Pedro Almodovar
All films with reviews
 | 1982 |
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| 1990 |
 | 2004 |
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| 1980 |
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| 1995 |
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| 1987 |
Other films seen
2002 Hable con ella 1984 What Have I Done to Deserve This?!Top Tens
Favorite films
- Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
- Law of Desire
- All About My Mother
- Volver
- What Have I Done to Deserve This?!
- The Flower of My Secret
- Hable con ella
- Pepi, Luci, Bom
- Dark Habits
- Bad Education
Quotations
Words from the Volver and Bad Education shooting diaries that move me.
Shooting a film is like being at home -just the same as writing a book, painting a picture or processing any other form of artwork. For over two months now, mi home bears the name "Bad Education" and ever since I stepped in I have hardly had the occasion to peep outdoors. All I do is film, think about the shooting and try to get enough sleep to be fresh the next morning. I hardly ever read these days, neither do I go out, watch films, listen to music nor switch the TV on.
One's life is minimized during the shooting of a film, but it is also focused and intensified -although in one way only. The few feelings that manage to brush one's senses do so in an extremely lively manner.
Despite the thickness of the walls in this home -which make it look rather like a bunker- there are always stories, anecdotes light as a breeze that somehow go through and touch me.
The few people I see outside the shooting ask me if I am happy. I never know what to answer to that question, neither now nor in relation to the fourteen previous films. It is not a matter of self-confidence or uncertainty, but rather an absolute lack of perspective.
However, I do anticipate things. I know for example that we have already achieved wonderful scenes, which I am so proud of. I also know that some I do not like that much. But this is always the same; I am deep in the stage where I shall demand perfection, and taking any less would be an act of cowardice. But I also know that once the film is finished time and common sense shall turn my perfectionism into possibilism. I have no choice!
I realise Im finding the answer to a question that I hadnt even consciously asked myself: Will I share the same empathy with Carmen as I did back in the eighties? Its been a long time. Many things have happened to us since then. Chemistry, that elusive and miraculous quality, will we feel it again?
I listen to Carmen reading, integrating my pointers, and I feel that we are just the same as when we did La ley del deseo-Law of Desire. I have to pat my belly to realise that time has passed. Seventeen years.
Unavoidably, I remember my childhood: the whitewashed streets, deserted until eight thirty in the afternoon, a time that we children used to discover the mysteries of the organism while the rest of the family slept under the narcotic effect of the heat. I remember the red earth, the yellow fields, the ash green olive trees and the patios, blooming with life, plants, neighbours, secrets as deep as wells and loneliness. Female loneliness. (Thirty years had to pass before I faced male loneliness).
Do you like films with ghosts?
Not normally. Im interested in how Buuel or Bergman treat the apparition of the dead, without changing the light or creating an extraordinary effect. Ghosts appear in front of the person who is thinking about them without pyrotechnical effects. They are inner ghosts. I like Hitchcocks Rebecca and Vertigo. And Sunset Boulevard where the leading character who is floating dead in the pool talks about himself when he was alive as if he were a ghost, trapped by the desires of another ghost (Norma Desmond, who is in turn cared for by the phantasmagorical Erich von Stroheim). William Holden when alive is the ghost of the drowned William Holden. A wonderful use of the off-screen voice, endlessly imitated since then. I also like Tourneur, when he tells stories about beings of other species. In general, I dont like horror stories with ghosts (M. Night Shyamalan), or films with angels, or with Presidents of the United States who keep on saving the world.
What ghost does Volver evoke?
It isnt a ghost, but the whole film is infused with the presence of my absent mother.
Were there any ghosts in Bad Education ?
My childhood, memory turned into legend. One of the actors also turned out to be quite ghostly, but that is a different kettle of fish. And at this point I decide to end this dialogue which has become a monologue.
The best is, without doubt, to take a stroll at night, on the way to the hotel, and find that the villagers still sit outside by their doors, on wicker chairs, to get a breath of fresh air. I thought this habit had almost vanished but no, the whole family sits, almost in silence, enjoying the breeze that travels through the streets before and after midnight. Time stands still. We greet every family group that me encounter along our way and they answer in one voice, infecting us with their balsamic silence. ...I feel that my films are getting progressively more autobiographical. At least, I am much more aware of how my memories stroll along the sets, like the breeze along the streets of Almagro, in the night.
Everything in Volver is fiction. But the best way to tell a fiction (at least in my case) is to dress it with reality. Reality and fiction come together without confusion. I feel that I can now hold a direct conversation with the film Im making. This is neither an endogamous nor a nostalgic feeling but by now it is easier for me to accept that films are my life, that they arise from it and sometimes give rise to it.
I like all film genres and I always say I would like to touch all of them (without committing myself to their particular rules) but there are certain genres which I already know I will not tackle. For example a big budget war movie, with battles and crowd scenes.
Nothing bores me more (as Director) than a big budget film in general, with enormous amounts of people in front of, around and behind the camera.
And neither am I interested in directing the remake of a Japanese horror film. Or a biopic, not even that of Liberace (I was already offered this). A car and motorbike story. I dont drive, I cant tell one car from another and I dont know how to make a car act, I just know that in thrillers they are a good decorative element (cars are needed for getaways and for shootouts with other cars) and that they also go very well with the young rebel style. But if I must pick a fetish from amongst the props, Id rather take the typewriter. Without moving away from Nicholas Ray, I prefer a violent screenwriter (Bogart in In a lonely place) rather than the youngsters who worship cars as much as their genitals (Rebel without a cause).
I will not do sequels, prequels or remakes.
I wont do a musical without spoken dialogue (I love musicals but I like to make characters talk once in a while); nor an epic movie in which the president of my country personally saves the world, or a buddy movie, or the adaptation of a Tolkien novel.
I have nothing against the genres which I dont want to do, I simply dont want to tackle them myself. (For example, I wont do war movies but I admire Apocalypse Now and Id love it if Coppola shot the sequel, dealing with the Iraq war, of course).
In general, I prefer working in scripts with few characters and I am particularly attracted to scenes with two or three characters, even at the risk of being slightly theatrical (Im thinking of models such as Woody Allen, Bergman, Cassavetes). One can tell the story of the Universe through scenes between twos. This is not a maxim. I guess one of the advantages of a diary is the right to be subjective. I like scenes where two characters confront each other. My films are full of them. And maybe that is the reason why students at Madrid theatre schools (according to what I have been told) often pick scenes from my films for their class exercises.
Scenes with couples have a special magic. The format I am shooting in (anamorphic widescreen, that is, in scope) is the only one that enables you to have two characters together and in close up. And if there is a man inspired while lighting shots of two faces, it is the Director of Photography Jos Luis Alcaine. We have already shot some of these scenes and, just as I expected, Alcaine has drawn from his magic wand the darkness and the lights that connect characters.
Before beginning a film, the Director of Photography asks me for references, which are just a path to be followed in order to find your own path. I normally talk about the photography in other films (I often speak about Jack Cardiff, thinking particularly about the films he made with Michael Powell) or about painters (I frequently mention Edward Hopper and Zurbarn, as well as the pop artists) or I show him images which I have found in magazines or books.
When Alcaine asked me for references in order to create the texture and atmosphere of Volver, I couldnt think of any. It is a pop comedy (pastel colours wouldnt suit it), a false local film that involves a drama with surrealist elements, it isnt a horror film, but some characters inhabit the darkness within the houses, the dim back rooms, it is an intimate story but with so much action that it seems like a domestic Indiana Jones. I didnt tell Alcaine anything, I couldnt think of a single film with which to compare it. But like the perfect artisan that he is, he has been able to wade into the story of Volver and reveal its images with the intensity and emotion of someone who is revealing an explosive and thrilling secret.
Im currently living one of those moments. I feel (and I am sometimes absolutely positive) that all I am doing is a mistake, including this dear diary. Experience tells me that the only thing I can do is take the plunge and closely watch every movement, every shot, every phrase, every pause, every tear and every joke. I shouldnt be talking about this. A directors loneliness is sacred. And the director himself should be the first one to respect it, without sharing it with you as I am doing right now.
You can take it as yet another contradiction. Its the problem of thinking/writing out loud. This diary is a monologue in shouts.
Once again I sense that sacred complicity with Carmen, a marvelous feeling of being before an instrument that is perfectly tuned for me. All the takes are good, some even extraordinary. Penlope listens to her. In this film there is a lot of talking, a lot of hiding, a lot of listening and, given that it is supposed to be comedy, and so the crew says, a lot of crying.
I talk with Cecilia about the importance of The voice in my work. Carmen played it in The Law of Desire, and how! Its wonderful to realise that from The Law (in my opinion, the peak of her acting career) until now, Maura hasnt changed. She hasnt learned anything new because she already knew it all, but keeping that fire intact for two decades is an admirable and difficult task which not all the actors Ive worked with have managed to accomplish.
Cecilias presence, the accumulation of monologues, the night and my own interior voice lead me to think about the last twenty years, about the time that has passed between The Law and Volver. In how much weve changed, or more to the point, how much Ive changed because I think that, inside, Carmen has hardly changed. She is still the sweet chatterbox who refuses to complicate herself and lives her life with a relaxed and smooth humour. In comparison to her, I feel I have become heavier, and not just physically. Before my load was lighter. Setbacks and problems lit up a wild spark inside of me that not only managed to defuse them but, sometimes, actually turned them into an inspiration.
I remember, for instance, the day that we were going to shoot the scene of The Human Voice in The Law. They had lent us the Lara Theatre for just one day. When I arrived at eight in the morning and saw the dcor on stage, I was furious. I didnt like it at all and we only had that day for shooting.
Even though it was early, I asked for an axe. Nobody seemed surprised, they brought me one. And as soon as I had it in my hands I began to hack away at the dcor. We called Carmen and I handed her the axe. When the scene starts, I told her, you are completely deranged and while you wait for the call, you destroy the house that you shared with your lover. Carmen looked at me with the smile of a naughty girl, game for anything.
Really? She asked.
I gave her the axe and she energetically attacked her bedroom. I much preferred this to what I had originally planned when I prepared the scene.
God bless that ugly dcor!
Nowadays, when I dont like a dcor I get an anxiety attack. Before I solved the situation with wild humour and recklessness and now I make do with breathing exercises and a tranquilizer or two. But Im not complaining.
Influences
When I insert an extract from a film, it isn't a homage but outright theft. It's part of the story I'm telling, and becomes an active presence rather than a homage, which is always something passive. I absorb the films I've seen into my own experience, which immediately becomes the experience of my characters.
More or less arranged chronologically / in terms of influence on each film.
PRE-FILMMAKING
Two for the Road (Donen)
Funny Face ("a film I consider my encyclopedia")
Frank Tashlin
Blake Edwards
Billy Wilder
French New Wave:
400 Blows
A bout de souffle
Italian Neorealism:
first Pasolinis
Visconti
Antonioni
"None of these films spoke about my life, yet I felt strangely close to the world they described. I was bowled over by L'Avventura. I'd say to myself 'This film speaks to me.' Which was rather an exaggeration since I was still a child and had no idea what the bourgeoisie was about. But the film was about ennui and, stuck as I was in my provincial backwater, I knew all about that. I felt exactly like Monica Vitti does in the film. I could say, just as she does, 'I don't know what to do. All right, let's go to a nightclub.... I think I've an idea... But I've forgotten it...'"
[He's confusing L'Avventura with La Notte, and Monica Vitti with Jeanne Moreau, but whatever.]
"I recognized myself with equal conviction in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, a film the church considered the apotheosis of sin. I'd say to myself: 'I belong to the world of sin, of degeneracy.' I was twelve years old and if someone asked me 'What are you?' I'd reply: 'A nihilist.'"
30s & 40s American comedies: "I loved them most of all"
Ernst Lubitsch
Preston Sturges
Mitchell Leisen
Marilyn Monroe
"Her last film, John Huston's The Misfits, is one of the most moving films I've ever seen."
PEPI, LUCI, BOM
"I was also more naturally influenced by the American underground, Paul Morrissey's first films, and most of all John Waters' Pink Flamingos. The films I'd been making were less documentary and sociological than Morrissey's. I was more interested in fiction. But my sensibility was as amoral and playful as his."
"Pepi, Luci, Bom helped express in concrete form my relationship to pop, a style I'd always felt close to -- in this case, the hard, corrosive pop of the late Seventies. I tackled the pop of the Sixties in Labyrinth of Passion. It's a much lighter, tamer style, exemplified by Richard Lester's first films and Frank Tashlin's comedies featuring the kind of American housewife Doris Day played so well."
Who are you, Polly Magoo? William Klein
LABYRINTH OF PASSION
"The film belongs to the genre of the screwball comedy, a genre which always appealed to me and to which I always felt a close affinity. I'm thinking, for example, of Easy Living... It's the very epitome of the kind of screwball comedy I adore."
DARK HABITS
"While writing it I had in mind Marlene Dietrich's work with Von Sternberg, especially Blonde Venus, where she plays a housewife who becomes a singer, spy and prostitute, who travels the world living a life of never-ending adventure."
"I very much like films whose endings are a kind of turnaround. Barton Fink, for example, starts off as an acid comedy on the life of a writer in Los Angeles and becomes a horror movie by the end. In retrospect, this explosion of horror illuminates the whole movement of the film. Something Wild, initially a sophisticated light comedy, reveals in the last quarter hour that one of the male characters is a seriously dangerous psychopath.... But most audiences stay very attached to traditional linear narratives and remain highly respectful of the genres they represent.
WHAT HAVE I DONE TO DESERVE THIS?!
"Most of all, it alludes to a form of narrative I'm particularly fond of: Italian neo-realism. For me, Italian neo-realism is a sub-genre of melodrama which specifically deals not just with emotions but also with social conscience. It's a genre which takes the artificiality out of melodrama while retaining its essential elements."
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
Johnny Guitar
KIKA
The Prowler Joseph Losey
(To be continued...)
