"The Orphanage" is the latest from the Spanish invasion

A potent combination of poetry and terror, Spain's Oscars entry, "The Orphanage," concerns a woman who intends to reopen the orphanage where she grew up as a home for handicapped children, only to have her own son mysteriously disappear. Convinced that he is trying to contact her from beyond the grave, she hires a team of psychics to reach him. The directorial debut of Juan Antonio Bayona based on Sergio Sánchez's screenplay and produced by Guilliermo Del Toro ("Pan's Labyrinth"), it has already been snapped up by New Line Cinema for an English-language remake. In a recent phone conversation, the filmmakers talked about ghosts, "Peter Pan" and the proper way to celebrate an Oscar nod.

Q This story has a classic, understated tension, like Robert Wise's "The Haunting," which implies everything but show very little. Did films like that inspire you?

Sanchez "The Haunting" was definitely one. The other, both as literature and film, was Henry James' "The Turn of the Screw" and the film Jack Clayton did of it, "The Innocents." There was an ambiguity at work there that we really wanted to put in the film. And on the other hand there was "Peter Pan." That book destroyed me when I was a kid. The last chapter was so sad and devastating. I remember a picture from that book of Mother sitting by the window waiting for the children to come back from Neverland. It's very haunting and evocative and I always thought it would be fascinating to retell the story of Peter Pan from the point of view of the mother. That's what gave me the idea for "The Orphanage."

Q The plotting is as intricate as a jigsaw puzzle, with pieces that can be interpreted either on a supernatural or realistic level. You were writing two stories in parallel with the third difficulty that they had to fit together perfectly. How did you construct this elaborate puzzle?

Sanchez Actually, I started from the ending and wrote it backwards. I knew where I wanted to go and I started to build the puzzle from that. I start with the easy piece and then I do everything around it. The thing about the plot that was extremely difficult was, I wrote all the scenes on three-by-fives and put them up on the wall. I had two separate columns. The one on the right was for the ghost story. The left one was for the story that had nothing to do with the supernatural: the story that dealt with a mother who is going crazy because she's missing her child. It was really hard to build horror set pieces because everything had to have a double reading. Everything had to have a realistic explanation. When the parapsychologists come to the house (and ostensibly discovers evidence of ghosts through an audiovisual recording system), there's nothing that real in there; everything they hear comes from their sound system so it could be something that's been prerecorded. Things couldn't fly through the air, there couldn't be any obvious manifestation of the supernatural because everything had to be real at the same time. That was the hardest part, to come up with a story that worked both as a ghost story and had nothing to do with the supernatural. It's become a huge success in Spain, and when people go to see it for a second time they say, "My God, that wasn't a ghost story at all, was it?" That's one of the fun things about the movie; you can interpret it any way you like.

Q There seems to have been an explosion of filmmaking talent from the Spanish-speaking world in the last decade. It's remarkable how many wonderful films have arrived from Mexico, Spain and South America. Do you have any ideas as to why that's the case now?

Bayona I'm part of the first generation to have grown up under democracy in Spain; that's part of the answer. And I remember we had two TV stations when I was growing up, that would play American movies and also European movies like Francois Truffaut's and Alfred Hitchcock's. So it was quite easy for me growing up to watch that with all my family. And also I'm part of the first generation to grow up with film schools. There were none 10 years ago in Spain. Also there's been an explosion of short film festivals in Spain. This is not only my first feature film, it's the first for all the crew and I met all of them in film school or at a short film festival. That's the place where all that talent grew.

Q Having Del Toro sign on as producer must have been a huge boost for the project in terms of the budget and resources available to you. How did that come about?

Bayona I met Guillermo 15 years ago and since then we have been friends. The movie has themes of childhood and fantasy that appeal to him and when he heard I was going to make it he wanted to be part of that.

Q I wonder if that's another reason for the explosion of talent we were speaking about. Several of the Spanish-speaking directors seem to be quite happy and eager to promote one another's careers.

Bayona That's true and it's a beautiful thing. I used to watch los tres amigos, Del Toro, [Alejandro Gonzalez] Iñárritu and [Alfonso] Cuarón, and I would like to have this kind of relationship. My partners and I, we met long ago at short film festivals, and became friends. My composer I met that way and I think that's how it should be, fun. In Spain, they say either you're jealous or somebody's jealous of you, but I think that's not true.

Q Your film was just selected as the foreign language Oscar selection from Spain. When you heard that, how did you celebrate?

Bayona We were at the fantasy film festival in Austin, Texas, when we heard that. The screening was so great that we went to celebrate that at a party where we were karaoke singing. Then we got the phone call with the news at the party and the party was even better.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186