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"FacebookPinterest\n\nIf you've never seen any of Pedro Almod\u00F3var's movies\u2014never embraced the high kitsch, low cleavages, and saturated colors of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the sweet sadism of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, or the beauty (and body) of Pen\u00E9lope Cruz in Volver\u2014you're missing one of the greatest love affairs ever captured on film: the one between Almod\u00F3var and his characters. There isn't a director alive who more fully loves the people he creates, even when they do bad things, like put bodies in freezers or tie up their favorite porn star. It is the love of a hyperactive mother\u2014insistent, highly tolerant, a little too indulgent perhaps, but always with a clean motive: to protect what she's put on this earth.\n\nAlmod\u00F3var grew up in small-town Spain, nurtured by a community of women from whom he learned to tell stories. (The men, he says, \"were always out working and then going to the bars.\") His passions were hemmed in by the inevitable pillars of life back then: the Catholic Church and the repressive regime of Francisco Franco. In fact, his whole career pretty neatly aligns with the death of Franco, in 1975, and the cultural awakening that followed it, known en espa\u00F1ol as la movida. Remember when Chevy Chase used to crack, \"This just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead,\" and everyone laughed? That's the exact cultural moment Almod\u00F3var began laughing, turning the whole riotous act into theater, his own 35mm liberation movement.\n\nOver the years, he's made sixteen feature films\u2014including the Oscar winners All About My Mother and (my vote for his best) Talk to Her\u2014and his love has only deepened. His movies, which used to swirl around the bad habits and outrageous afflictions of his characters, have become more disciplined, more anchored by emotions than hysterics. He works now by calming the passions he unleashes, as if trying to say: Don't judge my characters so quickly, listen to them talk, give them a chance.\n\nAlmod\u00F3var likes to meet interviewers in his comfort zone; we spoke at New York's Peninsula hotel, surrounded by his Spanish entourage and the detritus of a man on the road. He manages to be animated and relad at the same time, completely comfortable in his skin\u2014and his hair. It's hard not to keep looking at the hair, which is the stuff of wonder, high and flamboyantly white, possibly un-biodegradable, like something you could use to insulate a small shed. Although he speaks English with hardly a stumble, he prefers to have a translator\u2014in this case, a woman\u2014to whom he can turn and, in a moment of perfect clarity, ask for further clarification: What do I mean? What do I want to say? We spoke mostly of his obsessions: girls, film, girls on film, and other variations.\n\nLet's begin with rape, shall we? Talk to Her involves a male nurse who cares for a patient who's in a coma, falls in love with her, and eventually rapes her. When I saw it, I remember thinking: I can't believe he's going here. But then I remembered seeing a news story about an American nurse who had raped a patient in a coma. So I'm curious: People always say you're an autobiographical director, but I have this image of you poring over newspapers and clipping out stories, searching for material. Are your films ever inspired by the news?\n\nAlways. All of them. But particularly Talk to Her. And you're right, I took notes about that case. It happened in New York, I think. A nurse impregnated a woman who had been in a coma for about nine years. That story had a huge impact on me. I kept thinking about it. I knew there was something behind it that could inspire me. What grabbed me was the idea that someone who is supposedly almost dead\u2014she was brain-dead, after all\u2014could also engender life. There was another news story I followed in the European papers that inspired Talk to Her. It happened in the old Yugoslavia, in a morgue. One day, the body of a young woman was brought to the morgue. I don't know if by now my imagination has added to the story, but her body was attended by a night watchman, a guard, who I, of course, also imagined was very guapo, handsome. And in the night\u2014I imagine he was feeling very alone. To have that job would be so weird. Well, it is alleged that this guard raped the corpse of that girl, and she woke up.\n\nHe actually saved her life? By raping her?\n\nBy raping her, yes. Of course, the police took him to prison. But listen to this: The family of the girl was grateful to this guy. He had raped their daughter but saved her life. They would visit him in jail, bring him gifts. It's incredible. So I was interested in the human story, in the contrast between the parents' reaction to the rape and the law's reaction. The origin of a plot is always very mysterious. It's almost as if a little bug sort of lands on your head and transmits this idea to you, but then you have to develop it. The most eccentric and extraordinary things that appear in my movies\u2014the most surreal things\u2014all come from the papers. They all are real.\n\nYou've written some over-the-top characters in your films\u2014transsexual fathers in All About My Mother, heroin-sniffing nuns in Dark Habits\u2014but I imagine that rapist nurse was the most difficult character you've ever written.\n\nVery much so. My challenge was trying to create a psychopath for whom the audience can feel empathy. It had to be a very sweet psychopath, and a psychopath who understands reality but who, at the same time, lives on a parallel plane to reality. My challenge was just to present him as a human being. In the end, I created such a relationship between myself and the character that when I came to the point of the rape, not only did I not want to see it; I didn't want the audience to see it.\n\nOdd, because you never shied away from showing rape in any of your earlier films, like Matador and Kika.\n\nTrue. But this time, I felt I couldn't show it. Which is why I filmed the rape as a silent movie. I generated a screen, or cover, for the act. And yet I still gave hints of what was going on. It became a new way for me to explain something. I'm happy with the result, because it's become one of the pieces of my work I'm most proud of.\n\nYour approach to storytelling has always been pretty fearless. Were you always this way? Even as a kid?\n\nI was very precocious as a child. Even at 10 or 11, I understood everything that happened around me. I used to go to the movies a lot and other kids thought I was very strange, because I talked about movies and movie stars. In fact, at school I had a little bit of a following\u2014other kids who would sit and listen to me tell stories about the films I had seen, and sometimes I would reinvent the endings. I also had kids who hated me and made fun of me. For me, it's always been that way. I've always attracted both types\u2014people who would give their life for me and people who hate me, who are completely against what I do.\n\nI know school wasn't easy for you. In Bad Education, you describe a world where priests routinely molested young male students, and this was based on your experiences in the Catholic schools of Spain. Was the abuse there institutional?\n\nAt the time, sexual harassment in Spain was so common that you can't imagine. Not only in my school; it was everywhere.\n\nWas this common knowledge?\n\nWe all knew what was going on. As kids, we would tell each other everything. I heard stories from kids, of course, who experienced the abuse as a traumatic thing. But what was shocking to me is that there were also kids who actually experienced something pleasurable. That really came as a shock to me. But it wasn't just the students who knew what was going on. Everyone in the village knew it. The schools knew it, but they never fired anyone. After a scandal, the priest or the principal would just get transferred to another school. To me, it was made all the more horrible by the fact that I took all this very seriously\u2014the rituals, the church, the fact that these people were really instructing us in faith and what faith means. I had to sit there and watch them at the pulpit, touching things, and I could almost literally see their hands dirtied with sperm. So at 11, I decided that I had given up faith. Faith is a gift, and I didn't have that gift, and I couldn't get it by myself.\n\nIs it true that as a boy, you once publicly outed a priest, told him in front of a crowd that you knew he was abusing one of the boys at your school?\n\nYes. That priest was a monster. He had a harem of boys. And one day he was walking around the school grounds with his \"official lover.\" He was just a kid\u2014let's call him Eduardo\u2014and what I couldn't get over was that the boy seemed pleased to be the official lover of the priest. They were just talking like a couple, strolling quietly. And then the priest saw me sitting there with some boys, idle. We were making piles of sand so we could make goalposts and play soccer. One of the rules the priests would pound into us was that boys always had to be engaged in physical activity, because if you were constantly moving, then you couldn't be lured by bad thoughts. Well, I was already tired. That was enough ercise for me. So the priest saw me there, and he yelled, \"Almod\u00F3var! Get up! Go do something. You have to play.\" I said, \"I'm already playing.\" And he said, \"Don't answer back!\" As a student, of course, you're expected to be silent. So I turned to him, and at this point he's moved closer to me, and I say, \"Well, since we're going to speak of playing, what kind of game is Eduardo playing at this very moment?\" He couldn't believe it, the priest. He absolutely couldn't believe it. He didn't say a word. He just walked up to me and slapped me, two really hard slaps across the face.\n\nI sort of see that act as the first chapter in your work.\n\nYeah, that was perhaps my very first public moment where I confronted something that was wrong and that I did not like.\n\nYou grew up in the Franco era, and you once said that when you started making movies, your whole work was a rebellion against the repression and brutality of Franco. Can you explain that?\n\nWhen I started making movies, I decided I didn't want Franco to be in them. Even the idea that he existed before. So I didn't allow him to exist. I refused him. In those early movies\u2014Pepi, Luci, Bom; Labyrinth of Passion; Dark Habits\u2014my hope was to erase his existence. It was my revenge.\n\nBut weren't you also rebelling against the Catholic Church?\n\nWell, you know, Catholicism was very linked to the Franco dictatorship. In fact, even though they called themselves fascists, the actual name was National Catholicism. And so the two were very much tied together. It's also one of the reasons why, even after the end of Franco's rule, the Catholic Church has really resisted any kind of social movement that goes against what Franco stood for. Curiously, now thirty years later, I'm more concerned\u2014not only concerned, but curious\u2014about the Franco period. Maybe it's a symptom of getting older, but I'm much more interested in reading books about the Second Republic, about the origin of the war, and about what happened after the war, how Franco killed thousands and thousands of people and buried them in common graves. I'm also more anticlerical than ever. For a time, I forgot the church. I think I forgave the bad education they gave me. But now the church in Spain has become almost like a political party, where bishops and priests are preaching from the pulpits\u2014using the pulpits to incite people against things like gay marriage and gay adoption, and to deny not only the past but also the present.\n\nDo you consider yourself scarred by the church?\n\nOnly insofar as my sexuality is concerned. I was already conscious of being gay when I was in school, but when I left, I pushed my sexuality away, precisely because of all the trauma that I had undergone. In fact, I was heterosexual when I came out of school. My discovery of sex was heterosexual.\n\nIt was?\n\nYeah. For years, I couldn't really imagine having sex with another man. It had nothing to do with going to hell or anything like that. It was just the idea of that power and that violence that the priests had generated in me. Thinking about sex had become nightmarish for me. And it wasn't until maybe five or six years after school, when I moved to Madrid, that I was able to have experiences, experiences with men and women.\n\nI've always loved that you are a gay man who directs women and appreciates their sexuality. Pen\u00E9lope Cruz never looked more voluptuous than she did in Volver. You even said that while you were filming it, she became your obsession, sexually\u2014\n\nYeah, I like her very much indeed, physically, particularly in this movie. And I think it was good for the film that resulted, for me to desire her in a way.\n\nBut it's more than that. Far more macho directors in Hollywood shoot women very graphically, and yet they don't come off as sexy as your women.\n\nIt's true that when heterosexual men make movies\u2014I'm not talking about pornos\u2014they pay less attention to the power and sexual beauty of women. The goal should be simple: to create a wonderful woman. Just pay attention to a woman. It doesn't matter whether you are gay or straight\u2014if you pay attention, you will discover how rich they are. I don't like when journalists, usually heterosexual, say, \"Oh, you understand women better because you are gay.\" That's absolutely ridiculous. I'm gay, but I don't want to become a woman. I understand women because I'm interested in them. I like them personally. I like them as dramatic subjects. And I have to say, as dramatic subjects, they are richer than men. But male directors today aren't interested. I don't want to reproach Martin Scorsese, but Scorsese never portrays women as full characters in his movies\u2014he'll only use them in secondary roles. In his case, I don't mind, because he makes wonderful movies with a world of male characters. But you know, it wasn't always this way. Italian cinema of the '50s and '60s was led by strong, sexy women like Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren, and Claudia Cardinale, who exuded this kind of sensuality.\n\nSimple question: What are your three favorite movies of all time?\n\nThat's really, really difficult! I have so many. All About Eve, of course, which inspired All About My Mother. We filmed a lot of All About My Mother in a dressing room, just like All About Eve, and I instructed the crew that the dressing room in a theater is like the sanctum sanctorum of the actresses. You see, before making movies, I was an actor in theater, and I always was fascinated by the dressing room. It's a magic space, an intimate place where lies can't be told. When a woman is in front of her mirror and putting on her makeup and doing her hair, it's...it's as if time stood still. I love screwball comedies. Some Like It Hot is one of my favorites. I love Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch\u2014they made Ninotchka together, which is wonderful. I love Westerns, like The Searchers by John Ford. He's one of my favorites. It's odd, because I never watched Westerns when I was a child. Or war movies. And while I still don't like war movies very much, as I got older, I fell in love with Westerns. I don't know why it took me so long. No, actually, I know why. Because they always starred John Wayne. I hate this kind of actor.\n\nWhy?\n\nBecause for me, they represent machismo, authority, the reactionary father. The man who is always right. And I was sure that I would never be the perfect son of a man like that. I hate every movie with John Wayne and every movie with Spencer Tracy.\n\nSpencer Tracy? He's totally innocuous. I mean, I guess I can see not liking John Wayne, but\u2014\n\nLook, I don't know how John Wayne was personally, but I know he made a movie called Las boinas verdes that was really reactionary. How do you say it in English?\n\nThe Green Berets. You have to say that one in English. Las boinas verdes is weird.\n\nYes, Green Berets. It was very reactionary. But I have to concede he was a good actor.\n\nHow about Clint Eastwood?\n\nClint Eastwood I like. I still remember the first movie that I saw of his, The Beguiled. I don't know if you've ever seen it, but it's very interesting. Full of women. Very violent and very intense, almost like a Tennessee Williams play. But I have to say that I'm not a big fan of the spaghetti Western. I find it, like, cheap. I don't share the admiration that people have for Sergio Leone. His reputation, I really don't get it. I mean, I don't get what's so great about watching a very, very tight close-up of Charles Bronson's face for a full minute. I don't get it. For me, this frame represents emptiness. But bad movies can have good effects. Bad movies can generate wonderful movies. I mean, I don't like Sergio Leone at all, but I love the way Quentin Tarantino used, reworked, and converted Leone's work into something completely different. That's inspiration.\n\nWell, now Clint Eastwood does war movies\u2014pops them out two at a time\u2014but it sounds like you won't be watching them anytime soon.\n\nNo. Because they only have men, and that's just not appealing to me. Why make movies where you can't see actresses?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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