I was with my friend Kazick, director of the Accattone art cinema on the rue Cujas in Paris. We were having a good time together after a film screening. Then, suddenly, Raúl joined us to be part of the fun. Kazick introduced me to Raúl and showed him some of my artworks. Raúl and I talked to each other about our respective careers.

I subsequently saw some of his films like Three Lives and Only One Death, and travelled with him to the Cannes festival. Then he invited me to participate in the shooting of the film he was making with Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli, Genealogies of a Crime. He asked me to bring some paintings to hang in the office of the lawyer played by Deneuve. I didn’t expect this proposition. At first I was astonished, and then I was very enthusiastic as I made my way to the locations on the rue Littré in Paris where the film was shot. My paintings were used well. I was invited to lunch with Deneuve, Piccoli and the whole crew. It was an event for me, the first time that anyone had asked to use my paintings in a film.

Later Raúl invited me to his home, and in the course of the conversation he suggested making a film about me and my work, Miotte by Ruiz.

With his surprising and unconventional ideas he asks the actor – in this case, me – to surpass himself, which means that, in the end, one is happy to have worked with him. Example: creating a painting from one end to the other with the camera attached to the paintbrush, looking at the marks appearing on the canvas and not at the actor.

These days, we see a lot of each other in Paris. Our enormous sympathy for each other quickly became a deep friendship. He is very expansive and exuberant. He loves life and good times. It happened that we met up again one day in Durham, North Carolina, where I was undergoing surgery, and he was Professor of Cinema at the local University. We spent Thanksgiving dinner together at the Washington Duke Inn.

Here is what strikes me most about Raúl. He associates facts from his unique knowledge of the rarest subjects in a completely unusual and unexpected way. There is also the ingeniousness and the creative impulse evident in his choice of scenes to shoot. And also his arrangements of transparent objects: glass tables, vases, reflections in water after a stone is thrown into a pond – all of that gives a surprising effect of both the lived and the illusory. That is how he leads us into his dream.