Pedro Almodóvar: 'It's my gayest film ever'
He's one of cinema's most visionary directors, and his films have shaped the way we see his country. So how does Pedro Almodóvar choose to portray Spain's catastrophic economic crisis? With an outrageous, sex-sozzled farce
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Pedro Almodovar: 'I wanted this to be a wacky comedy, something escapist.' Photograph: Agencia EFE/Rex Features
Pedro Almodóvar is hobbling. He is also hopping mad. He has come into his Madrid office – where visitors are greeted by a massive album of Helmut Newton nudes – despite surgery on his knee the day before. Hence the hobble. But what really hurts him is that, forced to rest from his normally hectic routine of scriptwriting, the director has spent his convalescence watching the news. "Some days I try not to see the news at all," he says. "But yesterday I couldn't avoid it. It is all horrific."
Almodóvar's day in front of the television consuming endless stories of the country's economic woes, which have left a quarter of Spaniards out of work, has made him indignant. "I think the country as a whole is worried about social unrest breaking out," he tells me. "I certainly am. Every day that goes by, I get the impression that there is further provocation." But, he reassures me, "That doesn't mean I am inciting anyone to violence. Quite the opposite. I'd invite everyone to react – but in the most peaceful way possible."
As Spain's most famous film director – the Oscar-winning auteur of dramas such as Talk to Her and Volver, which range from melancholic to subversive to downright twisted – you can imagine Almodóvar's anger being expressed in dark ways. Witness The Skin I Live In, his most recent and arguably most chilling film to date. But at 63, Almodóvar has other plans. "I like the idea of helping people to have fun," he says, "because the atmosphere right now is so very bleak." And so the creator of Broken Embraces and Bad Education offers us his latest film – a screwball comedy set in a transatlantic jet, full of mile-high blow jobs and dancing cabin stewards camping it up to the Pointer Sisters (their signature song "I'm So Excited" provides the English title – in Spanish, it's called Los amantes pasajeros). And box office results in Spain suggest Almodóvar has judged the mood perfectly – the film gave him his best opening weekend performance ever.
In Madrid I've heard it approvingly referred to as a mariconada – a sort of irreverent campfest. Almodóvar's first return to pure comedy in 25 years, since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, is a piece of extravagant, kitsch entertainment which he joyfully calls "my gayest film ever". It's also a return to the style of his early successes, when he burst on to the scene as a colourful purveyor of lavish, gleeful, hedonistic transgression. Gags include a clairvoyant losing her virginity by riding a sleeping, but aroused, fellow passenger, and the semen flecks left on a cabin steward's face after he locks himself into a cramped bathroom cubicle with the captain.
But the film can also be taken as a metaphor for ailing, recession-struck Spain itself. "I wanted this to be a wacky comedy, something escapist," says Almodóvar. "But it is true there are things that chime with the times." An aircraft circles aimlessly in the sky, its landing carriage damaged, awaiting the go-ahead for a crash landing. The crew and first-class passengers drown their sorrows, confess their sins and indulge in mescaline-fuelled sex while the tourist class drifts into ignorant, drug-induced slumber. Almodóvar himself was surprised at how the surreal backstories of the film's main characters – who include a crooked banker fleeing the country and a call girl who claims to have a compromising videotape of the king – increasingly resonate with the things Spaniards read daily in their newspapers.
"There was always the metaphor of a Spain that doesn't know where it is heading, that doesn't know where to land or who will be in charge, nor what the dangers are," he says. But he did not foresee the raft of corruption cases that have since afflicted everything from prime ministerMariano Rajoy's conservative People's Party to King Juan Carlos's family. "Since we shot it, the film has actually gained in metaphoric relevance," he says.
Almodóvar's thick, vertically groomed bush of hair is now completely grey and his face is underscored by an equally grey beard. He wears it all with the same panache as, say, Albert Einstein – but it is a reminder, along with the knee, that age is catching up. Indeed there is something of the ageing rock star about him, as if the spirit of youthful rebellion cannot quite be cast off. He certainly exudes verbal energy – I could have got through an hour-long interview with just a handful of questions – but manages to avoid being either overbearing or arrogant. After decades of praise and adoration, he might easily have grown a bigger head. A last-minute plea not to make him sound as if he has been trashing Spain, which brought him rushing back out of his office after we had finished, was a reminder that he still cares what people think about him.
Almodóvar himself has long been the symbol of a more playful, upbeat Spain, one that emerged from decades of darkness and moral strictures under Franco's dictatorship in the mid-1970s to become a vibrant democracy. He was born in the rust-red flatlands of La Mancha, home toDon Quijote. His father Antonio traded in oil and wine, loading up a mule and carting it away for sale. But Pedro did not fit into his father's version of the masculine world. His mother Francisca, who occasionally appeared in his films before her death in 1999, was his key reference point. She earned pocket money by composing letters for illiterate neighbours. Like her son, she enjoyed embellishing. "The improvisations were a great lesson for me," he wrote after her death. "They established the difference between fiction and reality, and how reality needs fiction to be complete, more pleasant, more liveable.''
Almodóvar's brother Agustín, who doubles as his producer, once described their birth village of Calzada de Calatrava as "the sort of place where people spend their whole lives saving up for a decent headstone in the cemetery". Almodóvar himself has called it "a harsh place where nobody understood sensuality, the joy of life or even the idea of colour". His entire career can seem a rebellion against that (although many die-hard Almodóvar fans argue his best film is Volver, a story about superstition and death shot in a town close to Calzada de Calatrava and starring Penélope Cruz in her best role yet).
Close to where Almodóvar grew up is one of the country's dullest cities, Ciudad Real, and it's here that much of I'm So Excited! was filmed – at an abandoned airport that is one of Spain's infamous architectural white elephants, part of the glittering detritus left by a decade of extravagance, financial corruption and delusions of political grandeur.
"That airport cost more than €1bn to build and is totally useless," says Almodóvar. "All you see are a couple of rabbits hopping along what is Spain's longest runway. Some minister has produced a list of 17 airports like that one in La Mancha – they represent the megalomania of our politicians and unscrupulous financiers over the past decade."
Three amigos: Almodovar with Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem Photograph: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/WireImage
The international airport, which was supposed to welcome 2 million passengers a year, eventually sank the local savings bank. "Somehow they convinced my fellow Manchegos that people from across the world would catch flights straight to the heart of La Mancha," says Almodóvar. "But who wants to fly there?"
In some ways, Almodóvar's own journey is a reflection of Spain's own. He reached the big city in his teens, experiencing a surge of liberation after the claustrophobic atmosphere of village life and schools run by Roman Catholic priests. And when the so-called movida madrileña – an anarchic, anything-goes, party-crazed movement – set the Spanish capital's nightlife ablaze in the 80s, Almodóvar became its master of ceremonies and lasting icon. He is also one of its few real cultural products.
"We were drunk on optimism and freedom," Almodóvar remembers. "We weren't really conscious that Spain was taking such a huge leap forward for a country that was traditionally so divided and fratricidal. I was able to reinvent my life as if I had been newly born." There was something innocent – even ingenuous – about that time, despite its avowedly hedonistic nature. Almodóvar started making short, often soundless but sex-obsessed Super-8 films with titles like The Fall of Sodom. His first commercial film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, was written in his free time while he was holding down a desk job at a telephone company. He would take unpaid leave to go filming, then return to his job and weep. But he had definitively swapped the moral corset of Catholic rural Spain for personal and artistic freedom.
"We are all worse off now," he says glumly. "And we have all become worse people, too. If a filmmaker wanted to get started the way I did in the 80s, they would find it impossible. There is too much competition. I don't want to sound nostalgic, it's just that everything has changed." Almodóvar is part of that change. The man who used to dress up in fishnets and leather miniskirts to front a glam-punk band now does yoga classes.
His sisters still visit the chapel in Calzada de Calatrava to light candles and pray whenever he is nominated for an Oscar. The prayers worked their magic in 2000, when All About my Mother took the best foreign film award, and again in 2003, when he won best original screenplay for Talk to Her – a rare honour for a non-English-speaking director. But his lionisation by New York critics and Cannes festival crowds is too much for some Spaniards, who cannot see why this apparent eccentric – in reality a disciplined and driven worker – should come to represent Spain to foreigners; Almodóvar has joined a list of other great mould-breakers, including Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, who won greater respect abroad than at home.
A study by Spanish academics has claimed that his characters were off their heads on alcohol or drugs 14% of the time (I'm So Excited! can only have raised that percentage). A total of 170, mostly female, characters were regular drug users. Almodóvar says the study left him with "a Kafkaesque sensation of fear, disgust, astonishment, fury and indignation", for there is nothing he dislikes more than puritan moralism. He is, however, zealous about political ethics: he once issued orders banning Silvio Berlusconi's companies from distributing his films in Italy. Even José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the former socialist prime minister who made Spain the third country in the world (after Holland and Belgium) to embrace gay marriage in 2009, has let him down by pandering to the prophets of austerity. "It is not just disappointment. His last four years were a monumental disaster."
Almodóvar is also famous for putting female characters at the centre of his films. Penélope Cruz may only have a cameo role alongside Antonio Banderas in I'm So Excited! – laying on a thick, lisping Andalusian accent – but her presence is a reminder of how Almodóvar has made her career, and why he now has a long list of famous actresses begging for parts. Eva Mendes is the latest to have admitted asking him to direct her.
"All my life great actresses have been asking me for roles – there is an infinite number," he admits. He thinks this is because he wrote so many great female parts in the 90s, when Hollywood was ignoring its best actresses.
"They realise that I don't just write good female roles, but that I also work hard with the actresses. Great actresses are often condemned to working on their parts on their own. When big stars who don't speak Spanish ask me for roles I imagine they are thinking of me as a director who spends more than half of his time during shooting and pre-production working with the actors. They think: 'I want someone who forces me to work, who makes me jump without a parachute, but is there looking after my security.' I have never made a film in English, but one reason would be to work with some of these actresses, who I adore."
One of several half-written scripts he keeps on the boil is for a New York film, but he admits the chances of it being shot are fading. "I am a bit old to change language and culture," he says. "It might be too late to start trying that sort of thing." He describes I'm So Excited! as a Mediterranean comedy, sharing elements with the kind of Italian comedies in which a ruffled Sophia Loren would lose her cool. "We have sharp tongues, but it doesn't mean we really want bad things to happen to the person we are talking to," he says. "There is a shameless lack of inhibition in the way the characters act and speak. They shout and lose their composure, heatedly saying exactly what they feel. It's not that we are more sincere than the British, or that they are more hypocritical; it is just that we are less able to keep our mouths shut. And that is great for comedy."
With more than a dozen successful films and two Oscars, you might think Almodóvar was immune to the darts hurled by some critics. But that is clearly not the case. A famous feud with El País film critic Carlos Boyero led the director to call for the paper to send someone else to the Cannes festival in 2009. Indeed, reading a bitchy Boyero review before seeing Almodóvar's latest film has become, for some Spanish cinemagoers, an integral part of the entertainment. Writing of I'm So Excited!, Boyero complained about its "infantile" humour, and compared it to the tacky offerings of Mariano Ozores, a prolific Spanish director of spicy 1970s comedies with a touch of the Carry On.
Has Almodóvar seen the review? "No, I haven't read it," he says. He certainly used to read Boyero – there's a well-known exchange of letters with the newspaper's ombudsman that still sits on his blog. "For the past 30 years one of Boyero's functions in life has been to rubbish my films," Almodóvar says. "I don't think El País should let him use his job to do that."
But it's Britain, he says, that has been one of the toughest nuts to crack, with critics and audiences initially unwilling to look beyond the scandalous sexual edge to many of his films. "I am having wider success there now," he tells me. "They have got tired of being shocked by the films and find it easier to get close to them."
British viewers of I'm So Excited! may find it hard to understand the subtext of Spain's crisis, but they have their own concerns about the economic future. Perhaps Almodóvar's semen-specked Spanish screwball humour will lift them, too, out of their gloom.
I'm So Excited! is out on 3 May
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