As a Portuguese person, Saint Anthony is a figure you live with, negotiate with, for whom you may feel sympathy, aversion or, why not, curiosity. Thus, I wanted to find out to what extent this Saint Anthony inhabited me. What body could I reconstitute with the fragments picked up here and there, from scattered pieces – since, after all, several elements attracted me. What monster, lifelike or otherwise, would take shape? As for the main character in my film, Fernando, the future Anthony, I must admit that as I went on so I coloured him with my own story. He is a character who metamorphoses (like many characters in my earlier films), whose identity is transformed, and maybe this acquires a different meaning when you get over forty, when you think about the lives you have not lived. He is therefore like a continuation of a path that, a long time ago, I did not choose; another me existing in a parallel dimension. If I chose to give my Fernando a connection with birds, that is because ornithology, bird watching and bird watching trips are things I know very well. I studied biology and, more specifically, birds, long before I studied cinema. I still feel a deep fascination for bird watching and I often do it on my travels around the world. One could indeed see a number of features common to the two activities, notably the use of binoculars in one and the camera in the other.