Pedro Almodóvar
Translated by Carla Marcantonio
From Film Quarterly, Winter 2023, Volume 77, Number 2
I did not attend any film school or academy. I would have liked to, but at the time I realized that I wanted to write and direct movies, there wasn’t anywhere I could have gone to learn the craft. Franco closed the Escuela Oficial de Cine at the end of the sixties. I suppose he did so because he suspected that film can be a powerful weapon to speak about reality. This was true in the case of Spain, where movies critiqued the Franco regime in a cryptic manner such that censorship boards would miss all but the most obvious political charge. Closing the school was a way to prevent any future critics of the regime from employing cinema as a weapon. According to the politicians of the time, the film school was a nest of reds.
And they were right. Before they closed the Escuela Oficial de Cine, movies such as Viridiana (Luis Buñuel, 1961), El verdugo (The Executioner, Luis García Berlanga, 1963), and La caza (The Hunt, Carlos Saura, 1966) had been released. Censors had missed their vicious political critique, the condemnation behind their savage satire—for instance, the sexual repression in Viridiana. The realization hit only once reactions filtered in from the various international festivals where the films screened. Only then did the inept censors come to understand the films’ irreverent, anti-Franco message.
Far from celebrating the success of the New Spanish Cinema of the 1960s, the regime made it as difficult as possible for those movies to be seen in our country. But this topic deserves a book of its own. In addition to the films I’ve mentioned, there were various other masterpieces that commented indirectly on the society that Francoism had created: Surcos (Furrows, José Antonio Nieves Conde, 1951), Calle Mayor (Main Street, Juan Antonio Bardem, 1956), Plácido (Luis García Berlanga, 1961), El extraño viaje (Strange Voyage, Fernando Fernán Gómez, 1964), La tía Tula (Aunt Tula, Miguel Picazo, 1964), Nueve cartas a Berta (Nine Letters for Berta, Basilio Martín Patiño, 1966), and Peppermint Frappé (Carlos Saura, 1967).
From my earliest childhood, I’ve been condemned to being self-taught. My film school was the Super 8 mm. I shot a bunch of films in the 1970s that varied in duration from five to seventy minutes. I would shoot in the countryside, away from prying eyes, because transvestite characters appeared in most of these films. From the beginning, gender diversity and fluidity were present in my films; we represented an entire variety of sexual options despite the fact that we were still living in the midst of a dictatorship. In one of these shorts, Sexo va, sexo viene (Sex Goes, Sex Comes, 1970), transsexuality was already present.
There were no commercial circuits for this type of Super 8 work. There were some festivals in Barcelona that showcased my work, but most of my screenings took place in photography schools, art galleries, and even at birthday parties. After 1975, the year Franco died, I was able to screen my short films at the cinemateca. During the 1970s, a time period that represents my filmmaking prehistory, I managed to win the support of several thousand followers in both Madrid and Barcelona. Not unlike today’s crowdfunding, these followers contributed small amounts of money; I eventually raised more than $3,000. I used that money to start shooting my first film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, y las chicas del montón (Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Girls from the Heap, 1980). We didn’t have enough money to buy all the necessary 16 mm negative film. The shoot, which continued to be funded by donations from friends, lasted a year and a half; I started shooting in 1979 and we finished in 1980. In September of that year, I released Pepi, Luci, Bom, which went to the San Sebastián festival. It created a scandal, but many people enjoyed it. We were in the midst of change, and such an obscene film (directly influenced by punk) had never been shown in Spain.
My backdrop during the 1970s was the counterculture: the world of urban comics (El Rrollo Enmascarado, El Víbora, etc.) 1 ; American underground cinema (Andy Warhol, Paul Morrissey, and John Waters); English pop (Richard Lester, the Beatles); some free cinema (Tony Richardson, John Schlesinger); and, when art-house cinemas showing subtitled versions started to appear in Madrid, the French New Wave. During my visits to London, I experienced the glam revolution firsthand—David Bowie, Roxy Music, Alice Cooper. The films that spoke to me were Performance (Nicolas Roeg, 1970) and Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966). For the young people that made up La Movida Madrileña, everything that was done in the Warhol Factory was of great influence, as was the London new wave, glam, and, finally, punk. 2 This is the culture from where my first two films were born, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Laberinto de pasiones (Labyrinth of Passions, 1982). I had not yet mastered cinematic language; the films are full of technical errors, but that ended up being part of their style.
The first time I worked with a standard crew and had enough money for an actual budget was with Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983). And although it is still a pop film, it proved to be my initiation into a genre to which I would return many times, using different references: the unbridled melodrama. Here, I employ the bolero as the maximum musical expression of storytelling—at a time when the bolero in Spain was not modern, while my audience and I were. 3 I had characters sing boleros to each other, as if part of the dialogue. It is a very camp and kitsch film (Spain does not have the kind of camp culture that one finds in the United States) that referenced a very popular genre of Spanish musical cinema comprising nuns and young singers, films such as La novicia rebelde (The Rebellious Novice, Luis Lucia, 1972), starring Rocío Dúrcal. Except that my film turned the genre on its head: the nuns dedicate themselves to helping young girls with problems of all kinds—murderers, delinquents, drug addicts—and proselytize among them. The mother superior is fascinated by evil. But, in the nuns’ Christian longing to help Man (or, in this case, female sinners), they become sinners themselves, just as Jesus became a man in order to understand the imperfections of the human being; they end up absorbing the problems of the delinquents as their own. It is a community that moves away from faith in God and replaces it with faith in people—in this case, girls with problems.
Starting with Dark Habits and through the 1980s, I revisited various genres, always from a very contemporary angle; all of my films from the era include drug use, songs that describe the characters, and commercials that are part of the narrative. I took a daring step with Matador (1986), which approaches the horror film but in its sophisticated, Italian giallo incarnation. 4 It’s a story about a bullfighter who, even after his retirement from the bull ring, continues killing. (His victims are the girls who take bullfighting classes at the school where he teaches.) I think Matador is my most savage film from the 1980s, a decade in which my films were generally savage.
The exception was Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988), my first big, worldwide success and my first Oscar nomination. The origin of Women is the American screwball comedy of the 1940s and 1950s—Preston Sturges, Mitchell Leisen, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, and others. With this film, I unintentionally made a leap into mainstream distribution. I think this was due to the fact that it’s a hysterical comedy that moves at a breakneck pace, so I did not have time to add any scenes with sex or drugs. The central character searches frantically and without respite for the lover who has abandoned her, while both sex and drugs require a pause in action. As a screenwriter aware of the fast pace imposed by the genre, I could not include any such scenes, but this omission happened by chance; there was never the slightest calculation on my part to make it so.
Before Women on the Verge, I shot La ley del deseo (Law of Desire, 1987). This was the first film produced by El Deseo, the production company I formed with my brother. It’s a drama, with scent of a thriller, where “desire” is the impulse that drives and dominates the characters. It is the first time that I included a film director in the story and where I talked about the origin of artistic creation—two topics that I return to in the following decades. The film launched Antonio Banderas and Carmen Maura as actors who best represent long-suffering lovers while retaining their humor; the film plays with this mixture of elements that underline the fact that comedy is a natural part of drama. Carmen and Antonio each possess a versatility that makes them the perfect embodiment of my characters. They also know how to gaze passionately; the best way to communicate desire is through the eyes. I wrote the two films that followed as vehicles for each of them: Women on the Verge for Carmen Maura and Átame! (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, 1989) for Antonio Banderas.
I conclude the 1980s with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, the film that definitively launched Antonio Banderas into the American market. It’s a love story between two people on the margins: a porn actress addicted to heroin and a homeless young man who has just been released from a psychiatric institution. The boy, Ricky (Antonio Banderas), got laid in a bathroom stall at a nightclub with the girl, Marina (Victoria Abril). She was very high, and doesn’t remember it, but Ricky possesses only that memory and 50,000 pesetas. And he wants to start a family and lead a normal life (but he only achieves an imitation of normality). The first thing he must find is a girl with whom to form a family. Since Marina won’t go with him voluntarily, Ricky kidnaps her, not to hurt her, but to immobilize her and to show her that no one will love her as much as he loves her. He is both brutal and romantic, naive and vulnerable. The film ran into problems with the MPAA, who decided to give it an X rating, mistaking it for a pornographic film. Miramax and I sued the MPAA in New York court and won the lawsuit. 5 That’s when the NC17 rating was created for films of an explicit nature that are not pornographic.
The 1980s were very explosive years in my country, in the best of ways. That was when we took our first steps as a democratic society after having endured forty years of a dictatorship. We suddenly had access to all kinds of freedoms, and my films from that time period are a celebration of that freedom, of the very fact of making films and telling stories. Something that a decade earlier was only a dream. In any case, you can already find, in some of them, the themes that I will later develop: the origin of creation and desire, melodrama, the influence of Italian neorealism, films within films, references to works by other authors, the narrative nature of songs and theater.
My cinema has always turned to films by other authors such that they form an organic part of my stories. I don’t do it as a tribute; it’s more like a theft. My scripts are made up of everything I experience in life, and this includes what I read, what I see on a screen, my own life, what I am told, what I imagine, what I am afraid of or what I love. All of it belongs to me, including the movies I watch. The experience of watching a movie and all that it provokes in me is something that belongs to me, and it’s in this spirit that I use it. It would take too long to explain the function other films have in each of my films. I use songs in this same way. For me, songs are not background music; the songs I include explain the characters or the situations they live in. They are meant to elicit an emotion in the spectator, but only as long as the narrative flow is not obstructed or as long as they help the story move forward. In the colors I use, I am searching for the vibrant Technicolor of the films of my childhood.
Throughout the different periods of my career, my cinema has almost always mixed genres. My nature is eclectic and postmodern. The mixture of genres, which characterizes me, emerges naturally in my writing. In the beginning, this somewhat puzzled critics, but with time they became used to it.
I have a particular passion for the thriller and for melodrama, two sister genres. My fascination with extreme feelings and exaggerated situations, prominent in my early period, changed over time. During the 1990s, I matured and stylized my stories. The melodrama of Tacones lejanos (High Heels, 1991) becomes more Douglas Sirk than Mexican melodrama. In my more recent films, I shifted my style again, becoming much more austere.
I turn to rural culture as the place where my characters come from. It’s there in Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, 1984), High Heels, La flor de mi secreto (The Flower of My Secret, 1995), Volver (2006), Dolor y gloria (Pain and Glory, 2019). I am myself a mixture of rural and urban culture. Although I lived only a few years in a village, those years were formative. I owe my first education to my mother and the neighbors (all women), to the courtyards of La Mancha, as I show in Volver and The Flower of My Secret, where I absorbed everything that happened before my eyes, but that I would remember only decades later. Above all, these years instilled in me the importance of women, their omnipresence, in all the decisive aspects of the family; even though we were living in a very strict patriarchy, it was the women who took care of everything. That’s why my female characters are such strong women.
About my adaptations: Carne trémula (Live Flesh, 1997) is a free adaptation of Ruth Rendell’s novel by the same name; La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In, 2011) is based on the novel Tarantula (Mygale), by Thierry Jonquet; very little remains of it in my film, just the idea of a father who is a surgeon who abducts his daughter’s alleged rapist. From the moment I made the mad doctor one who is researching cellular therapy and transgenesis, the whole story changed. The Skin I Live In marks the first time I have tackled a truly terrifying thriller. Julieta (2016) is based on three stories by Alice Munro that appear in her book of short stories Runaway (2004). It’s the first time I’ve respected the essence of a text I’ve adapted—in this case, the strangeness that emanates from Munro’s stories. Julieta heralds the beginning of a period where I approach my stories with a greater sobriety and restraint than I had before. I like how I feel with this new style, perhaps because it’s new to me.
The source for The Human Voice (2020) is Jean Cocteau’s short play of the same name. It had already inspired the short play that appears in Law of Desire as well as the storyline of Women on the Verge. Knowing I’d be working with Tilda Swinton, I tried to adapt Cocteau’s play more closely, but I found that a text written in 1930 did not accurately represent a contemporary woman, even if she’s madly in love. I brought the character up-to-date, and it was great fun to do it in a short format. I experimented in a way that I couldn’t have done in a feature film. In a feature film, no matter the genre, the narrative must retain a greater commitment to reality.
I believe that the moment that marks my maturity as an author comes with Todo sobre mi madre (All about My Mother, 1999). All about My Mother is the sum of all the elements that I’ve used before: female complicity, sisterhood, gender fluidity. (Here the father is a transsexual woman.) I foreground the importance of theater within the main story, as well as motherhood and the ability of women to pretend, to act, and thus to be able to help others and themselves. I turn to a difficult mother–daughter relationship between the characters played by Penélope Cruz and Rosa María Sardá. I explore the pain of loss and mourning, particularly when it’s the only thing one has left. I dedicate this film to three actresses who have played the role of actresses on-screen: Gena Rowlands, Romy Schneider, and Bette Davis. Naturally, there are also characters in my film who are actresses, and some of my characters are still using drugs. All about My Mother is my tribute to the women’s film, with All about Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) at its center. I also acknowledge the master, John Cassavetes, when I include a scene directly inspired by Opening Night (1977).
With All about My Mother, I cap off the 1990s at the same time that my mother dies. Her loss marks a turning point, after which I think I make the best films of my career: Hable con ella (Talk to Her, 2002), La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004), and Volver. I consider them films that display my maturity as a filmmaker, each of them crafted with a very complex narrative structure. I spent many years writing and rewriting each of them until I felt I had the script right.
Talk to Her is an artifact inspired in principle by three real events pertaining to women in a coma. I pair this theme alongside the mystery of bullfighting and male–female relationships that are predicated on female passivity. I think it is the most daring script I have written so far. It also boasts the luxury of having Pina Bausch dance, for the first and only time on film, for her masterpiece, Café Müller. The male protagonist of my movie is a sweet psychopath; that is to say that he interprets reality in an absolutely unrealistic way. As an author, my challenge was to communicate his humanity, such that the spectator would not reject him and might even understand him. This film brought me a historic Oscar for Best Screenplay, given that it is only the second non-English-language screenplay to have received the award. (The first was for Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman [1966].)
During this time period, I felt the need to look back for the first time. I had never done so until this moment, perhaps because I didn’t like the memories of my childhood and I did not want to talk about them. But once I started to remember, things took me by surprise. The result of my looking back at the universe that comprised my first ten years of life was two very different films: Bad Education and Volver.
Bad Education includes some of my worst memories around the religious education I received. Those recollections also brought back to me memories of my first love as well as the emergence of my vocation as a filmmaker and of the adventure that a film shoot always implies. In the film, I use two different aspect ratios corresponding to the narration by two different characters, both former students: one who was abused by their school principal [Ignacio], and the other who is a film director searching for a story to tell [Enrique]. The supposed schoolmate [Ignacio, impersonated by his brother, Juan], with whom the film director had fallen in love as a child, a love that was requited, appears one day in his office, asking him for a job because he says he is an actor. Enrique, the film director, knows that the visitor is lying, that he is not his school friend, Ignacio. However, out of curiosity to know how far the false Ignacio will go with his imposture, he embarks on a cinematographic and sexual adventure. Filming is always an adventure, but Enrique adds further uncertainty to it as well as greater risk. Circumstances lead Enrique to discover that his friend and former love has died, that the impostor is actually the victim’s brother, Juan. By chance, he also receives a story written by his dead friend [Ignacio], through which Enrique comes to find out that Ignacio had been a victim of his own brother and of the very same priest who abused Ignacio as a child—the priest now become the layman, Mr. Berenguer.
It is impossible to summarize this story in a few sentences because there are multiple storylines on top of the film-within-the-film that Enrique is making. It also contains the denunciation of something that is unfortunately very common in Spanish religious education: the ongoing sexual abuses that, until now, neither the church nor the justice system has done anything about—neither to condemn them nor to offer any kind of reparations to the victims. This denunciation is one of the leitmotifs of the story, but not the only one. Bad Education is a noir, a genre that has always fascinated me and that I had not previously tackled. The fact that someone who is not a murderer is capable of killing for love and due to uncontrollable desire is something that has always fascinated me, from Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) to Thérèse Raquin (Marcel Carné, 1953).
The other film that emerged as a result of my looking back is one that recovers all the memories that I had unconsciously stored away and that I had never looked at until achieving the distance that comes from being fifty years old. I am referring to family life—to my mother, basically, and to the fact that I was always beside her when I was a child. At that time, life was lived in the courtyards of La Mancha, surrounded by our female neighbors, and was occasionally punctuated with a trip to the river to wash clothes. You don’t see any children in Volver, but everything that happens in the film comes from the memories of that invisible child for whom life manifested itself through the neighbors’ conversations and the joy they emanated, which was contagious. For me, that’s what discovering life meant, and with it, I also discovered that women were the origin of fiction—natural storytellers who also crafted lies to protect us.
Volver reconciled me with my childhood, and I became aware that my formation as an artist dates back to the conversations among the women who surrounded me as a child. These were strong women, fighters, who were not prejudiced and who, though we lived in a patriarchy, were really the ones who governed and brought the family forward.
The fourth stage in my career, which I consider myself to still be in, begins with La piel que habito / The Skin I Live In and Julieta. I had felt the temptation to craft more-contained stories; I’ve now allowed myself that experience. I suppose this has something to do with the fact that, now that I have made so many films, I am more attracted to distilling hysteria into its essence. I look for simplicity, something you can arrive at only with time.
But I don’t forgo the possibility of making something crazy in the future.
Notes
- El Rrollo Enmascarado was a comic book magazine self-published from 1973 in Barcelona by authors Farry, Javier Mariscal, Nazario Luque Vera, and Pepichek; it is usually considered the first consistent example of underground comics in Spain. Some of the same contributors moved to El Víbora, which became more mainstream and, having run from 1979 to 2005, is considered the longest-running comic of this adult genre.
- La Movida Madrileña was a vibrant cultural and artistic movement in Madrid during the late 1970s and early 1980s, marked by creativity, freedom, and countercultural expression. It remains symbolic of the felt freedom in Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy.
- A bolero is a genre of slow-tempo music that originated in Cuba in the late nineteenth century and was influenced by Spanish, African, and other Latin American musical traditions. Boleros are characterized by their emotive and romantic themes often expressing love, longing, and nostalgia.
- The Italian giallo is a stylized psychological genre of the 1960s and 1970s that blends thriller and horror elements.
- In May 1990, ten days before Miramax filed its lawsuit, Maljack Productions had also filed suit another against the MPAA, on behalf of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986), which had also received an X rating. A second Miramax film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (Peter Greenaway, 1989), had also been given an X rating that year but was released unrated.