This article appeared in the April 18, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.
Behind the scenes of The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
In times like these, there are few living filmmakers I’d rather have on my side than Pedro Almodóvar. The Spanish director, who is being honored on April 28 with the Chaplin Award at a Film at Lincoln Center gala, has for so long embodied that word that all the kids now overuse with abandon—iconic—that younger generations might not know what we longtime devotees will never forget: that his entire artistic persona was born out of a thirst to transgress social and sexual boundaries. His unabashedly queer, thrillingly liberated movies were only conceivable following the 1975 death of Francisco Franco, after his nearly 40-year dictatorship of Spain. They still feel provocative, maybe even more so in an era marked by sanitized stories of gay pride, an ascendant generation of squeamish teens whining about screen sex that doesn’t “advance the plot,” and, most alarmingly, a resurgent and virulent conservatism that’s encroaching into authoritarianism with whiplash-inducing speed.
I was heartened to talk to Almodóvar at such an anxious historical moment, both because his experiences as a filmmaker informed by an oppressive regime can teach us a lot about the promise of art in times of political duress, and because his work has always brought me significant joy. The primary-color shamelessness of his cinema—that deceptively bright look that evokes a feral, erotic hunger—shook me up at a young age, and has never relinquished its grip on my spirit and curiosity. Whether reconstituting melodrama for explosive effect (Law of Desire, 1987), adapting the screwball comedy to the impulsive rhythms of contemporary neuroses (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, 1988), or valorously peeling back the layers of his own past to confront lingering traumas (Pain and Glory, 2019), Almodóvar has always pushed against the boundaries of taste or comfort. His work has become as identifiable and widely beloved as that of any international auteur alive without sacrificing its core of subversion. What have we done to deserve such an astonishing oeuvre of films?
I’d like to go back just a few years to talk about Pain and Glory. Your films have always been deeply personal as well as political. But this is the one where you’re grappling most directly with the self—your health, your past—by casting Antonio Banderas as a version of yourself. Why did you decide at that point in your life to make something so autobiographical?
All my movies—I don’t know if they’re really autobiographical, but they really belong to me. They talk about my life. But this is the first one where I am really talking about myself, my career, and about my pain. It came out of a critical moment in my life, where I had just had back surgery. It was a very delicate operation, and I was not sure how I was going to move on from that point as a filmmaker. Shooting a film is such a physical enterprise, so I was terrified. I was in a lot of pain, and it was only when I was in the swimming pool, suspended with a lack of gravity, that the pain would go away. Being submerged brought me back very naturally to the rivers of my youth, and to my childhood. So, I immediately took myself as a referent. I kept writing [the screenplay] because it was about something so familiar to me. I was feeling very insecure about it, but my insecurity was cured by the process of shooting. It was almost like a miracle. The second I was on set, my pain disappeared; all the issues with my back were gone. Once the shoot was over, the pain returned. In essence, I found that the cure to my pain was being on a film shoot. That doesn’t mean that I use film as therapy. I really tried to avoid that. But in this particular case, the circumstances worked that way. There did come a point where I wondered whether I was exposing myself a little too much, and I thought about how I would feel talking to the press about things that were personal.
Antonio Banderas is so wonderful in the film, and this made me think about all the actors who’ve worked with you again and again. This is, of course, a sign of great trust, and it’s hard to imagine your career without Penélope Cruz, Rossy de Palma, Marisa Paredes, Carmen Maura, and many others. I hope Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore will reappear in your films, also.
Yes, they are now part of my stable company.
I hope so! Can you talk about the creative process you have with your actors?
When I said “stable company,” this is the term I use when I make a play or other theater. But it has that feeling of a family. One of the nice things about returning to actors you’ve already worked with is that there is a fundamental level of understanding. As soon as I finish writing a script, I always wonder if any of the actors I know could play the characters. As much as possible, I try to recast actors from my ensemble, even though I also employ new people, discover new talents. But the exciting thing about working with someone like Penélope or Antonio is that I have worked with them throughout the years; we have grown together. And the roles have also changed as they have matured and as I have matured. I do think the work of certain directors can be defined by the eras of certain actors. So, you have the era of Hitchcock when he worked with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant; a little later it’s the era of Tippi Hedren. Scorsese had a De Niro era, but then he also has a DiCaprio era. Actors are really the most important element of any given film, and they impress their own character on the characters that they play. The only thing that I cannot fathom doing is working with an actor that I’m also personally involved with, in an amorous relationship or otherwise. In the cases of Ingmar Bergman with Liv Ullmann or John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands or Woody Allen with Diane Keaton and Mia Farrow, that is something I think I could never do.
I’ve recently been doing a deep dive into the career of Mitchell Leisen, who frequently worked with the same actors—Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, Olivia de Havilland. I know you’re a fan of his Midnight (1939) and Easy Living (1937), and all the screwball comedies of the 1930s and ’40s. What do you take from those screwball comedies, which you’ve said have influenced you so much?
I’m a big fan of the genre in general. For example, when I made Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, in my mind it was Howard Hawks, the comedies of Billy Wilder, and George Cukor, of course. I wanted it to be like an American comedy in Spanish. But because many of them were based on plays from France in the comédie de boulevard style, I wrote it as if it were a play, with everything happening in Carmen Maura’s apartment. I was thinking about Midnight and movies like that. So, I was a big, big, big fan. At the beginning of my career, I was closer to that kind of rhythm. But with time, I think I’ve lost something. I would like to go back to that tone of comedy, of crazy comedy, but I find that I cannot. I would love to recover myself as a comedy writer. Because the dramas, which were once quite baroque, have become very austere. But I think it’s just my own maturity pulling me away from that kind of screwball comedy. It’s a pity because now, in the type of world we are living in, I feel almost a duty as a director to be funny, to make comedies—to make life more light, more livable. We’re living through apocalyptic times, and I think that people need that. I wish I could get back to that.
That brings me, of course, to the state of the world. Your career always existed in the shadow cast by the Franco dictatorship. You started making features after Spain transitioned into democracy. Now, the United States and many other countries in the world are living through a moment in which authoritarianism is on the rise. How do you feel art can flourish or entertain in times of great repression?
My films would have been impossible to make even five years before Franco’s death. So, my films speak to this transition, and even though they are not perfect, they do demonstrate the kinds of liberties we were able to recuperate once democracy came. As to what one should do in moments as delicate and difficult as these, the first thing you do is you talk about it. You’re a reporter, I’m a director, and we’re presently talking about the reality that is Trump, and that he has inflicted his abuse of power not just on the U.S. but on all countries. So, someone needs to say something about it, whether it’s through a film or an article, to tell him that he’s not the great pacifier that he thinks he is—that in fact, he will likely go down in history as one of the great catastrophes of the century. And so those who are able to speak to this, should speak to this. I can speak freely because I’m from Spain. I don’t depend on Hollywood. You need independent voices to be able to speak to this. Because every time that you read the very brutal morning news, you realize what Trump is doing to the world. I can only think that if I were Kubrick, I would make a film about his relationship with Putin, for example. I’m not Kubrick and I’m not as well-versed in that kind of political genre, but somebody needs to make this film.
Of course, as you know, I’m very proud to be receiving the Chaplin Award. But if I were Chaplin, I could make a film like The Great Dictator (1940). Just from my vantage point, what is essential is to speak clearly and freely, and not to let fear censor you. I speak of life as I see it. I think that directors need to be absolutely honest; that’s what they owe people.
Because your work came after Franco, and because so many of the Spanish films that we in the U.S. know and saw came out after Franco, I don’t think we have a really good sense of what it was like during Franco’s rule. Franco was in power during your teens and early twenties. What do you remember from those days?
I never had problems with the police. They were called “the Grays,” because the police wore gray. During the 1960s, when I was still a teenager and Franco was still in power, even though the repression was there, things leaked through the cracks, and we could see what was happening in other countries. So, we learned about the ways in which people were experimenting with their sexuality; mores around sexuality were changing, becoming more explicit. In Spain, everything had to happen in hiding. I was already shooting Super-8 films. I shot a film called The Fall of Sodom (1975), and we had to go to very rural areas with our people disguised so no one would see us, and the police wouldn’t find us. I was already playing with gender fluidity and gender identities.
I would work all morning at a telephone company, during the afternoons I would write, and then at night I would work with an independent company that was very critical of the dictatorship. That was the only time that I had brushes with censorship. One of the things that you can say about the late ’60s and early ’70s is that there was an atmosphere of transition, people were preparing. There’s lore that says that the Spanish households had already bought the champagne and were keeping it on ice for that day when the dictator finally died.
Your films have always been so transgressive in the depiction of queer sexuality. From nearly the beginning, you’ve had trans characters, gay characters, lesbian characters. These films were meaningful not just for Spain but also for international audiences. I can tell you, as someone who came of age in the U.S. in the ’80s and ’90s, that Law of Desire was immeasurably important to me as a young man growing up gay. Seeing these sexual relationships depicted realistically, funnily, movingly, and erotically was life-changing. Were you conceiving those films as political statements because of their depiction of sexuality, or were they just reflections of you and your identity?
Films, I would say, acquire political significance over time, regardless of the filmmaker’s intentions. Because they talk about life. With something like Law of Desire, I was declaring quite emphatically that desire is the primary motor of life, and it’s also the primary motor of your own sexuality. I was also exploring that obviously for myself. I was not aiming to have it transcend boundaries and reach the whole world. But I’m very proud that to this day, people from all around the world come up to me and tell me that Law of Desire changed their lives. One of the important things that runs throughout my films is that my characters always have moral autonomy. And that in itself is a political statement.
The classical Hollywood studio films you love were the products of so much censorship under the Production Code. Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and other directors whom you often cite were working under repressive strictures. We’re entering a time when maybe there isn’t a literal written code, but there are going to be filmmakers less willing to take risks: to represent trans people, to deal directly with political realities. What have you learned from filmmakers who worked under repression, whether in the U.S. or Spain, about how film can continue to express the inexpressible?
I’ll talk not only about American but also Spanish directors. Carlos Saura was a great director. The movies he did under the dictatorship are very cryptic. He couldn’t talk about reality in real terms, but he could articulate stories that talk directly about the Spanish way of living and the dictatorship. I would add Luis García Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem to this list. Berlanga did a film called The Executioner (1963), about the death penalty. These are two directors who explicitly worked against the regime, but by relying on symbolism, they were able to evade censorship. As you know, sometimes the censors are not the brightest bunch, and many times, it wasn’t until the films arrived at Venice or Cannes and were awarded that people realized that they were making political statements. This was also the case with Viridiana (1961) by Buñuel and Death of a Cyclist (1955) by Bardem. Obviously, Hitchcock is the absolute genius of all of this. Aside from the fact that he was a genius at picking stories out of novels that might not have been that popular or interesting, he also had this amazing ability to imbue everything with such mystery that on a first watch, the films are perfectly accessible, but have these other layers of meaning. In that sense, he is the greatest film author of all time.
When people think of your films, they think of the colors, the compositions, the angles. At what point in the writing or planning process do you start to visualize the film?
Part of that appears during the writing. But basically, I start visualizing the movie after the first draft. I start finding locations, doing the casting. The script is like an excuse that sends you on these different journeys where you slowly discover the film you’re trying to make. Now I’m in preproduction for a movie that will be in Spanish with Spanish actors. You can say I have an ironclad script. It’s completely finished. But as I am currently location-scouting, I begin to discover visual elements that had not occurred to me. And so I delve deeper into the story. Because the process of filmmaking is alive. You’re working with people who are alive, the situation itself is alive, and so you have to be open to that change.
Is there anything you can say about the new film?
My brother [Agustín, who produces all of Pedro’s films] has prohibited me [laughs]. I could say something very abstract. I am always interested in the process and origin of creation, and also the relation between fiction and real life. This is what it will be about. The title now is Bitter Christmas, but—and this is not very commercial—another title could be The Limits of Self-Critique. Because a writer can be very capricious, and not see the limits of where you can reach. This is one of the main themes.
Since you’re being honored at Film at Lincoln Center, I wanted to ask about when you shot scenes for The Room Next Door (2024) right here at Lincoln Center. New York looked so beautiful in your film.
That part is, I think, the seed of the story: the moment when Tilda Swinton proposes her plan to Julianne Moore, that she needs her to be in the room next door. And for me, that part of Lincoln Center [Alice Tully Hall] is like the heart of the city. Also, I admire Lincoln Center physically. Visually it is stunning. It was very important for the movie that this proposal happened there: having this main sequence in a place that is so familiar that to me it feels like home. And the first close-up of Tilda Swinton is of someone who is saying goodbye to that place. It was very, very moving.
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