For Saura, Goya was always a project that was going to take him into new areas of film-making. “Goya in Bordeaux goes further down the line than Tango,” notes the director, making a comparison with a film in which emotions are portrayed, not through dialogue, but through movement, colour and light. “Space, and above all the light which makes up the space, are essential. The whole thing has been conceived as two large blocks: the acting and the lighting. Light is inseparable from our conception of the set.”

All of human life...the young Goya (Coronado) with the Duchess of Alba (Maribel Verdú)

The film, Saura adds, would have been inconceivable without top Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who won Oscars for The Last Emperor and Apocalypse Now and who had previously worked with him on Flamenco, Taxi and, above all, Tango. “Storaro was essential,” he says. “He’s a master of lighting and here, on an extremely complex project, he’s shown it once again.”

Saura, Storaro and veteran French production designer Pierre-Louis Thèvenet - whose credits include Pedro Almodóvar’s High Heels (Tacones lejanos), Anthony Mann’s El Cid and Franklin J Shaffner’s Patton (for which he won an Oscar) - put months of planning into Goya’s huge and complex set, which boasted numerous innovations, including transparent sliding panels to enable the long and complicated takes that were part of Saura’s vision.

The ladies of the Madrid court

“90% of the shoot took place in the studio,” says Storaro. “We reproduced streets, palaces and nightmares. This was because a lot of the story happens inside Goya’s head. But there were other parts where a sense of reality was important - as, for example, when he speaks of his relationship with the Duchess of Alba - because this is a more complex part of the story. All of his creativity, his fantasy, his feelings and emotions... they’re all there when he talks about her, so we needed both verisimilitude and intensity.

“We worked with new materials - stamped plastics, projections, surfaces on which paintings or fragments of paintings are reproduced,” continues Storaro. “The scenic space was like a huge game where the pieces were all mobile, so that at any point we could construct a bedroom, a drawing room, a corridor, or make a painting or an engraving appear or disappear on the walls...”