Maria Ripoll: "As I'm the middle of five siblings, I spent my weekends at the movies."

Maria Ripoll (Barcelona, ​​​​1965) is a film director. She debuted in 1998 with Rain on the shoes. Now he has released his latest film, This will also happen, based on the novel of the same name by Milena Busquets.

I lived on Sant Elies Street, near Plaza Molina. "First, I went to the Talitha School, which is now the Orlandai School, and then to the Acis Artur Martorell School and the Institut Montserrat." How did you experience the changes? "At 10, I went from one extreme to the other, from a progressive Catalanist school, which is Orlandai, to a school with a similar system, but in a different neighborhood, like Plaza Sanllehy, where I grew up. Kids came from the Carmel barracks, and I emerged as a bit of a fighter."

I wasn't a classroom kid. "I didn't do very well at school; I had untreated dyslexia because it wasn't visible back then. But I had a good time and stood up for my friends a lot. I have an image etched in my head of a friend of mine who had both arms broken, and I would hit the boy who wanted to hurt her. I was a playground kid, a street kid."

She went to the movies since she was little. "We lived across the hall from a cinema in the parish of Santa Agnès. And since I'm the middle of five siblings and didn't belong to the oldest or youngest siblings, I spent my weekends at the cinema. I'd take the booster seat, sit down, and watch the double feature." She has two older sisters and two younger brothers. "The five of us would put on plays that were really funny. We charged a peseta to get in, we acted on the street, in Arenys, where we spent our summers. We'd put on the same scene in different ways, faster, laughing, crying..."

As a child, whenever they asked her, whenever they asked her, whenever they asked her, I really liked traveling, and then being a ship's captain, because I wanted to see the world and I liked the sea." And she tried. "I went to the maritime school in Plaça Palau to sign up, but they told me there were no female captains. I replied that there was one in Galicia. She'd found out. And they tricked me, they told me the entrance exam was on September 2nd and it was on the 1st, and when I got there it was already."

At 14 he had a revelation. "One day I said: "If I love images so much, because I'm fascinated by framing, light and stories, I have to make films."

His father laughed. "Of course, there was no one in my family. My father was a chemist, and my mother, a housewife." Although my mother was very imaginative. "And active. Her car was always full of children. And we would go to treasure hunts, to the woods... When someone passed by on the street, he would make up a story, create characters."

Despite his family's disbelief, he didn't give up on the idea of cinema. "I remember I had two books on my bedside table, one was the interviews Truffaut did with Hitchcock and the other was Luis Buñuel's memoirs. By reading and asking questions, I found out what this profession was and I started taking all kinds of courses. I went to university to study communications, but it wasn't what I wanted to do and filming."

There were no female role models. "As a child, I had no female role models. As an adult, I did; for example, Jane Campion is one of the first I remember, because hers debut, Sweetie, it touched my soul."

And then came the Los Angeles adventure. "I had already made films as an assistant director for great directors and I was working so much that I said enough. I applied for a scholarship from the Generalitat to study at UCLA and then at the American Film Institute." In between, she babysat for Danny DeVito's children. "I went to the interview thinking it was a job at the production company, but it was about working weekends at the house in Malibu looking after the children. They were very kind."