World-renowned Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar says he’s not as crazy as he used to be, but he’s using his vibrant imagery to explore issues of aging and mortality.
By Monica Castillo
Photography by Davey James Clarke
Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through opens on an ominous note. The story’s narrator attends a lecture by an ex-boyfriend sharing his gloomy forecast on the impact of climate change. In the book’s film adaptation, The Room Next Door, Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar changes this scene from a distanced presentation to an intimate lunchtime conversation between author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and her reconnected beau, Damian (John Turturro). The scene is a poignant one where Ingrid declares her choice to keep on living in the face of her friend Martha’s (Tilda Swinton) certain death from terminal cancer. How do we enjoy life when the end is imminent and guaranteed?
Almodóvar, once known for his explicit sex scenes, colorful melodramas and comedies, may not seem like a natural fit for a quiet drama about accepting—and embracing—death. But over time, and especially in the past few years, the provocateur’s movies have changed—matured, he calls it. And after several decades as one of Spain’s most critically acclaimed directors, Almodóvar still has much to say and show his audience.
“My movies today are less crazy, more conventional because there are fewer sex scenes in them than before,” Almodóvar said with a smile. “I am talking about death or pain because all of the exuberant things that make you want to live when you are young, I have done in the ’70s through ’90s. I don’t do it now because I did it before. I was crazy before.”
His craziness helped create a revolution. Almodóvar first burst out of La Movida Madrileña scene, a cultural revival that flourished after the fall of the Franco regime in the late 1970s and ’80s. He made a name for himself screening provocative shorts at clubs and parties. In a few years, his rebellious streak spilled over into feature-length work, and his movies included queer characters (Law of Desire), feminist themes (Pepi, Luci, Bom), sex scenes (What Have I Done to Deserve This?) and drugs (Dark Habits)—all subjects that would have been frowned upon or censored by the previous fascist establishment.
I’m a torturer to the set designer. I don’t just ask for a sofa, I ask for a sofa with a specific color, but I also ask for some other options to try. “
Then came his international breakout, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which earned him his first Oscar nomination. Many more films followed at a steady clip, as did the rave reviews and accolades. His work shows a range well-versed in cinema history, covering genres like black comedy (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!), erotic thrillers (Live Flesh) and romantic dramas (Broken Embraces), each featuring his signature visual style, an idiosyncratic mix of vivid colors, careful compositions and a fondness for the dramatic.
In recent years, the mature Almodóvar has begun to emerge. He credits an earlier adaptation, 2016’s Julieta, which drew from three short stories by Alice Munro, as the turning point for the once-unabashed raconteur to explore new emotional horizons with his work. “It’s not that I’m getting older, but I have 23 movies now,” he said. “This kind of change is always good. If you find a way to mature, it’s more attractive to me. I believe the inflection point arrived with Julieta partly because of Alice Munro, and partly because I was feeling a special way after I came back from surgery. It was the first movie I made after a complicated operation on my back, and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to go back to filmmaking. I proved to myself that, yes, I can still shoot a movie. My attention became more focused. I noticed the human condition more than before in respect to pain, sickness and death—much like it happens in Pain and Glory.”
That last film, a semi-autobiographical drama released in 2019 and starring Antonio Banderas as Salvador, a director clearly patterned after Almodóvar, opened a door to the filmmaker’s past. He then explored Spain’s past and present politics in the tender film Parallel Mothers and ventured back into short filmmaking with the stylish English-language duo of The Human Voice (his first collaboration with Swinton) and Strange Way of Life. Many of those films are in conversation with the director’s past loves and fascinations—and in The Room Next Door, he is also thinking of our uncertain future, the rise of fascism, climate change and, of course, death. The movie earned Almodóvar his first-ever Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival this past fall.
It came about because Almodóvar was a fan of Nunez’s previous book, The Friend. He picked up What Are You Going Through as soon as it appeared in Spain, with the book’s tension between old friends and life and death inspiring him to make it his 23rd film and his first-ever feature in English. He filled in details, making Martha a war photographer who’s faced death many times but doesn’t want to be entirely alone when the time comes to take the euthanasia pills she’s bought on the black market, and focused the narrative on their unlikely dynamic.
“Mortality is a subject I’m really interested in,” Almodóvar said. “On the one hand, we have a character, Martha, who approaches it from a natural sense. She’s not scared of it. She embodies my own sense, in which we’re both in favor of euthanasia. Then you have the character of Ingrid, who is going to have to go on a journey that fundamentally scares her. It was the tension between the two characters that really interested me to follow them all the way to the house in the woods where most of the story is going to take place.”
Having already covered the topic of death in earlier works like All About My Mother, Parallel Mothers and Pain and Glory, Almodóvar was also intrigued by Damian’s perspective on the future, given the precarious state of the world. “The lover that they shared when they were young, played by John Turturro, was a very good character to talk about what is happening now,” he said. “When we were making the movie in May, that was a kind of thesis, the lecture of how bad it can be. He talks directly about climate change and how dangerous the situation is that the ultra-right—especially now after the election—is hand-in-hand with neoliberalism. These were the elements that were attractive to compose the story.”
When I write, I don’t think about a specific actor,
but in this case, from the very first moment, I thpought about Tilda for the sick person and Julianne came after.”
But if there’s a big difference between the young Almodóvar in his 30s and the mature Almodóvar in his 70s, The Room Next Door still draws from the cinematic vocabulary the director has been using for his entire career. Throughout his features and shorts, Almodóvar has proven himself to be a virtuoso visual stylist, with “the Almodóvar look” as immediately recognizable as calling cards of other iconic stylists: Michael Powell and his use of color, Ingmar Bergman and his composition, Stanley Kubrick and his production design. In an Almodóvar movie, there’s not just color on the screen; his hues are vivacious and positioned in such a way that they look as if they’re leaping off the screen. The colors are also used to highlight details or themes in the story. In Pain and Glory, the neutral tones of Salvador’s memories could be seen as a more innocent time living with his mother, washing clothes by the river and sleeping in a whitewashed cave; the colorful complexities of metropolitan life come later. Even as he’s surrounded by success, his life is pockmarked by his physical ailments and mental anguish, painful feelings enhanced by Salvador’s fondness for different shades of red. In The Room Next Door, both Martha and Ingrid wear carefully coordinated costumes, meeting in complementary surroundings to enhance the striking shades of their lipsticks, outfits or hair colors. Their homes feature certain color schemes and textiles to express their distinct personalities.
“I behave like a painter when I’m choosing the different colors of the set,” Almodóvar said. “I’m a torturer to the set designer. I don’t just ask for a sofa, I ask for a sofa with a specific color, but I also ask for some other options to try. The first thing we decide is the ceiling and the wall because they’re the two surfaces that dominate the image. We first choose the colors, then add in the sofa, and maybe we change it. Then, we put the actress on the sofa in different ways so that the colors of the actress, the couch, the background and the floor, it’s all put together in such a way that’s intuitive because there’s no other way to do this. It’s all intuition. Then I say, ‘This is what I want,’ and then we get to work and start filming. Evidently, after 23 movies, I have a dependency on bright colors.”
Despite the specter of mortality at the heart of The Room Next Door, Almodóvar decided to keep his trademark vivid color palettes. “This is a movie about death, but I didn’t want to do a movie about death like (Michael) Haneke,” he said. “I didn’t want to do a dark, sordid or creepy movie because that’s not my natural instinct as a director. I believe that over the course of my films, I have always been searching for Technicolor, but it’s not possible—it was the chemical result of what they washed the negative with.
“My intentions have been towards saturated colors, whether it’s a drama or comedy,” he added. “There’s always red, some shade of green, blue and yellow according to the type of movie. Here, for example, red is present in three elements: a red door, which indicates the door to her (Martha’s) death, a red lamp on the roof and a yellow vase. With those three elements, I had the color palette I identified with. The luminosity and colors of the film represent Tilda’s Martha, who is a baroque woman, a woman who was raised in pop culture and who likes vibrant colors. What I wanted to do with the movie’s color scheme is express the vitality of a tremendous decision like euthanasia. I wanted to represent that vitality especially in the house in the woods because it represents her decision, the character and the liberty of the protagonist.”
Ever the visual artist, Almodóvar also considers how to incorporate elements within a shot, whether it’s a carefully matched vase or a symbolic prop. “There are objects I buy at airports or museums like MoMA or the Whitney that are made for tourists,” he said. “For instance, I bought the scuba diver from Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! at an airport for my nephew, and I ended up keeping it. Years later, that scuba diver becomes important in the movie because it crashes into the genitals of Victoria Abril, so I could make it clear how the two men in her life view her. The scuba diver represents those masculine characters, and it worked perfectly. The scuba diver also brought me a lot of problems. It was the reason the MPAA wanted to give me an rating.”
Like the repeating motifs of primary colors and staging, Almodóvar utilizes many of the same actors again and again, like Banderas and Penélope Cruz as well as a cast of regulars such as Carmen Maura, Marisa Paredes, Cecilia Roth and Rossy de Palma. Now, Almodóvar says, both Swinton and Moore have joined his list of repeating collaborators. “When you have a good experience with an actor—like in the case of Antonio Banderas, Penélope or Tilda—then it’s like an investment,” he said. “This belongs more to the theater world, but we became like a stable company. When I write, I don’t think about a specific actor, but in this case, from the very first moment, I thought about Tilda for the sick person and Julianne came after. This is an advantage you have once you realize that the actors understand you and you understand the actors, and there is a chemistry between you and them. The most intelligent thing is just to keep on working with them. It’s good to have this sense of family with people that you know.”
Although he’s directed actors for more than 50 years since his earliest shorts, Almodóvar said he is still learning from his collaborators like Moore. “There is a precise moment when she’s writing the letter to Martha explaining that when she came into the house, she looked to the red door and it was open (and) she thought, ‘Oh, she’s alive.’ Because I direct the voiceover with the same intensity of a closeup of the character talking, I took many notes of Julianne’s performance. Julianne saw that my script had a paper with a lot of notes. I told Julianne, ‘I would like you to do this,’ and she said ‘No, Pedro, let me do it. When you see the result, then we talk about intention, but I prefer to do it by myself.’ She was more than perfect. It was like a monologue that sounds like a song with the music of (composer) Alberto Iglesias. In the end, I realized it was not necessary to torture her with so much direction.”
As an adaptation, The Room Next Door is quite different from its source. But for Almodóvar, it became a springboard to explore deep emotions, work with a pair of the most impressive actresses in their profession and continue to push his audience out of their comfort zone through his colorful style, humor in the face of drama and sense of vulnerability that’s rarely seen on screen.
“Everything you do is a challenge because there is never a complete assurance it is going to come up well, but that doesn’t discourage me,” he said about his writing process. His interests may have shifted away from the sensuality of his earlier works, but his recent films are no less thought-provoking, with his latest movie looking at climate change, politics and the right to euthanasia. If Almodóvar’s love of color, unforgettable characters and unconventional stories in The Room Next Door are any indication, his screen has yet to dull.
Credits
Fashion and visual creative director: Michaela Dosamantes
Entertainment and Bookings director: Kegan Webb
Market Editor Daniel Victoria Gleason
Special thanks Osama Chami and Ericka Monreal
Davey James Clarke
English photographer Davey James Clarke lives in Los Angeles with his beloved dog, George. This issue, he turned his camera on Pedro Almodóvar and on the women filmmakers in the “In Focus”portfolio.