Fernando Rey, Luis Bunuel, and the Rule of No Return
Written by Joe D on July 13th, 2007
Fernando Rey was asked how he liked working with Luis Bunuel. He replied that he loved it with one exception. Whenever a scene was damaged in the lab or had some technical difficulty Bunuel would not reshoot it. He would just cut it out of the movie. This drove Rey crazy. Bunuel realized that you can cut anything out of a movie, it’s a very liberating thought. The human mind loves putting together puzzles, imposing patterns on chaos. Bob Downey told me he once bribed a projectionist to show the reels of one of his films out of order to see how it would play. So have a glass of champagne and toast the great Fernando Rey. Maybe his best scenes were damaged in the lab and never saw the light of day.