A Goya Award-winning director whose stinging sense of pitch-black humor could best be represented by envisioning a Fellini clown with a scorpion's tale, Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia has achieved near stratospheric success in his native Europe while curiously remaining a fairly obscure cult figure to stateside audiences. With a warped cinematic world of greed, lust, and outsider mischief populated by masturbating Darth Vaders, militant cripples, joyously sinful priests, and murderous department-store salesmen, de la Iglesia displays a surreal world view that may simply be too bizarre for most U.S. viewers to stomach. Regardless of the reasons for audacious de la Iglesia's failure to catch on with North American viewers, however, his highly inventive camerawork and outlandish creativity have set new standards for filmmakers seeking to push the limits of cinema and keep audiences on their toes.

A lifelong comic-book fan, de la Iglesia was born in Bilbao, Spain, and found creative inspiration early on in the works of Stan Lee and Alex Raymond. Though de la Iglesia would later attend Deusto University, it was in the local bars and at the institution's film society that most of the future filmmaker's education took place. Following a brief stint as a production designer on director Enrique Urbizu's Todo por la Pasta…  » Read more