The Secret Life of Words

When you finish making a film, it's always extremely difficult to talk about it. After sleeping, eating, living, dreaming and breathing it twenty-four hours a day, I feel that the words to describe what you've just done are never going to do justice to the adventures in which the actors, the crew and you have been involved. So, even though I feel that I'm betraying myself, that in the film there are many more things and many more layers than those I am going to tell, I'm going to try to say something.

An isolated spot in the middle of the sea. An oil rig, where all the workers are men, on which there has been an accident. A solitary, mysterious woman who is trying to forget her past (Sarah Polley) is brought to the rig to look after a man (Tim Robbins) who has been temporarily blinded. A strange intimacy develops between them, a link full of secrets, truths, lies, humour and pain, from which neither of them will emerge unscathed and which will change their lives forever. A film about the weight of the past. About the sudden silence that is produced before a storm. About twenty-five million waves, a Spanish cook (Javier Camara) and a goose. And, above all else, about the power of love even in the most terrible circumstances.