Keeper of the flame

It is seen as one of the greatest films ever. So what has Víctor Erice been doing in the halfcentury since The Spirit of the Beehive? As his new film hits screens, he reveals all

- Ryan Gilbey

IN 1972, WHEN ANA TORRENT was six years old, a man came to her school and asked her to be in his film. "He had a beard," she recalls now, from her home in Madrid. "And I told him I didn't like men with beards." The director said his film was about Frankenstein's monster and asked if she was familiar with that character. "I replied, 'I've heard about him but I haven't yet been introduced. That's when he thought, 'She's the one.'" The director was Víctor Erice and the film was The Spirit of the Beehive. Made at the end of the Franco regime but set in 1940, in a Castilian village scarred by the recent Spanish civil war, it concerns two sisters whose imaginations are stimulated by seeing James Whale's 1931 film Frankenstein at a travelling cinema. Torrent's performance as the younger of the two girls - her face as pale and round as a communion wafer, her inky eyes watchful and wide - is among the most hypnotic ever given by a child.

Perhaps that's because it isn't a performance at all. "At that age," she says, "I couldn't separate fantasy from reality. That's part of what the film is about." Erice rechristened her character Ana when Torrent failed to respond to the fictional name in the script. And shooting was halted for two hours after she had an adverse reaction to the monster. "The actor was already in his makeup," she recalls. "It's no wonder I didn't want to go near him." What does she see now when she looks at herself in the film? "Complete truth. As kids, we have it naturally. As adults, we need to study to find it again."