Actresses Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore will be the protagonists of The Room Next Door, Pedro Almodóvar's first feature film in English. Filming will begin next March, between Madrid and New York.
The story is about a very imperfect mother and a spiteful daughter separated by a great misunderstanding. Between them, another woman, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), a friend of her mother, is the repository of both of their pain and bitterness. Martha, the mother (Tilda Swinton), is a war reporter and Ingrid is an autofiction novelist.
The film will talk about the limitless cruelty of wars, about the very different ways in which the two writers approach and write about reality. It will be about death, friendship and sexual pleasure as the best allies to fight against horror. And it will also talk about the sweet awakening to the chirping of birds, in a house built in the middle of a nature reserve in New England, where the two friends live in an extreme and strangely sweet situation.
The Room Next Door will mark the first collaboration of the man from La Mancha with the American Julianne Moore, who will release Secrets of a Scandal in February. With Swinton he already collaborated on the short film The Human Voice, shot in English, as well as his acclaimed medium-length film Strange Way of Life, a gay western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal that premiered at the Cannes Festival.
The Oscar-winning director had in mind for a long time bringing Manual for Cleaning Women, by Lucia Berlin, to the cinema, an ambitious project that was going to mark his debut in an English-language film with Cate Blanchett as producer and main actress, but in September 2022 decided to abandon it, stating that he was not prepared for such a large project in English.
