q 19Which future Nobel laureate, then a Mexican diplomat, campaigned to get Los Olvidados to Cannes and paraded outside the cinema with a placard?
Octavio Paz
Buñuel won Best Director at Cannes 1951, and the film ran for two months on its Mexican reissue.
Q 20Los Olvidados was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in which year?
2003
UNESCO called it 'the most important document in Spanish about the marginal lives of children in contemporary large cities'.
Q 24The beggars' banquet in Viridiana pauses for a group photograph parodying which famous painting?
The Last Supper
The scene was a major reason for the Holy See's denunciation.
Q 25How did Buñuel get the finished Viridiana out of Spain before the censors could see it?
his son smuggled the negatives to Paris
The censors had approved the script with minor changes; the replacement ending Buñuel devised was, he said, 'even more immoral'.
Q 26The Exterminating Angel (1962) is about wealthy dinner guests who find themselves unable to do what?
leave the room
Sheep and a bear wander the mansion; the guests end up roasting the sheep on a fire in the salon.
Q 27Which actress starred in three 1960s Buñuel films bankrolled by her producer husband Gustavo Alatriste?
Silvia Pinal
Buñuel said her husband Gustavo Alatriste gave him more creative freedom than any other producer.
Q 28Simón del desierto (1965) is loosely based on a 5th-century saint who lived for 36 years where?
on top of a pillar
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.
Q 29Which screenwriter, hired in 1963 partly for his wine-growing family, co-wrote all of Buñuel's late French films?
Jean-Claude Carrière
The producer had to tell the deferential young Carrière to contradict Buñuel; 'he needed an opponent', Carrière said.
Q 30Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) starred which French actress, chosen over his Mexican leading lady?
Jeanne Moreau
Buñuel refused to watch Jean Renoir's 1946 version for fear of being influenced by a director he venerated.