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Alejandro Amenábar scored an arthouse hit with Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), which he then saw remade by Cameron Crowe and Tom Cruise as Vanilla Sky. Mainstream success came with the spooky English-language ghost story The Others, starring Nicole Kidman as a mother of two creepy children in a fog-enveloped house in Jersey. He returned to Spain for his latest film, The Sea Inside, in which Javier Bardem plays Ramón Sampedro, a real-life quadriplegic who fought the Church and the Spanish state for the right to die.

Ramón Sampedro's death did not actually bring about a change in the law on euthanasia in Spain. Did you want to re-open the debate with this film?

I know the more Javier researched the story, the more he felt we had to tell it to the people. But I was interested in the story itself and the human relationships, feelings and emotions. Ramón's situation and the book he wrote were very interesting, but we were talking about abstract concepts. So I had very beautiful ideas that he had about death, life and love, but I couldn't find a way to make a movie of it. Then I was told about the intimate person and the power of dreams in his life, and then I thought we had a movie.

But the issue of euthanasia is a very emotive one. Do you have a personal position on it?

I think it should first be debated, of course, and why not regulated and legalised? I understand that it's a very sensitive subject and none of us wanted to cross a line. But when we see cases like Ramón Sampedro's, it's so dramatic that to me it's like crystal. I can see he was right. So to me, in the case of Sampedro, it's really a question of love. How much you love that person and how keen you are to help him.

Javier Bardem is not the most obvious choice to play a man in his 50s. What convinced you he was right for the part?

He wasn't in my mind at the beginning. It was when we started to think about the cast that we realised he's the best actor in Spain and he would be able to go to the deep soul of Ramón and really be the character, not just perform it. The problem was his features. We knew that meant make up and I didn't want to include any external process that would distract the audience from anything we wanted to tell them.

How long did the makeup take?

It was quite long actually. It ended up being a minimum of five hours, every day. So that affected the schedule. That affected Javier. It's a pain in the ass, the make up, always.

We see a partially naked Ramón on television and it's quite disturbing. His legs look very short. How was that achieved?

We thought about having a real quadriplegic and putting Javier's head on the body. Then when Javier showed me how he would perform it, we decided to digitally make his limbs thinner. But it's Javier's body. This was one of the first appearances by Ramón on TV in Spain. We all saw his body, almost naked. You could see it was almost deformed. Ramón refused any kind of training in order not to get deformed, so he barely moved for 30 years.

You had the cooperation of Ramón's family. Would you have made the film without it?

I don't know, actually. I could have told another story inspired by Ramón, but the more I researched about him, the more I felt this is a story that needs to be told. This is the story of Ramón. If this story doesn't deserve to be told, well, that's the end of moviemaking to me.

The Sea Inside (Mar Adentro) is released in UK cinemas on 11th February.