‘The writer by nature is selfish, which makes us dangerous to the people around us’ …. Pedro Almodóvar. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian View image in fullscreen ‘The writer by nature is selfish, which makes us dangerous to the people around us’ …. Pedro Almodóvar. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian Film Interview ‘It is the riskiest film I’ve ever made’: Pedro Almodóvar on being the villain in his own movie Ryan Gilbey As his new film Bitter Christmas is released, the legendary Spanish director turns his fire on Donald Trump, Will Smith, Netflix – and himself
Prefer the Guardian on Google B lack sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almodóvar , 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) – and sumptuous melodramas such as his 24th film, Bitter Christmas, a cautionary tale about the perils of autofiction.
We are sitting in the library of a London hotel and Almodóvar 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? “I do swim almost every day because I have a pool,” he sighs. Never can those words have sounded so sorrowful.
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’s Oscar-winning Talk to Her.
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? Almodóvar agrees: “It is weird.” 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 , Almodóvar 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. “The colours are very important,” he says, as if anyone needed reminding.
Part of the new movie already existed as a short story called Bitter Christmas, written in 2003 and published 20 years later in Almodóvar’s collection The Last Dream . The story concerns a cult film director plagued, as Almodóvar really was at the time, by panic attacks and paralysing migraines. In the movie, Bárbara Lennie plays the stricken director, Elsa, who starts planning a new feature after years spent making commercials. “When I wrote Els…