IF YOU'RE in the Comunidad Valenciana any time between now and the early hours of March 20, you may notice an awful lot of noise and colour on the streets. It's the season for the region's biggest festival,...
Almodóvar's unstoppable: English films on cards for multiple Goya-winner
15/02/2020
HAVING cleared up at the Goyas and narrowly missed two Oscars, cult director Pedro Almodóvar is on a roll – already the most international of Spain's home-grown filmmakers, he is seeking to become even more global by launching his next two projects in English.
“What I'd really like to do is make a short film, of about 15 minutes, and not part of a series,” the acclaimed director said this week.
La Voz Humana ('The Human Voice') is based upon Jean Cocteau's 1928 story and, although Almodóvar has written the script in Spanish, he is planning to have it translated into English.
It will feature just one character – a woman talking to her lover for the last time on the telephone, her only companion being her dog.
British-Australian actress Tilda Swinton, 59 – a schoolmate of the late Lady Diana Spencer, a Cambridge graduate and great-great-granddaughter of Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour – plays the lead rôle.
“She's exactly as I imagined her,” enthuses the director.
“Open, intelligent – we understood each other, and very closely.”
Tilda, whose German-New Zealander husband is the acclaimed Highland artist Sandro Kopp, has played the lead part in Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and starred in The Beach, with Leonardo di Caprio, Vanilla Sky with Penélope Cruz and Tom Cruise, and three of the films in the Chronicles of Narnia series, among others.
The mum-of-two has won an Academy Award, two BAFTAs, a Critics' Choice Award, a European Film, an Independent Spirit, two Saturn, a whopping 20 Critic, and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar Award.
Next up, Almodóvar wants to direct a feature-film adaptation of Lucía Berlín's five short stories, Manual para Mujeres de la Limpieza ('A Manual For Cleaning Women'), which will be partly shot in Oakland and San Francisco, California (USA), but with the scenes in the book in México moved to Spain, probably Madrid.
The Oxford University Doctor Honoris Causa has at least two cast members in mind already, but is not willing to reveal their names just yet – although given that the line-up is likely to include British or US actors, speculation is rife.
Prolific British actress Emma Thompson (Nanny McPhee, Saving Mr Banks, Love, Actually, Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility) said 10 years ago that one of her greatest career wishes is to take part in an Almodóvar film – something US star Meryl Streep nearly achieved in Julieta, although the lead rôle finally went to Emma Suárez.
The Tilda Swinton short and the 'Cleaning Ladies' Manual' will be the first-ever films Almodóvar has made in English – although he only just missed being director for Sister Act, the 1992 comedy starring Whoopi Goldberg.
Almodóvar: Kitsch, melodrama, introspection and taboo-busting
The 70-year-old from Calzada de Calatrava (Ciudad Real province, Castilla-La Mancha), who has been with his photographer boyfriend Fernando Iglesias for 18 years – even though they have always lived in separate houses, which could be the secret to their successful relationship – has long been known for his camped-up, kitsch, colourful, melodramatic and explicitly-sexual off-the-wall films, although they have gradually become darker, more introspective and psychological.
That's because his early works were a product of their time: in the 10 or 15 years following dictator General Franco's death and the Transition to democracy, the iron-fisted censorship over the arts, media and public speech had been lifted, and Spain started to really let rip.
Held in chains for so long, forced to adhere to a pious, nationalist and strait-laced status quo, musicians, film directors and authors lurched to completely the opposite extreme in every possible way, challenging or simply ignoring every taboo.
This cultural renaissance or 'arty party' was at its most prominent in Madrid, and has since been dubbed La Movida Madrileña – a highly-creative, flamboyant, explicit and no-holds-barred era where Almodóvar was right at the centre of the stage.
Drag queens, uncut sex scenes, shower scenes, homosexuality, murder, rape, promiscuity, and satirising the institution of the Church would never have been aired on screen prior to Almodóvar's first work, Pepi, Luci, Bom, which premièred at San Sebastián Film festival in 1980 – and now, Almodóvar's generation was milking it all, simply because they could.
Almodóvar's 'training ground' for superstars: Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem, and others
The director has effectively been responsible for catapulting some of Spain's best-known Hollywood names into the stratosphere of international fame – and they know it, are grateful for it, and carry on working with him at every opportunity.
Antonio Banderas is long overdue for an Oscar, and in fact was only nominated for the first time in 2020, for Best Actor in his leading rôle in Dolor y Gloria ('Pain and Glory') – the fact the highly-versatile Málaga-born star, who has played everything from murderers to film directors grappling with existential crises through to being the voice of Puss in Boots, the famous musketeer cat in Shrek, has been on the silver screen for nearly four decades ought to be qualification enough to net a golden statuette in Los Angeles, but he is still waiting.
Banderas' real début was with Almodóvar, in the 1982 film Laberinto de la Pasión ('Labyrinth of Passion'), playing a supporting rôle to Imanol Arias' gay Middle Eastern prince Riza Niro and Cecilia Roth's nymphomaniac pop singer Sexila. After being a trainee bullfighter who 'confessed' to murders he did not commit in Matador in 1986, he went on to play the repressed, obsessed, criminally-dangerous stalker in Ley del Deseo ('Law of Desire') in 1987, part of a complex romantic triangle involving Carmen Maura as a transsexual female and her gay film producer brother Eusebio Poncela, a creation which won Berlin International Film Festival's first-ever Teddy Award.
Equally as dark, but unexpectedly romantic and actually comic, the 1990 film ¡Átame! ('Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!') saw Banderas as psychiatric patient Ricky who, after leaving his secure hospital unit, kidnaps porn actress Marina (Victoria Abril) and tries to make her fall for him.
The ex-husband of Melanie Griffith and stepfather of Dakota Johnson would not appear in an Almodóvar film again until 2011, with La Piel que Habito ('The Skin I Live In'), as the disturbed plastic surgeon Robert, winning the director a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language.
His part in Amantes Pasajeros ('I'm So Excited'), a comedy set entirely on a plane in 2013, Banderas' part was merely a cameo, but he was the centrepiece of the recent Dolor y Gloria, playing Salvador Mallo, a character based on Almodóvar's own life as he saw it.
“When Salvador says he cannot conceive of a life without making films, it's true. This is something I feel,” Almodóvar said just after the Oscars ceremony.
“That doesn't mean I have to make big or small films; it just means I have to keep on thinking about the future.”
Penélope Cruz has held glamorous rôles since her début in English-language cinema – Pelagia in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, drug baron Johnny Depp's Colombian wife Mirtha Jung in Blow, as Matt Damon's girlfriend Alejandra Villarreal in All the Pretty Horses, as the psychologically-unstable María Elena in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and, of course, as Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Vanilla Sky, in the same rôle as she played in the original Spanish version of the film, Abre los Ojos ('Open Your Eyes') opposite Eduardo Noriega. But her earliest parts as an 'Almodóvar Girl' were far from starry.
Penélope, 45, had already hosted a teenagers' chat show on Telecinco and played the lead part in Bigas Luna's Jamón Jamón – alongside the man who would become her real-life husband, Javier Bardem – but it was Pedro Almodóvar who really put her on the map: she was 23 when her short appearance as the prostitute giving birth to the protagonist on a bus in Carne Trémula ('Live Flesh') premièred at the New York Film Festival, in 1997.
Probably her best-remembered 'Almodóvar Girl' spell was two years later in the tragic, but whacky, Todo Sobre Mi Madre ('All About My Mother'), as Rosa, a pregnant nun dying from AIDS who is cared for by her new friend Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a grieving mum whose son Esteban (Eloy Azorín) was run over and killed when they were about to watch A Streetcar Named Desire at the theatre, and who travels to Barcelona to track down his dad, played by Toni Cantó, who is now living as a woman, Lola.
Penélope was the first Spanish woman to earn a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her part in the 2006 Volver, a female-dominated multi-generation saga that won the whole cast a collective Best Actress Award at Cannes, and the 2009 Abrazos Rotos ('Broken Embraces'), where Penélope plays up-and-coming actress Lena, a past love interest of main character Harry Caine, a blind novelist, was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.
She was unable to play Antonio Banderas' hostage patient in La Piel que Habito, as she was pregnant with her and Javier Bardem's first child, but returned to the Almodóvar circuit for a cameo in Amantes Pasajeros, joining old colleagues Cecilia Roth, Blanca Suárez, Lola Dueñas, Javier Cámara and Paz Vega on set.
Other 'Almodóvar Girls' include the late Chus Lampreave, who always played lovable elderly matriarch parts; Verónica Forqué, who starred in the recent Remember Me with British actress Sienna Guillory and ex-Monty Python actor John Cleese; Marisa Paredes, Julieta Serrano, Carmen Maura, and Rossy de Palma.
Javier Bardem's co-starring with Penélope in Jamón Jamón would not be the last time, and although the couple have said they 'don't want to make a habit of it', this statement is a little like shutting the proverbial stable door: they joined each other on set in Carne Trémula, then in 2013 in Ridley Scott's The Counselor – filmed partly on the urbanisation Monte Pego (northern Alicante province) and starring the pair along with Michael Fassbender, Cameron Díaz and Brad Pitt – and in Escobar ('Loving Pablo', in English) in 2017, where Bardem played the central character, a drug baron and leader of the infamous Medellín Cuartel and Cruz played his wife and author of his memoirs, Virginia Vallejo, with their most recent joint appearance being on Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's psychological thriller Everybody Knows, in 2018.
Second photograph (from Imdb): Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios, or 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown', the mostly-female 1988 comedy which sealed Pedro Almodóvar's place in Spain's film history
Related Topics
HAVING cleared up at the Goyas and narrowly missed two Oscars, cult director Pedro Almodóvar is on a roll – already the most international of Spain's home-grown filmmakers, he is seeking to become even more global by launching his next two projects in English.
“What I'd really like to do is make a short film, of about 15 minutes, and not part of a series,” the acclaimed director said this week.
La Voz Humana ('The Human Voice') is based upon Jean Cocteau's 1928 story and, although Almodóvar has written the script in Spanish, he is planning to have it translated into English.
It will feature just one character – a woman talking to her lover for the last time on the telephone, her only companion being her dog.
British-Australian actress Tilda Swinton, 59 – a schoolmate of the late Lady Diana Spencer, a Cambridge graduate and great-great-granddaughter of Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour – plays the lead rôle.
“She's exactly as I imagined her,” enthuses the director.
“Open, intelligent – we understood each other, and very closely.”
Tilda, whose German-New Zealander husband is the acclaimed Highland artist Sandro Kopp, has played the lead part in Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and starred in The Beach, with Leonardo di Caprio, Vanilla Sky with Penélope Cruz and Tom Cruise, and three of the films in the Chronicles of Narnia series, among others.
The mum-of-two has won an Academy Award, two BAFTAs, a Critics' Choice Award, a European Film, an Independent Spirit, two Saturn, a whopping 20 Critic, and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar Award.
Next up, Almodóvar wants to direct a feature-film adaptation of Lucía Berlín's five short stories, Manual para Mujeres de la Limpieza ('A Manual For Cleaning Women'), which will be partly shot in Oakland and San Francisco, California (USA), but with the scenes in the book in México moved to Spain, probably Madrid.
The Oxford University Doctor Honoris Causa has at least two cast members in mind already, but is not willing to reveal their names just yet – although given that the line-up is likely to include British or US actors, speculation is rife.
Prolific British actress Emma Thompson (Nanny McPhee, Saving Mr Banks, Love, Actually, Remains of the Day, Sense and Sensibility) said 10 years ago that one of her greatest career wishes is to take part in an Almodóvar film – something US star Meryl Streep nearly achieved in Julieta, although the lead rôle finally went to Emma Suárez.
The Tilda Swinton short and the 'Cleaning Ladies' Manual' will be the first-ever films Almodóvar has made in English – although he only just missed being director for Sister Act, the 1992 comedy starring Whoopi Goldberg.
Almodóvar: Kitsch, melodrama, introspection and taboo-busting
The 70-year-old from Calzada de Calatrava (Ciudad Real province, Castilla-La Mancha), who has been with his photographer boyfriend Fernando Iglesias for 18 years – even though they have always lived in separate houses, which could be the secret to their successful relationship – has long been known for his camped-up, kitsch, colourful, melodramatic and explicitly-sexual off-the-wall films, although they have gradually become darker, more introspective and psychological.
That's because his early works were a product of their time: in the 10 or 15 years following dictator General Franco's death and the Transition to democracy, the iron-fisted censorship over the arts, media and public speech had been lifted, and Spain started to really let rip.
Held in chains for so long, forced to adhere to a pious, nationalist and strait-laced status quo, musicians, film directors and authors lurched to completely the opposite extreme in every possible way, challenging or simply ignoring every taboo.
This cultural renaissance or 'arty party' was at its most prominent in Madrid, and has since been dubbed La Movida Madrileña – a highly-creative, flamboyant, explicit and no-holds-barred era where Almodóvar was right at the centre of the stage.
Drag queens, uncut sex scenes, shower scenes, homosexuality, murder, rape, promiscuity, and satirising the institution of the Church would never have been aired on screen prior to Almodóvar's first work, Pepi, Luci, Bom, which premièred at San Sebastián Film festival in 1980 – and now, Almodóvar's generation was milking it all, simply because they could.
Almodóvar's 'training ground' for superstars: Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas, Javier Bardem, and others
The director has effectively been responsible for catapulting some of Spain's best-known Hollywood names into the stratosphere of international fame – and they know it, are grateful for it, and carry on working with him at every opportunity.
Antonio Banderas is long overdue for an Oscar, and in fact was only nominated for the first time in 2020, for Best Actor in his leading rôle in Dolor y Gloria ('Pain and Glory') – the fact the highly-versatile Málaga-born star, who has played everything from murderers to film directors grappling with existential crises through to being the voice of Puss in Boots, the famous musketeer cat in Shrek, has been on the silver screen for nearly four decades ought to be qualification enough to net a golden statuette in Los Angeles, but he is still waiting.
Banderas' real début was with Almodóvar, in the 1982 film Laberinto de la Pasión ('Labyrinth of Passion'), playing a supporting rôle to Imanol Arias' gay Middle Eastern prince Riza Niro and Cecilia Roth's nymphomaniac pop singer Sexila. After being a trainee bullfighter who 'confessed' to murders he did not commit in Matador in 1986, he went on to play the repressed, obsessed, criminally-dangerous stalker in Ley del Deseo ('Law of Desire') in 1987, part of a complex romantic triangle involving Carmen Maura as a transsexual female and her gay film producer brother Eusebio Poncela, a creation which won Berlin International Film Festival's first-ever Teddy Award.
Equally as dark, but unexpectedly romantic and actually comic, the 1990 film ¡Átame! ('Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!') saw Banderas as psychiatric patient Ricky who, after leaving his secure hospital unit, kidnaps porn actress Marina (Victoria Abril) and tries to make her fall for him.
The ex-husband of Melanie Griffith and stepfather of Dakota Johnson would not appear in an Almodóvar film again until 2011, with La Piel que Habito ('The Skin I Live In'), as the disturbed plastic surgeon Robert, winning the director a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA for Best Film Not in the English Language.
His part in Amantes Pasajeros ('I'm So Excited'), a comedy set entirely on a plane in 2013, Banderas' part was merely a cameo, but he was the centrepiece of the recent Dolor y Gloria, playing Salvador Mallo, a character based on Almodóvar's own life as he saw it.
“When Salvador says he cannot conceive of a life without making films, it's true. This is something I feel,” Almodóvar said just after the Oscars ceremony.
“That doesn't mean I have to make big or small films; it just means I have to keep on thinking about the future.”
Penélope Cruz has held glamorous rôles since her début in English-language cinema – Pelagia in Captain Corelli's Mandolin, drug baron Johnny Depp's Colombian wife Mirtha Jung in Blow, as Matt Damon's girlfriend Alejandra Villarreal in All the Pretty Horses, as the psychologically-unstable María Elena in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and, of course, as Tom Cruise's girlfriend in Vanilla Sky, in the same rôle as she played in the original Spanish version of the film, Abre los Ojos ('Open Your Eyes') opposite Eduardo Noriega. But her earliest parts as an 'Almodóvar Girl' were far from starry.
Penélope, 45, had already hosted a teenagers' chat show on Telecinco and played the lead part in Bigas Luna's Jamón Jamón – alongside the man who would become her real-life husband, Javier Bardem – but it was Pedro Almodóvar who really put her on the map: she was 23 when her short appearance as the prostitute giving birth to the protagonist on a bus in Carne Trémula ('Live Flesh') premièred at the New York Film Festival, in 1997.
Probably her best-remembered 'Almodóvar Girl' spell was two years later in the tragic, but whacky, Todo Sobre Mi Madre ('All About My Mother'), as Rosa, a pregnant nun dying from AIDS who is cared for by her new friend Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a grieving mum whose son Esteban (Eloy Azorín) was run over and killed when they were about to watch A Streetcar Named Desire at the theatre, and who travels to Barcelona to track down his dad, played by Toni Cantó, who is now living as a woman, Lola.
Penélope was the first Spanish woman to earn a Best Actress Academy Award nomination for her part in the 2006 Volver, a female-dominated multi-generation saga that won the whole cast a collective Best Actress Award at Cannes, and the 2009 Abrazos Rotos ('Broken Embraces'), where Penélope plays up-and-coming actress Lena, a past love interest of main character Harry Caine, a blind novelist, was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe.
She was unable to play Antonio Banderas' hostage patient in La Piel que Habito, as she was pregnant with her and Javier Bardem's first child, but returned to the Almodóvar circuit for a cameo in Amantes Pasajeros, joining old colleagues Cecilia Roth, Blanca Suárez, Lola Dueñas, Javier Cámara and Paz Vega on set.
Other 'Almodóvar Girls' include the late Chus Lampreave, who always played lovable elderly matriarch parts; Verónica Forqué, who starred in the recent Remember Me with British actress Sienna Guillory and ex-Monty Python actor John Cleese; Marisa Paredes, Julieta Serrano, Carmen Maura, and Rossy de Palma.
Javier Bardem's co-starring with Penélope in Jamón Jamón would not be the last time, and although the couple have said they 'don't want to make a habit of it', this statement is a little like shutting the proverbial stable door: they joined each other on set in Carne Trémula, then in 2013 in Ridley Scott's The Counselor – filmed partly on the urbanisation Monte Pego (northern Alicante province) and starring the pair along with Michael Fassbender, Cameron Díaz and Brad Pitt – and in Escobar ('Loving Pablo', in English) in 2017, where Bardem played the central character, a drug baron and leader of the infamous Medellín Cuartel and Cruz played his wife and author of his memoirs, Virginia Vallejo, with their most recent joint appearance being on Iranian director Asghar Farhadi's psychological thriller Everybody Knows, in 2018.
Second photograph (from Imdb): Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios, or 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown', the mostly-female 1988 comedy which sealed Pedro Almodóvar's place in Spain's film history
Related Topics
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