Pedro Almodovar

Located about a ten-minute drive from the city centre and a severed ear’s throw from Las Ventas bullfighting arena, the offices of Almodóvar’s production company, El Deseo (Spanish for “desire”), are in a generic, four-storey ’90s building that could be mistaken for an advertising firm or digital agency.

All terracotta panelling and boxy PVC windows, the workaday façade suggests an unexpectedly joyless cathedral of commerce for Almodóvar, who emerged from the margins of the Spanish counterculture in the early 1980s to become the most riotously original voice in film – an all-purpose, post-Franco saviour of an auteur about whom even ‘The New York Times Magazine’ gushed: “Pedro Almodóvar has sanctified society’s transgressors, rescued Spanish surrealism and liberated international cinema.”

Inside, the pale-blue walls of El Deseo attest to Almodóvar’s inestimable contribution to filmmaking over the past 35 years, with splashy movie posters captivating one’s eye like so much dorm-room stained glass. An image of a towering stiletto with a gun for a heel, which was used in the promotional materials for ‘High Heels’ (1991) looms menacingly above a photocopier and a vivid Oscar Mariné-designed poster for ‘All About My Mother’ (1999), the movie for which Almodóvar won the Oscar for best foreign film in 2000 and which many consider to be his masterpiece. The confluence of his myriad fascinations (among them mothers, nuns, the trans community, and actresses) and the dual strands of realism and spectacle that are his hallmarks, ‘All About My Mother’ starred an intense Cecilia Roth as a grieving mother to rival the Virgin Mary and Penélope Cruz in a breakout performance as a nun who gets pregnant by an HIV-positive transgender prostitute.

Says the Picasso-esque beauty Rossy de Palma, Almodóvar’s long-time friend and collaborator, of his ability to project his divinely perverse milieu onto the world at large: “Pedro has taken his obsessions, which are not to everyone’s taste and are very local in a way, and made them universal. It takes a very strong vision and will to have that effect.”

Like Almodóvar, who has been taken to task for his alleged misogyny and sympathetic characterisations of perverts (including rapists and a paedophile priest), Waters has met with his fair share of censure over the years. But he knows well enough to look beyond the controversies. “It’s not just his incredibly twisted imagination and eye, which is so exacting,” Waters notes. “He writes all of those fantastic scripts. Pedro is always evolving. I actually like his later films more because they seem even smarter and catch me off guard. ‘The Skin I Live In’ was haunting and creepy and beautiful, and ‘I’m So Excited’ was pure Pedro. Who else but Pedro could spend an entire movie building for an airplane crash that you never see? He constantly surprises you.”

Starring Almodóvar newcomers Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suárez as the younger and older titular mother, respectively, ‘Julieta’ flits between the mid-1980s and the present, and marks a return to the director’s best work. There are some recognisable Almodóvar tropes, like his use of voiceover and a few familiar names, including a straight-faced turn by de Palma as a frumpy housekeeper, but ‘Julieta’ is noticeably devoid of the dark humour, melodrama or genre-bending contortions that have made “Almodóvarian” a synonym for dazzling camp ingenuity.

There have undoubtedly been stylistic pivots in his career, as his work has evolved from the biting social commentary of ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ (1984) to the screwball comedy ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (1987) and the cerebral occult dramedy ‘Volver’ (2006), but the narrative and visual restraint in ‘Julieta’, particularly in the hauntingly airy scenes of the Galician coast and the sweeping, bucolic shots of the Pyrenees, represent a poetic about-turn for Almodóvar.

At a recent private screening of ‘Julieta’ in Madrid, which was attended by a handful of journalists, and in conversations with some of the few people in the city who had seen a preview of the new film, the consensus was that this unalloyed drama and its austere visual language – the directorial equivalent of Penélope Cruz suddenly nailing an English accent – perhaps signal a sober new direction.

Almodóvar says he has heard it all before and is prepared for the reading of tea leaves by critics. “The truth is, it happens every time I bring out a film,” Almodóvar laments, in the clipped Madrid accent that occasionally betrays his southern roots. Although he speaks perfectly fine English, Almodóvar, who is now 66 and silver-haired and appears to have shed some of his famed decadent belly, prefers to give interviews in his native tongue – especially, as he explains with a cheeky grin, while he is refining his press shtick for a new movie. A conversation with Almodóvar is an exercise in fits and starts, his conversation ricocheting from time to time only to return to the subject at hand in a manner that recalls the elliptical editing of his later films.

After a digression that includes Almodóvar’s recent brush with Kim, Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian, whom he met briefly backstage at a fashion show in Paris for his friend Riccardo Tisci of Givenchy – he resumes his previous train of thought. “Since I began making films – and I’ve made 20 with this one – none has ever been similar to the one that came immediately before or after it,” he explains, without a hint of frustration. “However, they do form a chain, a series of coherent links that say something about me, about the way I view life and the way I make movies. At the same time, this chain has evolved as I have aged and grown.”

Besides, the anguish at the heart of the movie demanded an entirely different exercise in genre. “The pain that Julieta suffers, the pain of not knowing what has happened to someone you love,” he explains, “is one that any son, father, mother, grandfather or sibling can relate to. We all have family. So the challenge for me was to tell this agonising story in a very contained way – without the humour, songs, references to television or classic movies, or any of the graphic or stylistic elements that I have been known for in my career. I was able to put myself in a new place, and that’s something I’m thankful for. After 35 years of making films, it was very liberating to take on a project that I knew would be totally new for me.”

Not that ‘Julieta’ is wholly uncharted territory for Almodóvar. Just as he drew loosely on the work of novelist Patricia Highsmith for the creation of two of his most criminally heinous but not altogether unlikeable characters – Benigno, the male nurse in ‘Talk to Her’ (2002) who rapes a female coma patient in his care, and Gael García Bernal’s Juan in ‘Bad Education’, who was based on Ripley as played by Alain Delon in René Clement’s ‘Purple Noon’ – ‘Julieta’ was kind of inspired by three short stories by Alice Munro, the Canadian Nobel Prize-winning writer.

Almodóvar, an insomniac and avid reader who goes through two or three books a week, has been enamoured of Munro, known for her complex narrative structures that move backwards and forwards in time, since he read ‘Runaway’ a decade ago. “When it comes to short stories I think there is no better writer in the English language,” he says emphatically. “I remember being so excited and telling my brother” – Agustín, who runs El Deseo and has produced all of Pedro’s movies since ‘Law of Desire’ in 1983 – “that we had to acquire the film rights to these three unconnected stories about a woman at three different stages of her life, because I just loved them. But I knew from the beginning that it would be a challenge to make this film, because Alice Munro is so literary that it’s almost impossible to capture her on film.”

Part of the problem lay in the fictional daughter’s decision to cut the umbilical cord for good. It’s a permanent separation that Almodóvar couldn’t imagine happening in Catholic Spain, even in the free-spirited years after the fall of the dictatorship, so he decided to honour Munro and set the movie, which was to have been his first in English, in Canada. He finished a draft of the script in 2011 and travelled to Canada to scout for locations, but the experience left him cold. “There was something so depressing about these places,” he remembers. “I thought to myself: ‘I can’t live with this light.’ I guess we’re like plants and eventually live with what we’re used to, but I really thought I would die there.”

He tried setting the city scenes of the movie in New York, a place he has visited frequently since 1985, and even found a few possible locations for the rugged coastal shots, but the challenge of conveying in a foreign language the quotidian nuances so critical to his work and Munro’s proved insurmountable even for Almodóvar.

“I really thought that this was going to be my first film in English,” says Almodóvar who counts ‘Sister Act’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’ among the English-language movies he has turned down the opportunity to direct, “but when I finished the script, something just didn’t feel right, so I abandoned the project.”

Three years later, after putting ‘I’m So Excited!’ to bed, Almodóvar reread the script and was surprised to discover that the foundations of a solid story were in place. He began revisions with a view to setting the movie in Spain and making it in Spanish, shifting the action from the ’60s to the mid ’80s, a period of blossoming democracy in Spain. “Little by little, I forgot about Alice Munro, who, I should add, is a lot tougher and crueller as a narrator than I am,” he says. “But the raison d’être of this movie is my fascination with her as a writer, specifically with these three stories.”

I use the time alone to pore over the contents of his meticulously art-directed office. If any reminder were necessary that we are in the king’s realm, leaning against a wall is a large photo of him, taken by Jean-Paul Goude, wearing a fur-trimmed coat and a tux, script in hand. To one side of his desk is a copy of ‘Sumo’, the 35kg Helmut Newton book, which comes complete with its own metallic stand – a gift, I’m later informed, from Penélope Cruz. Behind it is a bookshelf bursting with art and visual culture books and numerous BAFTAs, Césars, and Goyas that he has won. (His two Oscars – in addition to the nod for ‘All About My Mother,’ Almodóvar won Best Original Screenplay in 2003 for ‘Talk to Her’ – are on a bookshelf at his nearby apartment.)

The walls are teeming with framed photos of Almodóvar and fellow directors past and present, including kindred spirit Quentin Tarantino and idol Billy Wilder, who urged Almodóvar, when they met in Los Angeles in 1988, to resist the siren call of Hollywood. There are also countless photos of Almodóvar and his darlings, including a stunning black-and-white photograph of him and Cruz and a fun pap snap of him with Liza Minnelli and Sandra Bernhard at the New York premiere of ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!’ in 1990. Much has been made of the importance of objects and interiors in Almodóvar’s movies, which he oversees with the firm hand and exactitude of an estate agent prepping a property for sale. According to Almodóvar lore, his embrace of colour and the Memphis-meets-Looney Tunes quirkiness of many of his sets are a reaction to the dull severity of his upbringing in Calzada de Calatrava, a small agricultural town in La Mancha (later the setting for ‘Volver’). While that’s no doubt true, looking at the photos of Almodóvar rubbing shoulder pads with the beau monde and the cultural miscellany that he surrounds himself with, I can’t help but think of a line by Agrado, the fake-Chanel-wearing, cosmetically enhanced transgender prostitute in ‘All About My Mother’ played by the brilliant trans actress Antonia San Juan: “One is more authentic the more one resembles the self that one has dreamed about.” Almodóvar may well live in a hermetically sealed pop-pastiche world, at the nexus of celebrity and artistry, but it’s a parallel universe that this timid outsider, who grew up genuflecting at the altar of Hollywood and not Catholicism, has entirely willed for himself.

I remind him that we were talking about the interior world of women and his affinity with actresses when we were cut off earlier.

“I’ve always maintained that Spain is a country of actresses,” he comments. “It refers back to Garvía Lorca, whose plays were filled with magnificent female characters who are much more powerful than the men, by which I mean power as in force, not money. Women are freer and much bolder, so I naturally gravitate towards writing interesting parts for them.

“It’s also simply a question of numbers. I’ve worked with wonderful actors, including Antonio Banderas, who grew under my guidance in the 1980s. Javier Cámara is fantastic in the three films (‘Talk to Her’, ‘Bad Education’ and ‘I’m So Excited!’) he has made with me. And Darío Grandinetti is marvellous in ‘Julieta’, playing an incredibly generous and mature man. But the truth is that in the years that I have been working, I’ve always encountered more actresses than actors.”

Given the interest in the coterie of women that he has cast over the years (a group that includes theatrical powerhouses Carmen Maura and Marisa Paredes and is collectively dubbed las chicas Almodóvar in Spanish), attention will no doubt be focused on his choice of actresses – especially as this time round, Almodóvar split the lead role between two women who don’t resemble each other rather than rely on cinematic sleight of hand.

“I really don’t like using make-up or special effects to make actors look older,” he avers. “It’s something that not even Hollywood does well. With all due respect to Clint Eastwood, Naomi Watts being made to look old in ‘J. Edgar’ was embarrassing.

“I didn’t want to pick a young actress and have her made up to try to look 30 years older,” he says. “So I decided to divide the part between the two best actresses, even if they do look different. In the few screenings we’ve had so far, the shift between them hasn’t been a problem, so I hope viewers can appreciate them as they are, because they are both wonderful.”

The admiration is apparently reciprocated – “It’s been fantastic getting to know the human being behind the genius,” fawns Adriana Ugarte, 31, who plays the younger Julieta – despite Almodóvar’s reputation as a tough taskmaster on set.

“It’s true,” says Emma Suaréz, 51, who plays the older Julieta, “he expects a lot from you, and he can be a control freak, obsessed with every little detail. To give you an example: he held up this one scene to replace the books in Julieta’s Madrid apartment, which were on a shelf way in the background, because he didn’t think they were quite right. So we waited a day to get the exact books he thought the character should have, which of course all came from his own apartment. He is that committed to what he does. He is very demanding, but never more than on himself.”

Ugarte concurs. “He will ask you to descend the depths of dramatic hell,” she says, “but he will hold your hand the entire way. He is not the kind of director who will disappear into his trailer. It’s obvious even to a stranger that he was born to direct.”

Francisca, whom Almodóvar describes as “the territory where everything happened” and who later appeared in a few of her son’s movies – including ‘Kika’ (1993), so called after her nickname–not only encouraged her son’s precocious reading habit by buying him books like ‘Steppenwolf’ by Herman Hesse from a mail-order catalogue but also gave him valuable lessons in storytelling. When he was 8, the family moved to the Extremadura region, and Francisca earned extra money by reading and writing letters for her illiterate neighbours, creatively filling in the gaps as she saw fit. “She would read out that someone’s grandmother or whoever said this or that,” Almodóvar recalls. “Whatever these people wanted to hear. I would try to correct her, and she would be, like, ‘Shhh, it sounds better this way.’ She taught me a lot about the difference between fiction and reality, and how reality needs fiction to be complete.”

It’s a capacity for embellishment that Almodóvar has mined since he moved to Madrid as an 18-year-old in 1968. Having gobbled up a self-served diet of cultural influences that ranged from Spanish masters (Velásquez, Goya) to pop art (Warhol) to American postwar movies, the young aesthete, who was moved at age ten by German’s ‘The Virgin Spring’, had planned to study at the national film school, which unbeknownst to him had recently been closed by Franco. So Almodóvar devised his own curriculum, devouring as many movies – everything from Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini to American westerns and the comedies of Preston Sturges and Mitchell Leisen – as he could at the Madrid Film Institute.

His education began in his small town, listening to his mother and their female neighbours (Almodóvar likes to say that the root of all storytelling is a room full of women talking), but it was Madrid that shaped him into the person and artist he is today. “It really taught me to survive, to make the most of even my disadvantages, to be myself,” he says of the city which has served as the backdrop to nearly all of his films and which many people imagine to be exactly as refracted through the often-outrageous prism of his work. “I read, bought myself a Super 8 camera and just soaked up everything I could on the street. I still feel very connected to Madrid, even though it has definitely changed a lot. I think it’s a bit uglier than it used to be, but life is a little like that, isn’t it?”

The city, which he again depicts in ‘Julieta’ but with a fresh, tender eye and no real attempt to take the cultural pulse of its youth, is certainly far removed from the halcyon days of the Movida (“the movement”), a cultural groundswell that affected all aspects of Spanish life in the wake of Franco’s death in 1975. A long-haired Almodóvar, by then in his late twenties, was living a double life, working as an administrator at a phone company (a job he kept until 1981, when he finally quit to concentrate fully on making ‘Labyrinth of Passion’) and at night being at the centre of a ragtag group of cultural vanguardists that included musicians Bernardo Bonezzi and Alaska, photographer Ouka Leele and artists Guillermo Pérez Villalta and Sigfrido Martín Begué.

Aside from the growing renown for his experimental silent shorts, including ‘Fuck, Fuck, Fuck Me, Tim!’ (1978), which he narrated at screenings with the improvisational skill of his mother reading letters, Almodóvar made his mark on the city well before he started making features.

He performed at legendary haunts like Rock-Ola, as one singing half of the high heel-wearing gender fuck, neo-cabaret act Almodóvar y McNamara – one of Almodóvar’s songs was tellingly called ‘Voy a ser mama’ (‘I’m Going to Be a Mommy’) – and wrote “photo novels” for ‘Vibora’ magazine, one of which would become the basis for his film ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls Like Mom’ in 1980. He also penned acerbic articles for era-defining publications ‘Star’ and ‘La Luna de Madrid’ under his nom de drag, Patty Diphusa (a pun on the feminine form of patidifuso, which means “dazed” or “dumbfounded”).
Though not a drinker, he earned a reputation for ingesting large amounts of pretty much everything else.

“The life I lived back then is unconceivable now,” he says, glancing at the door in a sign that his assistant is back to tell him to wind down our interview. “The truth is that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with myself back then even if I wanted to.”

Although Almodóvar, who is single, has chafed at being called a gay filmmaker – he dismisses the practice of classifying movies sexually as being akin to, say, referring to “a fat movie by Orson Welles” or a “brunette movie by Sofia Coppola” – Almodóvar has never tried to pretend to be someone he’s not. It’s not for nothing that he is an unanimously admired member of the pink pantheon.

Don’t mistake his sounding like a technophobic old biddy as a sign that the former enfant terrible is ready for his close-up as an éminence grise. Friends like Rossy de Palma insist that he hasn’t changed much over the years, despite the access and comfort that his stature as one of the world’s great filmmakers affords him. “If anything, he is much more funny and wicked now that he has pretty much everything he ever wanted,” says de Palma, who met Almodóvar 30 years ago when she was singing in a band called Peor Imposible.

It’s an opinion shared by Almodóvar, who points out that the heart is willing even if the body is not. “I’m not a nostalgic person but I definitely miss the physical strength I had back then,” the lapsed reprobate says in parting. “I would be lying if said I would do things differently. I hate when people say that. I would do it all again if I could, all of it.”