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Wednesday 27 April 2011

An (old) interview with Pedro Almodovar...

In a few weeks, Pedro Almodovar will be unveiling his latest feature film, La piel que habito, aka The Skin I Live In. Based on the novel Tarantula by French crime writer Thierry Jonquet and starring his mid-80s leading man Antonio Banderas, it is, he says, “a horror story without screams or frights”. As with pretty much all of the 61-year-old Spaniard's work, it is a story founded on extreme passion and seething sexuality, with Banderas as a plastic surgeon who must take revenge on the men who raped his daughter. It promises to mark another yet departure for the versatile Almodovar, who, since 2004's Bad Education, seems to be becoming more acquainted with the subversive possibilities of genre and its use by the (largely American) masters. Whether it plays as a true "horror movie" or not, sight unseen, The Skin I Live In may well start yet another fresh page in this fascinating director's ever-unfolding story, as the films get less playful, more muted, tonally darker and ever more psychologically bold.

The interview that follows took place at London's Soho Hotel on May 2 two years ago, just before Broken Embraces premiered at the Cannes film festival. As you can probably tell, I wasn't so wild about that film; instead, I was more interested in exploring Almodovar's attitude to film and the knowledge that forms his undoubted talent...

Would you agree that Broken Embraces is one of your 'departure' films?
Yes, I agree with you, although I do believe that I am recognisable in all my films. It is also true that during the writing of this film, and also during the shoot, I did find myself in a different place. The way of making the film, the way of telling the story, the actors' tone, the way of editing, was, you could say, a departure from some of my previous films.

What I mean by that is that Women On The Verge and Volver are a very good introduction to your style, but Broken Embraces is a very good introduction to your ideas...
Yes, indeed. In this film I do also have the tone that you can find in Volver, that tragi-comical tone, or the screwball comedy from Women On The Verge – that's also present, in very small doses in this one. But it is true that I might also be more recognisable in those other films.

It's always surprising when you choose a male protagonist. Penelope [Cruz] is more of a supporting actress here..
She is the female protagonist, because, of course, the protagonist is the director. But in this case, the film is much more balanced between the female characters and the male characters. This is also something new.

So what else has changed? Has your attitude to filmmaking changed since 1980?
Good question! I do feel not so much that I have changed my attitude, but I realise that over time I have come to see and talk about cinema in a different way. I'm more aware of what filmmaking means to me, and I do feel that this film is a true declaration of love for cinema. I can almost say that cinema perfects all the irregularities, or the imperfections, of life.

It's interesting that you started out making quite flippant movies, and yet you always were serious about cinema. Did you always intend to make serious films at a certain point, or did your seriousness overtake you?
Yes, the gravity on my film, the seriousness, is a result of age. One can't help maturing, and it's a result of new experiences and the way I've lived. And that shines through in my film-making. The films I made when I was young were the most honest films I could make, and I believe they were very faithful to the life I was living in Madrid at the time. I was very connected to pop, to music, at the time; it was a true renaissance of pop, and it was also a renaissance of freedom in Spain at the time. My idols were Andy Warhol and John Waters, and I really believed that those films matched the world I was living in at that time. Over time, I grew up, I changed, I lived other experiences, and I believe my films reflect that. But it certainly wasn't a calculated approach.

Do you still recognise yourself in those early movies?
It's true that if you compare those films with the films I'm making at the moment, they look like the opposite. But I recognise myself in the two extreme tones. I'm completely the same person! But I don't think a director needs to change his tone. For example, Woody Allen is still making comedies, and it doesn't mean that he doesn't grow. I mean, he's growing and growing. He tried to imitate others, sometimes, but he didn't succeed! Ingmar Bergman, with Interiors, and Federico Fellini, with Stardust Memories. But Woody Allen is Woody Allen in the same way he was in the beginning. Of course, with time, age and maturity does lead you to touch on different issues, because you're a lot more aware of how you feel about yourself and the people around you. In my case, that knowledge and that awareness hasn't made me happier. On the contrary.

With every film you make, you reveal more about yourself as a cineaste. Do you think people underestimated your film knowledge at the beginning?
Yes, when you're making underground films it's very easy for people not to take one seriously. But from my very first film I was very serious as a filmmaker. I had a very outstanding media personality at the time. I'd get up onstage and sing punk rock songs, not exactly in drag but in very daring attire. So, probably, in the media, I was connected to that world and taken less seriously. It was drag in the sense that the New York Dolls were in drag, because they wore make-up, high heels and things like that. But it was very much a part of the same thing. From the very beginning I took my filmmaking very seriously. By way of example, on my first film I devoted a year and half to making it, with very scarce resources, and I think that proves my passion for filmmaking from the very beginning.

And that was Pepi, Luci, Bom...?
Yes. But I think in Spain they started to take me seriously after What Have I Done To Deserve This, because it was a film with a very powerful social and class-awareness message. Abroad, it was probably with Law Of Desire, Matador and Women On The Verge. I'm not complaining about that, it just took a bit longer perhaps. But, yes, my first film was deliberately underground, because i had no budget to make it. But I was very serious about my filmmaking. And as I started to make perhaps more serious films... There's a question of prejudice when the films become more serious – people take you more seriously. I do believe they're better films, but when you're making films that seem more light-hearted there's always that prejudice. At the same time, I was always very eclectic. Even in the music I listen to. But above all with the movies that I see or that interest me.

What do you mean by that?
I could get a lot of pleasure from a screening Pink Flamingos by John Waters, and at the same time a Bergman movie, like Face To Face or Persona. When I was a child, I remember very well that I saw a film by Michelangel Antonioni. I was at school at the time, about 11 or 12, and I was deeply interested. But at the same time I saw silly pop movies that I liked too, because I was a child. I always combined these two tastes in my life.

When did you first fall in love with cinema?
I think since the beginning. I was living in a small village. There was a cinema, but only at weekend, and I used to go every weekend. Even as a child I could see movies that were banned for kids. I remember very well seeing The Virgin Spring – it was really hard for a little boy! But I could go because I knew the doorman; there wasn't really censorship in such small places and I was lucky for that. So I was really interested from the beginning. I remember very well that I used to see all the movies of the period – I'm talking about the early 60s – with my sisters. And then when they out on the patios with their friends – they were three or four years older than I – they liked to say, “Pedro, tell us the story of the movie that we saw yesterday.” And so I would invent a completely new story. The first stories that I told to my sisters and her friends was just talking about movies that I'd seen. But I was so enthusiastic that, in the middle, I invented new scenes. And my sisters liked just to listen to me, because it was a new movie that I was making in my head,

They'd seen the same film?
Yes! But I was unfaithful, because the movie inspired to tell other stories. That was the first experience I remember of movies. You think about that period, late 50s and early 60s: in Spain we were only under a dictatorship, a rough dictatorship, but also it was a post-war period. The post-war period in Spain was very long; it lasted for at least 25 years. I remember myself at age 8, very much as I am today in terms of my taste, and cinema was a parallel reality that was greater ad definitely more interesting than our everyday reality. And that's probably true for all Spaniards of the time. From the very beginning, I did feel closely connected to that, and I knew that I wanted to be connected to what I was seeing.

Did you understand the whole concept of filmmaking?
No. I wasn't aware of the director, I wasn't aware of the writer, I wasn't aware of the world that was behind the screen. I was only aware of the screen – and to me, cinema was only the story and the actors. But I did know from early on that I wanted to be a part of that world. I really thought that the actors invented the story! And then I thought, Well, I want to become an actor. And then as I grew up I began to realise there was a director, and also there was a writer, and that's when I said, “This is the place where I want to be.” But at the beginning, when I was really little, I thought that the actors just told the story.

Do you think that's a feeling you're trying to recreate in your movies? You like to foreground the artificiality of your films, through set design and plot contrivances...
Less so now. But, say, the range of colours, those explosive colours, that I use stem directly from the colours that I would see in films at that time. Films at that time were made in Technicolor, and that's the colour range that I've always pursued in my films, although I only became aware of that later on. But I do believe that cinema is a representation of life. I mean, it isn't life itself, so I don't make naturalistic or realistic films. I talk about life in a very profound way, but I do so through the artifice of filmmaking. I've only become aware of it with time, but certainly the colour palette I was pursuing was the colour palette of the Technicolor movies of my childhood. and I certainly always intended to communicate, or generate, and emotion through artifice.

Is it true you didn't go to film school?
No, no, I didn't go. I couldn't go. Franco closed it in '68 or 69.

So where does your film knowledge come from?
At the beginning I obviously didn't know how to make a movie, but it didn't matter. The story was funny, the people were alive, and that's what counted. I was learning just doing it. Making movies. Everything I learned, it was always in front of an audience. But, anyway, the only school I had at the beginning was the Super-8mm camera. During the 70s I made a lot of Super-8 movies, in different lengths. Sometimes they were ten minutes, sometimes 30 minutes, and at the end... It was my school but it was a private school – my personal school! And I wanted to make a feature. So at the end of all that, in 1978, I made a long feature in Super-8. That was my only film school. But with that small camera you could make a lot of films. And it was cinema. It was possibly very different from now, with video. If I was coming through in this period I would start immediately with video. It's cheaper and it's easy to get a camera. But the Super-8, although there was no negative, it was film. It was something you could touch. And that was my only school. I was completely... (struggles to find the word) auto-didact?

You were self-taught?
Yeah. But I was always a very early film buff. When I lived in my hometown I would just see the films that they happened to play, but I moved to Madrid at a very early age – 16 – and that's where I completed my training as a cinephile. As a viewer. So every day I would go to the Film Archive screenings, and that's where I discovered the Italian neo-realism, the British Free Cinema, the French nouvelle vague, silent movies... I discovered the auteurs of the day. And also the American movies. A lot of cult American movies – they were very important also to me. So my training as a cinephile was wrapped up at the Film Archive screenings.

Is it true you have five favourite filmmakers?
I said five just to say a number, because, you know, that five could be a thousand! But if I have to say five, it's difficult, but I say, first, Bunuel. We have the same roots, we belong to the same family and I really recognise myself in this films. For me, he is a real master. But Ingmar Bergman is also one of my absolutely favourite, even though his movies are the opposite of mine. Billy Wilder is also one of my masters. Fellini at the beginning was very special. You can say that the very early movies, La Strada, The Wheik Sheik, I Vitelloni, they were very neo-realistic movies, but at the same time there was something completely in those movies that was Fellini-esque. I mean, he created his own type, his own genre. And also Jean Renoir was very important for me. Always. But, you know, I keep on watching movies. That way I discover many of my roots, that sometimes I'm not conscious of. All the screwball comedies, from the 30s to the 60s, were very important for me, and this is a genre I feel close to. Preston Sturges, Mitchell Leisen, Ernst Lubitsch, all those types of crazy movies. But the Western was a genre I didn't 'get' when I went to the cinematheque, when I was really watching everything. I don't know why, but when I was 20, or almost 20, I was not very interested in Westerns. It was only in my maturity that I really discovered this incredible genre; I mean John Ford, Henry Hathaway... I don't know. I remember from my childhood that the Western was, in a bad way, a macho genre, and I wasn't very interested in that! But also, I felt very close to melodrama, and I discovered, very soon, Douglas Sirk, and he was also one of my five favourites.

What about Alfred Hitchcock? There has always been a strong Hitchcock influence on your films, surely?
No, I didn't mention Alfred Hitchcock, but he is always there. He is one of The Trinity. The Saint Trinity. Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Bunuel: the Holy Trinity. (Laughs) I'm also a big fan of Michael Powell and David Lean. They are both completely unique. I think David Lean is the only example of a filmmaker who makes super-productions that are auteur super-productions. They're extremely personal. And I don't think anyone's making films like that one, and I really miss a personality like David Lean's in Hollywood. And in the last 15 years I've become more and more interested in thrillers and noirs. It really is one of the genres that I'm most interested in.

Why are you so interested in it?
There's a point where the drama meets the noir... I'm every interested in that connection, and I think that connection is very present in Broken Embraces, in the relation between the powerful man and Penelope. I think American directors have been extremely generous to that genre, like John Huston, and particularly the Europeans who relocated to the US, like Fritz Lang, Jules Dassin, Otto Preminger, it's a very wealthy genre. It's not that present in the European tradition. Probably Jean-Pierre Melville is the closest – not that I make films like him. (Laughs) I'd like to!

You were working for Telefonica when you made your first film. Could you foresee a future as an international film director?
No, in no way whatsoever. My dream was to make films, which was something I was already doing. My vocation was to tell stories, and I was already doing that in filming them in Super-8. i also felt that I had a greater capacity to tell stories through images than through narrative literature. but my aspiration at the time was to make very modest films in 16mm for the few. Even the stories that came to me, given the convention of the time, were very scandalous, and I believed they'd be very hard to distribute. So the last thing I dreamed of was having worldwide success. And above that, having worldwide acceptance. What is important when you are very young is to be clear about what you want to do. Now, we are living in a very different time to the 70s or 80s. Today, you have to be very successful from the very beginning. So even when I made my first long feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom, the thing was just to do it. Just do it, and do it as quickly as possible. It's not something you can do by yourself. But it was very clear to me that what I wanted was to tell stories.

Did you think it was going to last?
I was prepared, after being successful with Women On The Verge, that if I was not so successful in the future, I could always count on shooting in 16mm and doing what I wanted to do. I mean, what was very important to me was just the fact of telling the stories. Now, unfortunately, we are living in a society where people are mis-educated, in a way, by the media. In the sense that they are made to feel that if you're not on TV, if you're not a celebrity, you haven't been successful and you're not achieving what you want. And I think this is distorting people's vocations, in a way. And then we also have the internet, of course, which is very democratic, in the sense that you can put anything out there. It is a many-headed monster, but in some ways it is very positive, in that you can film a short and put it out there for people to see.

You could have been a writer instead. Did you ever consider that as an alternative?
My dreams from very early childhood were always connected to cinema, and very soon literature joined cinema in those dreams, and of course as I read more and more, I realise that I would not be a great novelist. That's not to say, in saying that, that I'm a great filmmaker! (Laughs) But I think as a writer I'm inferior to what I am as a filmmaker, and I think this new story, the story of Broken Embraces, could be told more effectively in literature than in film, probably. I have nearly an entire other film that I didn't shoot. I think I've told about half of what I developed in literary form, in terms of character studies, and so on. But I do write things, and I've had books published.

The tips you give in your book of newspaper columns on what to say to a director if you hate their movie – “It's so fresh!” “Where did you find the cast?” “The cinematography is amazing” – are incredibly funny. And very useful...
Thank you! Yeah, yeah, I know. Everyone knows what it's like when you see a movie and you really don't know what to say, because you didn't like the movie! If you say those things, the director can be satisfied.

When did you first realise you were becoming a world-famous director?
The first signals came when Law Of Desire screened at the Berlin film festival, in the Panorama section, and the reaction to that was absolutely amazing. And also the film was sold everywhere. It was the first time I realised that a film that was as personal as that film could transcend the borders of language and culture. But the first time I felt international acceptance and acclaim was with Women On The Verge Of A nervous Breakdown, which had worldwide success and brought my first nomination at the Oscars.

When you made your breakthrough, you were famous for working with Carmen Maura. Do you divide your career into periods, with different actresses as your muse?
If you did divide the stages of my career and label them with the names of the people I've worked with, there's definitely a stage in my filmmaking that would be called The Carmen Maura Years, and those films were all in the 80s – although I did work with her again in Volver. At the time, I felt she was absolutely the best vehicle I could find to tell my stories. She was the actress who had the best intuition, to connect with what I wanted from her. She could be very funny and very dramatic at the same time, so it was the perfect combination for me. Our relationship was absolutely perfect.

So what happened between you? Is it true that you fell out?
We had this total communion, this osmosis, that went on, and due, probably, to that very intense and very fruitful engagement, that generated a number of personal problems that led to us having to stop working together. That's the reason why we stopped working together, because of these personal problems. We were a filmmaking couple, but we faced all the issues – all the personal issues – that a normal couple faces. I'd also like to say that in that same period, through the 1980s up to 1990, the actor who best understood me and was able to play my parts, was Antonio Banderas. Together with Carmen Maura.

The reason for mentioning this is that your name is often mentioned in the same breath as your leading lady: Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, and now Penelope Cruz...
...And Marisa Paredes also! Marisa is also a period! (Laughs) It's true: it goes Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes and Penelope.

Are you conscious of that? Do you like to have a muse?
I'm conscious... afterwards. Not at the time. I'm aware of now, but at the height of passion you just live through it and work on it. I think it's marvellous when you find your muse. You don't realise it at the time, but a muse – whether it be male or female – is somebody who brings about a mutual enrichment of both party's work. I think that when I work with Penelope now, I'm a better director, thanks to Penelope – and Penelope's probably a better actress thanks to me. So that's what sets a muse aside from just a very good actor you're working with. For instance, to give you an example of this distinction, I do feel that when Robert De Niro worked with Martin Scorsese he really was an actor that inspired Scorsese, and I don't think you can say the same about Leonardo Di Caprio working with Scorsese. I think De Niro really was a muse; he worked better under Scorsese and he made Scorsese a better director. With DiCaprio, he's made four movies already, and he'll probably make five or six, but I don't feel that same union. I mean, he's really good – DiCaprio is a fantastic actor, but in terms of being a muse...

You mentioned Antonio Banderas, who went to Hollywood. You must have been asked this question a thousand times before, but have you been invited to make a film in Hollywood, and would you ever go?
Yes, I have been offered projects – many projects – in Hollywood, but I feel it's increasingly unlikely that I'll take them up. Because the way I work, and the way they work over there, are very different. I would even say they're opposites. I'm used to making up the story. I write it and direct it, or I adapt it if it's an adaptation, but my filmmaking is very, very personal. I'm used to taking decisions, and the criteria is my own. Of course, it's not a question of power – I do this in co-ordination with the entire team – but the ultimate criteria, the decision-making, is in my hands. And I feel that in Hollywood there are a whole number of people who take decisions prior to the director, and I feel that if I had to be listening to ten other people, all giving their opinion before I took a decision, that would lead to utter confusion.

And have you ever wanted to make a film in English?
It's funny, because I did apply for the rights to two novels that ended up being taken to the screen by Stephen Daldry – The Hours and The Reader. I applied for the rights as soon as the novels were published in Spain. So if I made a film in English, it would be because the film demanded that it be in the English language. Which of course wasn;t the case with The Reader, which would have been in German. And I wouldn't oppose the idea of making a film in English – but I would make it with European capital. I wouldn't go to Hollywood to make a film. So the possibility is there, if I ever apply for the rights of a novel that Stephen Daldry isn't connected to!

With the exception of All About My Mother, which was set in Barcelona, and Broken Embraces, which took you to Lanzarote, all your films are set in Madrid? Are you tied to the city?
Yes! I need much than before to get out and shoot in other places. With Madrid, my relation is deep. In a way, it's like a marriage that's been together for 40 years. And, of course, there's a lot of love and understanding there, but we're not giving each other as much as we used to after 40 years. Indeed, whenever I can, I try to shoot outside of Madrid.

And do you have an idea for your next movie yet?
No, I'm not writing, as such. I have two very different... Well, really, I have four! I'm always writing and I live with stories for years, and at the moment there are four that are developing. Two of them are almost in their first draft, both very different, and one of them will be the next movie. Although it's too soon to talk about it. But yes, yes I do. When I finish one movie, I need to be in contact with something new. Because if not. then I feel like... like dying!


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