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Compiled by: Jack Foley
I HAD to make Bad Education. I had to get it out of my system
before it became an obsession.
I had worked repeatedly on the script for over ten years and
I could have gone on like that for another decade.
Because of the amount of possible combinations, the story of
Bad Education was only finished once the film had been shot, edited
and mixed.
Bad Education is a very intimate film, but not exactly autobiographical.
I meant that I’m not recounting my life at school or all
that I lived and learned during the first years of the ‘movida’;
although those are the two periods in which the story is set (1964
and 1980, with an interval in 1977).
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Of course, my memories were important when it came to writing
the script. After all, I lived in the settings and in the periods
in which it takes place.
Bad Education is not a settling of scores with the priests who
‘bad-educated’ me, or with the clergy in general.
If I had needed to take revenge, I wouldn’t have waited
40 years to do so. The church doesn’t interest me, not even
as an adversary.
Nor is the film a reflection on the ‘movida’ in Madrid
at the start of the 80s, even though a large part of it is set
in the Madrid of that time. What interests me about that historic
moment in the explosion of freedom that Spain was experiencing,
as opposed to the obscurantism and repression of the 60s.
The early 80s are, therefore, the ideal setting for the protagonists,
now adults, to be masters of their destinies, their bodies and
their desires.
The film is not a comedy, although there is humour (Javier Càmara’s
character), nor is it a children’s musical, although there
are children singing. It is a ‘film noir’, or at least
that is how I like to think of it.
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