Almodóvar was born on 25 September 1949 in Calzada de Calatrava, a small rural town in the province of Castile-La Mancha. When he was about nine, the family, moved to Madrigalejo, a town in Extremadura, where he was sent to study at a religious boarding school to prepare him for a life in the church. Aged 18, though, he left home for Madrid where he began to pursue his dream of becoming a filmmaker. Thwarted by the closure of the national film school, he purchased a Super-8 camera and began making his own short films, all the while supporting himself with a variety of odd jobs. At the time, he was much involved with experimental cinema and theatre. In 1980, he produced his first feature film (Pepi, Luci, Bom), and then Laberinto de pasiones, the first of several films with the Spanish actor Antonio Banderas.
In 1986, he joined forces with the producer Andrés Vicente Gómez to make Matador, and in 1987, he and his brother Agustín Almodóvar established their own production company: El Deseo, S. A. His first major critical and commercial success came the following year, with Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). Almodóvar’s reputation continued to soar, not least with Todo sobre mi madre in 1999 (All about My Mother), which won an Academy Award for best foreign-language film. He was also honoured as best director at the Cannes film festival. He continued to direct films, roughly one every two years, many of which won prizes and were nominated for many more. Volver in 2006 won him the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes, and the Best Actress prize for his entire female cast. His most recent film - Dolor y gloria - was released in March 2019. Almodóvar is gay, and has been with his partner, actor and photographer Fernando Iglesias, since 2002. Further information can be found at Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, IMDB, and The New Yorker.
There is no indication among these biographical details that Almodóvar is a diarist. Indeed, Paul Julian Smith in an essay entitled Almodóvar’s Self-Fashioning (to be found in A Companion to Pedro Almodóvar - see Googlebooks, page 31) quotes Almodóvar himself as saying ‘I’m not a diary writer.’ Nevertheless, on at least one occasion, he did keep a diary of sorts - during the making of Volver. This was published as Volver: A Filmmaker’s Diary in a collection of essays, All About Almodóvar: A Passion for Cinema, as edited by Brad Epps and Despina Kakoudaki (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Some pages can be read online at Googlebooks. It is worth nothing, though, that the ‘diary’ does not meet a couple of the requirements usually applied to diaries: firstly, n
‘On the other side of my desk, in my office in El Deseo, sit three of the actresses who will star in Volver. Each of them embodies an important return. The most anticipated is that of Carmen Maura, but there are two additional returns, full of sense and sensibility: Penelope Cruz, with whom I’ve worked twice before [in Live Flesh and All about My Mother], an actress and a woman whom I adore both on and off the set; and Lola Dueñas, with whom I worked in Talk to Her (she was a nurse, a fellow worker of Javier Camara, and I felt like repeating the experience).
I am extremely agitated about the meeting. Despite the fact that the role assigned to me in this circus is that of the master of ceremonies, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy for me to break the ice. But that’s what it means, among other things, to be a director - at least, in a European country. I’m the icebreaker, the chimney that warms the atmosphere, the mother-father-psychiatrist-lover-friend who, with a simple word, can help you regain your self-confidence.’
***
‘Films, the collection of all the processes that make up a film, entail a wide array of questions - hence the adventurous nature of a shooting. The adventures worth isn’t proportional to the number of answers one finds along the way, it is proportional to the resistance of the people involved. What happens is that the director is driving a train with no brakes, and his job is to make sure that the train doesn’t derail. That’s how Truffaut saw it.
My first question is always similar: Will I feel the same passion I felt the last fifteen times about the new story? Without an answer to this question, it is best to avoid getting involved in a new project.
With Volver the answer is certainly, “yes.” Once again, I have the feeling of handling a story - a fable, a treasure, and a secret - in which I am anxious to engross myself.’
***
‘The first week of shooting is over. I came to Madrid on Friday, at the end of the days work. The “girls” and most of the team stayed behind in Almagro. I miss them, and I like that. I can concentrate better in the solitude of Madrid and I prefer to feel homesick for the shoot and to see it from a distance, in perspective. I leave Almagro in order to miss it. 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 at night.’
***
‘We leave Almagro today. I am writing from a patio that is swamped with electric material and rocking chairs with “No sitting” signs. It is one in the afternoon and all the shots we have to do today take place in the street and its impossible to shoot until at least four because the sun multiplies on the white walls; the light is blinding and far too flat. We have to wait. The team has disbanded; at this point I like to stay in one of the lifeless interior sets and enjoy the solitude, the clutter of objects, and the silence.
During these two weeks, contact with the villagers has been wonderful. Both with those we cross in the streets and with those who have worked with us as extras. In most of the sequences of La Mancha there are groups of women and men, and, I must say, I’ve never had better extras. There is something priceless about them; everything that they are supposed to do in front of the camera mirrors their own lives. Their presence has given depth and truth to the sequences in which they participate. Women from this land know well what it is like to clean a tombstone, to pray at a wake, to greet the neighbors. And the faces of the men, slowly weathered by the sun and the wind, have a weight and an expressiveness that would be impossible to improvise.’
***
‘Do you like films with ghosts?
Not normally. I am interested in how Buñuel or Bergman treats the apparition of the dead without changing the light or resorting to special effects. Ghosts appear in front of the person who is thinking about them without pyrotechnical effects. They are inner ghosts. I like Hitchcock’s Rebecca [1940] and Vertigo [1958]. And Sunset Boulevard [Billy Wilder, 1950], 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 in turn is 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 offscreen voice, endlessly imitated since then. I also like Tourneur, when he tells stories about beings of other species. In general, I don’t like horror stories with ghosts (M. Night Shyamalan), or films with angels, or with U.S. presidents who keep on saving the world.
What ghost does Volver evoke?
It isn’t a ghost, but the whole film is infused with the presence of my absent mother.’
***
‘This week is less intense; we are shooting many of those sequences necessary for credibility, where actors go in and out of houses, stop cars and park them, etc. Everything is important in them, but these sequences, required to locate the action and establish its geography, are hard for me. In La Mancha there were doors also, but people left them wide open so they didn’t interrupt action, but allowed it to flow instead. Those shots of entrances and exits from cars or houses are a requisite of him orthography, even if in quite a number of thrillers the screenwriter and the director decide to make characters appear at each others spaces effortlessly, disregarding all obstacles. Take a look at Basic Instinct [Paul Verhoeven, 1992] and you will see what I mean. Characters show up inside other people’s houses as if they walked through walls. And that’s not right.’
***
‘There is a moment, during each of the processes involved in making a film, when I go to pieces and think that I have irretrievably lost control of my movie. It happens when I write it, while we are shooting (when editing I suffer more that one crisis) and, certainly, when the film is ready and no one has seen it yet, that’s when I truly shit myself.
In order for the crises to be short-lived, you need to have a very close relationship with what you are shooting. I know these crises; I’ve experienced them in every single one of my fifteen previous films. Always. As with all passions - and for me, making movies is essentially a passion - crises evaporate when one irrationally loves what one is doing. (And it has nothing to do with whether the film afterwards turns out to be good or bad, whether the crises were justified or not; often crises arise out of very specific problems. I’m talking about the crises that surface without a justifiable reason and still manage to drag you down into a sea of confusion.)
I am 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 that I can do is to take the plunge and closely watch every movement, every shot, every phrase, every pause, every tear, and every joke. I shouldn’t be talking about this. A director’s loneliness is sacred. And the director himself should be the first to respect it, without sharing it with you as I am doing right now.’
No comments:
Post a Comment