Pedro Almodóvar does not stop. After the international success of Parallel Mothers and before he makes his first film in English, Manual for cleaning women, an adaptation of the book of stories by Lucia Berlin that Cate Blanchet will produce and star in, the filmmaker from La Mancha is preparing of August a short film that will be his first foray into the western and that will feature Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as protagonists.
The 30-minute short film will be titled Extraña forma de vida, alluding to the famous fado by Amalia Rodrigues, and will be shot in part in Almería. Specifically, in the mythical desert of Tabernas, the setting for more than 300 films, and in the town that Sergio Leone built 50 years ago to shoot his dollar trilogy with Clint Eastwood.
It was Hawke himself who first announced his collaboration with the Oscar-winning director in an interview with eCartelera on the occasion of the premiere of the horror thriller Black phone, in which he plays a kidnapper and murderer of children in a disturbing story that takes place at the end of the seventies in Colorado: "I'm going to make a movie with Pedro Almodóvar, so I'll be there soon," said the actor of titles like Dead Poets Club or Boyhood.
The American actor collaborated with Alejandro Amenábar in Regression (2015) and already told La Vanguardia a few years ago that he would like to work with Almodóvar. "He is a genius," he assured in the talk held in September 2016 on the occasion of the awarding of his Donostia award. Chilean Pedro Pascal, star of The Mandalorian and currently on the bill alongside Nicolas Cage in The Unbearable Weight of a Huge Talent, has also made clear in several interviews his admiration for the director of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.
According to the first synopsis of the short film offered by the production company El Deseo, the story is as follows: “A man crosses the desert that separates him from Bitter Creek on horseback. He comes to visit Sheriff Jake. Twenty-five years earlier both the sheriff and Silva, the rancher who rides to meet him, worked together as hired guns. Silva comes under the guise of meeting up with his childhood friend, and they do indeed celebrate their meeting, but the next morning Sheriff Jake tells him that the reason for his trip is not the memory of their old friendship. Almodóvar assures that "I don't have to say more so as not to reveal all the surprises of the script".
In addition to these two fancy stars, the cast will be formed by young promises Jason Fernandez, Jose Condessa, George Steane and Manu Rios, as well as Pedro Casablanc and Sara Sálamo.
