The western according to Mateo Gil

The first time Alejandro Amenábar noticed Mateo Gil he thought his classmate was putting his foot in it. Gil, a Canarian with blue eyes who had arrived in Madrid to study film, was arguing with a teacher from the Media Studies Faculty, trying to convince her she wasn't explaining the lesson very well. "Who is this idiot so desperately looking to fail?" he thought.

At the end of the session, Amenábar approached his kamikaze colleague: "I told him that it wasn't so heavy going, that it wasn't worth the bother." That was the beginning not only of a great friendship, but also of one of the most solid and fruitful creative partnerships of recent Spanish cinema. Together they've written, as well as various short films, the scripts for Open Your Eyes, The Sea Inside and Agora. Tesis, the film that turned the 23-year-old Amenábar into a precocious talent ? and on which Gil worked as assistant director ? was inspired by their student world. "We were the two freaks of the class," Amenábar recalls.

"I've spent a lot of time in film, but somehow it's as if I still haven't arrived"

"Now, if I think I will never make my 'Pedro Páramo,' I start to cry"

He admits Gil was more mature, more intelligent and more noble than the rest ? though that didn't prevent that same teacher from failing him. "He never knew how to sell himself well ? he is not very cunning." Perhaps that explains why Gil, despite a career full of successes, exudes an essence of personal failure. At 38, he has won four Goya film awards but nobody has ever seen him hanging out at one of the ceremonies. He didn't collect his Goya as director of the short, Dime que yo, nor the three screenwriting prizes he won for Agora, The Sea Inside and The Method, the latter directed by Marcelo Piñeyro.

His second feature film as director, Blackthorn, a western shot in English with Sam Shepard and Eduardo Noriega, might mean the definitive consolidation of a man who until now has seemed allergic to success ? or, perhaps it's better to say, allergic to believing in success. "I have been around a long time, but somehow it's as if I still haven't arrived. Although maybe it's that I've already arrived at a place and now it's just a matter of retiring. I don't know. I would like to make films like they made 10 years ago, but now that's impossible [...] In just a few years, things have become very difficult for everyone and I only know that today I couldn't even make a film like Blackthorn again."

"We've spent a lot of time watching him complain, but without ever missing a single day of work," says Eduardo Noriega, another of his best friends. "Mateo is a walking contradiction. He has a perfect mix of ingenuity and perceptiveness that makes him irresistible, and I'm not just talking about his success with women. He always sees the glass half empty, but the truth is that without a bit of self-confidence nobody would devote themselves to this. He is a pessimist and he's self-critical, but at the same time he has a lot of confidence in himself. A true pessimist doesn't advance and he is persistent and hard-working."

Arriving in Madrid to study after finishing high school in Las Palmas, he didn't find what he wanted at university, ending up working in a bar, selling encyclopedias door-to-door and delivering parcels as a courier. Meanwhile, he found the response to his filmmaking vocation in a group of misfits: Carlos Montero, creator of the popular TV series Física o química; Amenábar and, later, the actors Noriega and Fele Martínez. With them, from the first year, he started filming video pieces.

"I was lucky to meet Alejandro, who understood me perfectly," says Gil. "I know I wouldn't be here today without him. We developed together and then, when he had success, he opened a lot of doors for me. But the truth is he turned me into a film writer by chance, because it was not my vocation to write. In fact, I was very bad, but I learned the tricks and how to adapt, even though I've never known if it was truly my vocation."

"Watching them work is a spectacle," says Fernando Bovaira, Amenábar's regular producer, who was also behind Nadie conoce a nadie, Gil's 1999 directorial debut.

Between that and Blackthorn came the failure of one of Gil's most ambitious and personal projects: the film adaptation of one of literature's greatest works, Pedro Páramo. Those who know him say Gil experienced real torture seeing that project collapse. "I can only say that it was a tremendous blow. It's a film that I was obsessed with since I was 18. It's difficult to define why it was like that; it had to do with an overall view of life that I identified with. A view that had to do with a very deep melancholy that is in Pedro Páramo [...] I wrote the script in two months. I was carrying it all inside. Now it is totally shelved, but if I think I will never do it, I start to cry."

Although everybody spoke wonders of that script, all the circumstances were against Gil and his story. He was left alone. Maybe part of that failure also had to do with his propensity to run from conflict. He doesn't like banging on the table or shouting. "I know many people on my crew for Blackthorn thought I wasn't very tough, and perhaps they were right. It was a very difficult shoot, but it's hard for me to blow up."

Behind the Pedro Páramo fiasco lay the origin of the film he is releasing now, a western about friendship, old age, time and death that resurrects the outlaw Butch Cassidy and somehow confirms that Gil is one of those people who doesn't throw the towel in easily. It fits with a phrase he uttered to describe himself: "I don't believe in myself at all, but for some reason I can't stop doing things." So now, galloping back on to the screen, it's not difficult to imagine his friends telling him: "Well, Mateo, you got your own way. You finished off your half-empty glass!"