'Goya's Ghost' director witnessed parallels to the Inquisition

[Ian David]

'Goya's Ghost' director witnessed parallels to the Inquisition
by Steven Rea
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)
26 July 2007

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“It was probably my first shock as a citizen,” says the 75-year-old, two-time Oscar winning director. “In the `50s, as an idealistic young man, I read these terrible things about the Spanish Inquisition, and I saw the parallels, exactly the same thing, in Czechoslovakia, during the Communist era: people being arrested without reasons, then confessing to crimes they never committed, obviously under torture, and then being executed. It was happening right there, in the 1950s.

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A half-century later, Forman has. “Goya’s Ghost,” a roiling melodrama set in the late 1700s and early 1800s, when the Catholic Church ruled Spain with an iron fist, stars Javier Bardem as an ambitious and wily Inquisition priest, Stellan Skarsgard as the revered Spanish painter Francisco Goya, and Natalie Portman as a merchant’s daughter, accused of heresy and sent to prison, where she is tortured and raped.

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Carriere handed in his final draft, says Forman, in the fall of 2002. That’s a year before Vice President Dick Cheney went on television to say that U.S. military forces “would be greeted as liberators” in Iraq, that the Iraqi people would throw flowers at the soldiers’ feet.

Virtually the same line appears in “Goya’s Ghost,” spoken by Napoleon Bonaparte to his troops as they set out to invade Spain.

“It’s difficult to make people believe that the screenplay was finished months before the invasion of Iraq,” notes Forman. “But really, it was. ... Napoleon said it, verbatim.

More:
http://www.popmatters.com/pm/news/article/46408/goyas-ghost-director-witnessed-parallels-to-the-inquisition/