{"id":591269,"date":"2026-08-21T06:00:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T06:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/591269\/"},"modified":"2026-08-21T06:00:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T06:00:13","slug":"it-is-the-riskiest-film-ive-ever-made-pedro-almodovar-on-being-the-villain-in-his-own-movie-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/591269\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It is the riskiest film I\u2019ve ever made\u2019: Pedro Almod\u00f3var on being the villain in his own movie | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Black sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almod\u00f3var<\/a>, bourgeois arthouse darling nonpareil and master of everything from screwball romps (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to clammy thrillers (Live Flesh, The Skin I Live In) \u2013 and sumptuous melodramas such as his 24th film, Bitter Christmas, a cautionary tale about the perils of autofiction.<\/p>\n

We are sitting in the library of a London hotel and Almod\u00f3var is dressed in a thin black windcheater, grey trousers and white trainers; add a whistle on a string and he could pass for a PE teacher. The 76-year-old director may have won more than 60 awards including two Oscars, five Baftas and six Goyas but when the shades come off today, he looks momentarily sorry for himself. He has been deaf in one ear since childhood, he tells me, and now the other one is giving up the ghost. In addition, a nasty stye has turned his left eye a gluey purple. Might he have picked it up while swimming? \u201cI do swim almost every day because I have a pool,\u201d he sighs. Never can those words have sounded so sorrowful.<\/p>\n

Then again, mixing contradictory flavours is part of what he does. There is the blank, blase approach to extreme material (murder, paedophilia, telekinesis) in his 1984 comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? Or the climax of Matador, his kinky 1986 thriller, in which the race to prevent a double murder is paused while the characters gawp at a solar eclipse. A rape scene becomes comic in Kika, from 1993, and another rape is euphemised as a silent movie pastiche in 2002\u2019s Oscar-winning Talk to Her.<\/p>\n

The peculiarities of Bitter Christmas begin but do not end with its release date: whoever heard of a film with a festive title opening during a summer heatwave? Almod\u00f3var agrees: \u201cIt is weird.\u201d Though we both know his ardent base would swarm to see whatever he did. Even when he was making cheap, guerrilla-style Super-8 shorts, he has always known the love of a good fan. After the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975<\/a>, Almod\u00f3var picked up thousands of underground followers in Madrid and Barcelona. They contributed more than $3,000 toward the budget of his 1980 debut, Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls on the Heap. Possibly the only thing he could do today to shrink his audience would be to ditch the eye-popping palette and make a film in black and white. \u201cThe colours are very important,\u201d he says, as if anyone needed reminding.<\/p>\n

Part of the new movie already existed as a short story called Bitter Christmas, written in 2003 and published 20 years later in Almod\u00f3var\u2019s collection The Last Dream<\/a>. The story concerns a cult film director plagued, as Almod\u00f3var really was at the time, by panic attacks and paralysing migraines. In the movie, B\u00e1rbara Lennie plays the stricken director, Elsa, who starts planning a new feature after years spent making commercials. \u201cWhen I wrote Elsa\u2019s little universe, I immediately got the idea that someone, a film-maker, was writing the story of Elsa that we were seeing,\u201d he explains. That someone is Ra\u00fal (Leonardo Sbaraglia). Almod\u00f3var, then, has directed a film about a director writing a film about a director writing a film.<\/p>\n

Keeping track of what is happening on screen becomes a case of mind over meta. Why should we care about Elsa\u2019s story, though, when it is merely the product of Ra\u00fal\u2019s imagination? \u201cI hope that when the audience discovers that the film-within-a-film is going to change, that this change will surprise and excite them. But you\u2019re right, it\u2019s very risky. I think it is the riskiest film I\u2019ve ever made. I took a whole bunch of risks, even knowing that some might not land. It requires you to pay complete attention, and it does seem to me that film audiences are increasingly getting lazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

No prizes for guessing where he places the blame. Bitter Christmas sneaks in a jab at Netflix when someone suggests Ra\u00fal should take his new project there: \u201cDon\u2019t reduce me to making a TV movie!\u201d he scoffs. Almod\u00f3var made his own views plain in 2017 when he was president of the Cannes film festival jury. Two Netflix titles (Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories) were in competition that year even though they were never going to be exhibited theatrically in France; Almod\u00f3var, who regarded the situation as a case of the US trampling all over European traditions, announced that he could not foresee awards<\/a> being \u201cgiven to a film that is then not seen on the big screen\u201d. So it proved.<\/p>\n

Victoria Luengo as Patricia in Bitter Christmas. Photograph: PR<\/p>\n

His passionate defence of \u201cthe hypnosis of the large screen\u201d was countered, however, by one of his jurors, Will Smith, who stood up for Netflix. The star\u2019s name alone causes an almighty eye-roll today from Almod\u00f3var, stye or no stye. \u201cWill Smith was saying very silly things. The American press said things against me and in favour of him. And then, after years, they discovered how Will Smith is.\u201d He mimes a slap, referring to the star\u2019s attack on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony<\/a>. Almod\u00f3var, whose film Parallel Mothers was nominated for two Oscars that year, had a ringside view of the assault<\/a>; his snowy dot of a head can clearly be seen in images of the incident. He later described the acceptance speech given by Smith after winning the best actor Oscar as resembling \u201cthat of a cult leader\u201d.<\/p>\n

Reminded of this now, he says he thinks Smith still sounds like he is in a cult. \u201cIn our jury discussions at Cannes, everything he said sounded like that. He also showed me in all our discussions that he had very bad taste as a person. It was not a good experience being jury president. I didn\u2019t want to do it but my brother [his producer Agust\u00edn Almod\u00f3var] and [Cannes festival director] Thierry Fr\u00e9maux insisted so much that I had to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Back to Netflix<\/a>. Have the streamers won the war? \u201cThey\u2019re very close to winning,\u201d he says gravely. \u201cAll the elements to do with releasing a film theatrically are disappearing. The film art, the posters, which we can then look back on and want to collect. Even the elements that seem banal, such as the fashion that the stars wear to a premiere.\u201d He falls silent, then adds forlornly: \u201cThe excitement.\u201d<\/p>\n

His principled stand in 2017 remains a lesson in defending home turf from bullies. \u201cYou can take this attitude to the political sphere. The European Union should be a shield for the crazy stuff Trump is coming up with in the US. He has created this lawless world, and we in the EU can demonstrate to him that if there\u2019s something he wants to do, he needs to respect European laws. Trump is very angry at the EU and especially at Spain because our president has been brave and vocal in his opposition to his actions toward Ukraine and in his alliance with Israel.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bitter Christmas is, however, less engaged with global issues than with the interior landscape of the artist, as so many of Almod\u00f3var\u2019s films have been. Insularity is to be expected from a director who admitted in The Last Dream that \u201cwriting about myself [is] pretty much the only thing I do\u201d, and Bitter Christmas both addresses auto-fiction and represents an example of it. Ra\u00fal, whose loyal assistant, M\u00f3nica (Aitana S\u00e1nchez-Gij\u00f3n), turns on him after discovering he has plundered her life in his screenplay, is, Almod\u00f3var tells me, \u201ca form of alter ego. At least 80% of Ra\u00fal\u2019s dialogue is something I could say.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Cinema is what motivates me and moves me to live.\u2019 Photograph: Sarah Lee\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

An obsessive, perfectionist director himself, Almod\u00f3var has written proxy figures before, most recently in Pain and Glory from 2019<\/a>, where the auteur played by Antonio Banderas admits that life without film-making is meaningless. But as long ago as The Law of Desire<\/a>, the torrid 1987 masterpiece, which he described in 1995 in the book Almod\u00f3var on Almod\u00f3var as \u201cthe key film in my life and career\u201d, he was already alert to the threat posed by creative types like himself: that movie ends with the defenestration of a typewriter, which then bursts implausibly but spectacularly into flames.<\/p>\n

I ask whether he concurs with the poet Czes\u0142aw Mi\u0142osz, who said: \u201cWhen a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.\u201d Almod\u00f3var offers a minor tweak: \u201cNot finished. But they\u2019re going to have a lot of problems. It is pain that inspires me, not happiness. The writer by nature is selfish, which makes us dangerous to the people around us. It\u2019s not very nice but this is what it is. That\u2019s why I painted Ra\u00fal as almost the villain of the film.\u201d Almod\u00f3var claims to have only ever pilfered responsibly. \u201cWhen I\u2019ve been inspired by someone from my life, I\u2019ve changed many elements to make them unrecognisable.\u201d<\/p>\n

That isn\u2019t quite true. He took the facts of a friend\u2019s traumatic encounter with Eta terrorists, made them Shias instead, and played the episode for giggles in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The friend was aghast. \u201cOh yeah,\u201d he says, remembering now. \u201cShe got very mad when she saw the film. At that time, I didn\u2019t get it because I saw it as a homage: I\u2019d turned something dark that happened in her life into comedy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Antonio Banderas in Pain and Glory, 2019. Photograph: Manolo Pav\u00f3n\/AP<\/p>\n

Thoughts of the damage a writer can do lead to the subject of the late Alice Munro. In 2016, Almod\u00f3var adapted three stories from Munro\u2019s collection Runaway into his film Julieta; one of those stories, Silence, describes a woman who severs contact with her mother, as Munro\u2019s daughter had done. It only emerged posthumously in 2024<\/a> that Munro had stayed married to her second husband after learning he had sexually abused her daughter years earlier.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s overwhelming is that she wrote that story after everything that had happened,\u201d the director says. \u201cI try not to judge but I find that incredible. The whole family were silent, too, which is very dirty, and as dark as the position of the mother. If I knew what had happened there, my adaptation would have been completely different.\u201d Would he still have made Julieta, then, even if the terrible facts had emerged in time? \u201cYes, but the story is much better with the stepfather, the mother doing nothing, the daughter escaping the family.\u201d I don\u2019t doubt his horror at Munro\u2019s behaviour. There is a faint chill, though, in hearing the screenwriter within him express frustration that a vital piece of the narrative puzzle was hidden from view.<\/p>\n

When it came to writing the scene in Bitter Christmas in which M\u00f3nica accuses Ra\u00fal of \u201cvampiring\u201d her, Almod\u00f3var found the experience of self-criticism liberating. \u201cAll the things she says to him, I could easily say to myself. It\u2019s refreshing and fun to be so nasty about yourself.\u201d That might be because his own critics have been so thin on the ground. What they lack in number, however, they make up for in rigour. In 1993, film-maker Alex Cox pointed out that Almod\u00f3var\u2019s actors speak \u201cthe \u2018official\u2019 Spanish with the lisped \u2018s\u2019\u201d, indicating \u201ca certain societal correctness \u2026 which is naturally divisive and detrimental to the culture\u201d. When Volver, a gumbo of ghosts, murder and mother-daughter devotion, was released in 2006, critic Peter Matthews saw only<\/a> the \u201csmooth, velvety craftsmanship\u201d of a \u201cfailed iconoclast\u201d. After Parallel Mothers, Leo Robson argued<\/a> that, far from being rebellious, the director\u2019s work has consistently parroted \u201corthodox and to some degree official Spanish attitudes\u201d.<\/p>\n

The auto-critique in Bitter Christmas is nowhere near as harsh as all that. Almod\u00f3var may see Ra\u00fal, his alter ego, as something of a villain, but he has also described himself as a \u201cvictim\u201d of his own passion for cinema. Whether villain or victim, what price has he paid? \u201cSometimes I\u2019ve suffered during shoots for various reasons,\u201d he recalls. \u201cYou can encounter problems that you can\u2019t even fathom. There have been a lot of painful moments but that is the price. One must never complain because it\u2019s part of the adventure.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almod\u00f3var shows no evidence of slowing down, deafness and styes be damned. This October in Spain, he will even publish his first novel, The Man Who Only Wrote on Airplanes. Before we part, though, I remind him that he is now the same age that his hero Luis Bu\u00f1uel was when he made his swansong, That Obscure Object of Desire<\/a>, a film which ends, as The Law of Desire later would, with an explosion. How does it feel to be at that point? \u201cUnlike Bu\u00f1uel at that time, I am still completely full of desire to keep making films. Cinema is what motivates me and moves me to live. Bu\u00f1uel was pressured by his producer when what he really wanted was to rest in Mexico.\u201d A flash of defiance. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t ever want to rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bitter Christmas is in UK and Irish cinemas from 28 August.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Black sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almod\u00f3var, bourgeois arthouse…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591270,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46],"class_list":["post-591269","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591269","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591269"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591269\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591269"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591269"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591269"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}