Luis Buñuel Trivia
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48 free Luis Buñuel trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 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 48 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
Aragon. Calanda is known for its Good Friday drums, beaten through the day and night, and Buñuel ended his film Nazarín with their thunder.
Q 02Buñuel's father had made his fortune running a hardware business in which city?
Havana
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.
Q 03At Madrid's Residencia de Estudiantes, Buñuel befriended Salvador Dalí and which poet?
Federico García Lorca
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.
Q 04Which director's silent film Der müde Tod convinced the young Buñuel that he had to make films?
Fritz Lang
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.
Q 05Which French director fired Buñuel from The Fall of the House of Usher for belittling Abel Gance?
Jean Epstein
Jean Epstein. Giving Buñuel a lift afterwards, he warned him to keep away from the Surrealists, the very group Buñuel joined soon after.
Q 06Buñuel's 1929 debut with Dalí, Un Chien Andalou, opens with a razor slicing what?
a woman's eyeball
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.
Q 07Who financed Un Chien Andalou?
Buñuel's mother
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.
Q 08At the premiere of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel stood behind the screen with his pockets full of what?
stones
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.
Q 09After the 1930 scandal over L'Age d'Or, what did its patrons, the de Noailles, do with the prints?
withdrew them from circulation
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.
Q 10At Cadaqués, as he and Dalí fell out over L'Age d'Or, whom did Buñuel try to throttle?
Gala, Dalí's girlfriend
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.
Q 11Which star had Buñuel ushered off the first MGM set he visited in 1930?
Greta Garbo
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.
Q 12Buñuel's documentary Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread) was paid for by an anarchist friend who got the money how?
in a lottery
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.
Q 13Las Hurdes pairs scenes of misery with a detached narrator and thundering, inappropriate music by which composer?
Brahms
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.
Q 21Buñuel's first colour film, shot in English and Spanish on Mexico's Pacific coast, adapted which novel?
Robinson Crusoe
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.
Q 22Buñuel's 1961 return to Spain, Viridiana, shared which prize at Cannes?
the Palme d'Or
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.
Q 23The beggars' banquet in Viridiana pauses for a group photograph parodying which famous painting?
The Last Supper
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
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.
Q 15Which cocktail did Buñuel credit with sustaining his reveries, giving his own exacting recipe for it in his memoir?
The dry martini
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.
Q 16What kind of film was Gran Casino (1947), Buñuel's first picture in Mexico, starring Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque?
Musical
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.
Q 17Buñuel's Los Olvidados (1950) was inspired by a newspaper report of what?
a boy's body on a garbage dump
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.
Q 18In which Woody Allen film does a time-travelling writer pitch the young Buñuel a plot he would film decades later?
Midnight in Paris
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.
Q 19Which poet, then a diplomat in France, handed out his own essay defending Los Olvidados outside its Cannes screening?
Octavio Paz
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.
Q 20In 2003 UNESCO added Los Olvidados to which register?
Memory of the World
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.
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.
Q 24Who smuggled the negatives of Viridiana out of Spain so that its censors never saw the finished film?
Buñuel's son
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.
Q 25The Exterminating Angel (1962) is about wealthy dinner guests who find themselves unable to do what?
leave the room
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.
Q 26Which actress starred in three 1960s Buñuel films bankrolled by her producer husband Gustavo Alatriste?
Silvia Pinal
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.
Q 27Simón del desierto (1965) is loosely based on a 5th-century saint who lived for decades where?
on top of a pillar
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.
Q 28Which screenwriter co-wrote all of Buñuel's late French films, starting with Diary of a Chambermaid in 1964?
Jean-Claude Carrière
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.
Q 29Which French star played the title role in Buñuel's Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)?
Jeanne Moreau
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.
Q 30In Belle de Jour (1967), Deneuve's housewife Séverine spends her afternoons doing what?
working in a brothel
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.