Spanish director Isabel Coixet: “Open yourselves to the world and be bold”

The path to her position as one of Spanish cinema’s most well-known international names began in a Barcelona advertising agency for writer/director/producer Isabel Coixet.

Hailing from the town of Sant Adria del Besos near Barcelona, Coixet spent part of her undergraduate history degree at the Sorbonne in Paris before working as a copywriter, travelling to New York and London. But the world really opened up for Coixet when she started work at a production company in Los Angeles.

“The idea of making a film set in the US, like I went on to do with Things I Never Told You, came naturally,” she recalls. “I realised you don’t need to stay in your own country, your neighbourhood, your social class, your time.”

Cinema had been her passion since childhood. Coixet’s grandmother sold tickets at a local theatre and her parents were devoted cinephiles. “I remember getting lost in the stories but also taking notice of how films were made very early on,” she says.

Coixet made commercials while working in advertising in Barcelona, before the move into fiction. Her first film was the Barcelona-set Too Old To Die Young (Demasiado Viejo Para Morir Joven), starring Emma Suarez and Gerardo Arenas in 1989, winning her a Goya nomination for best new director. Her next feature was shot in English, the bittersweet drama Things I Never Told You starring Andrew McCarthy and Lili Taylor. It played widely on the international festival circuit in 1996 and established Coixet as one of Europe’s most exciting young directors. She followed it up with films including My Life Without Me with Sarah Polley and Mark Ruffalo, and The Secret Life Of Words with Polley alongside Tim Robbins.

Since Things I Never Told You, Coixet’s films have regularly premiered at the Berlinale, including Elegy (2008) with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley; Endless Night (2015) starring Juliette Binoche, Rinko Kikuchi and Gabriel Byrne; The Bookshop (2018) with Bill Nighy and Emily Mortimer; and Elisa & Marcela (2019).

Coixet was also in competition at Cannes in 2009 with Map Of The Sounds Of Tokyo, while Learning To Drive, starring Patricia Clarkson and Kingsley, played Toronto in 2014. More recently, she worked with Timothy Spall on 2020’s It Snows In Benidorm, which was shot in Spain and produced by El Deseo.

As a producer, one of the first projects Coixet boarded was 2006’s Glue, a coming-of-age story by Argentinian filmmaker Alexis Dos Santos, and many more have followed. Through her company Miss Wasabi, Coixet has co-produced Elena Trapé’s The Distances, which won prizes for best picture, director and actress at Malaga Film Festival in 2018; shorts by Belén Funes, who went on to make the feature A Thief’s Daughter; Julia Solomonoff’s Nobody’s Watching; and Avelina Prat’s debut feature Vasil, selected for this year’s Valladolid International Film Festival.

Words of wisdom

“Open yourselves to the world; be bold,” is Coixet’s advice to rising filmmakers and actors. And on the practical front, “Learn English and take the leap.” To actors, she says: “You have to live with the fact you will always have an accent. So what? Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem have an accent and look at all they have achieved.”

To women filmmakers, she says: “Always ask for more. Never be afraid to ask for more money.

“The difference in budgets managed by male directors compared to the ones handled by women is still abysmal,” she continues. “There are so many interesting new female directors and yet a lot of them have to make do with quite tight budgets. I was always a soldier ant, making do with what I was offered — and in a lot of cases where I should have asked for more money, better working conditions or more weeks to shoot.”

Coixet’s own experience has not always been easy. “As a woman director you have to work harder, like women have to in whatever field they are in,” she asserts. “[You have to] be the first to arrive on the set, pretend you have absolutely everything under control all the time, never complain, never appear to get tired or to have your period, or even work as if nothing had happened a month after giving birth.”

Rising stars

Coixet is thrilled by the new generation of Spanish women filmmakers — directors Carla Simon (Alcarràs), Pilar Palomero (La Maternal), Alauda Ruiz de Azua (Lullaby) — while producer Marisa Fernandez Armenteros’s Buena Pinta Media, behind Lullaby and the Oscar-nominated The Mole Agent, is producing Un Amor, Coixet’s next film as director. Based on a novel by Sara Mesa, the film is about a young woman working as a translator who goes to live in a remote village, in what turns out to be a troublesome move. Shooting will start at the end of February in La Rioja, with casting underway.

Star names and big budgets may punctuate her career, but Coixet regularly returns to smaller works. Her most recent completed project was a feature documentary about a sexual abuse case, The Yellow Ceiling, which premiered at San Sebastian International Film Festival in September. It was inspired by a newspaper article about abuses perpetrated in a Catalonian theatre school.

Coixet considered making it as a fiction film, until she met the women who were the victims of the case. “They told their story in a way that made me realise they had to be at the centre.”

High-end drama series have also caught Coixet’s attention, and in 2019 she made the romantic drama Foodie Love for HBO Max. “I had a lot of fun making it and felt free to do what I wanted,” she recalls of the change in pace. The series starred Laia Costa and Guillermo Pfening as a couple who meet through a foodie dating app.

TV work still appeals, and Coixet is now involved in the docuseries Omnivore for Apple TV+. Created by filmmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga and chef René Redzepi of Copenhagen’s renowned Noma restaurant, the series explores the world through food. Coixet directs an episode devoted to pork, and filming has taken place in a village near Salamanca — somewhere she knows from summers spent there as a child. The staggered shoot will be completed in January.

Looking back at her career, Coixet says her most cherished memories are her collaborations with Taylor, Polley and Robbins. “I have had the chance to work with such great actors. That’s priceless.”