"I don't know if I'm going to know how to answer you," a hungover Pedro Almodóvar confidently comments to a group of Spanish journalists after the bath of crowds and the excellent reception he received yesterday at the Cannes festival Strange way of life, the gay western that he shot last summer in Almería with Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, which will hit Spanish theaters on May 26.
The American actor, who plays a sheriff in search of the culprit of a murder, has accompanied the filmmaker from La Mancha in the relaxed talk with the press, but not the Chilean star of The Mandalorian or The last of us, who is filming these days Gladiator 2 under the orders of Ridley Scott. "I am very happy with the reception, although I am sorry for the enormous chaos that occurred at the entrance, in the rain, with many people. There were many accredited media that could not enter, but apart from that, for which we are not responsible, the reaction It was very intense and warm", assured Almodóvar, who really likes the first screenings "and yesterday was the first time I saw it with an audience. Listening to how people breathe gives you a lot of information about how they are seeing it. Despite "When people knew the theme was about two cowboys meeting again, I got the impression that no one was expecting this movie. The audience's excitement touched my heart."
Established on the Croisette since All About My Mother competed for the Palme d'Or in 1999 and won the Best Director Award, Almodóvar has participated with Bad Education (2004), Volver (2006), The Skin I Live In (2011) , Juliet (2016), Pain and Glory (2019), and this year out of competition with his second short in English after The Human Voice.
The Extraña forma de vida project arose from a proposal by Anthony Vacarello, the creative director of Yves Saint Laurent, who acts as the film's producer and who wanted to work with the Manchego director. "The first thing I wrote is what happens between them after the orgiastic night. From the beginning I thought that it had to be two mature men and that it had to be a western, a masculine genre." With the short film format, he admits that "it has given me a lot of fresh air. A feeling of enormous freedom, that there are things that I can do in a short that I couldn't in a long one. And with these two short films that I have made I have felt like if I started making movies".
The director always had Hawke in mind - whom he met at the Spanish Theater when he was performing The Cherry Garden - and Pascal for the leads, who enthusiastically accepted the challenge of playing very intense roles, where looks and silences they fill everything, men we see cooking and making the bed, "something no one has seen in a western," he qualifies. "They were physically perfect for the part and from the beginning they got into their characters, who have an ulterior motive in their reunion."
The American interpreter, who has Leave the World Behind pending release, along with Julia Roberts, and has just directed Wildcat, about the writer Flannery O'Connor, declares himself an admirer of the work of the Spanish filmmaker and cites Tie Me Up and Pain and Glory among his favorites: "I like his characters and I think we share the same love for the western. Also, I appreciate that we have been able to rehearse a lot, something that is not possible with other directors. I immediately grasped what Pedro wanted from me." And he adds: "Both Pedro Pascal and I were the perfect protagonists. We got along very well, we understand cinema in the same way, we both loved Pedro and we knew our characters."
The actor from films like The Dead Poets Club or Training Day is passionate about westerns - he was in the remake of The Magnificent Seven - and also short stories, "the fact of having to communicate something in a few scenes, that is concise. And we live in a time where everyone does long things and it's kind of ridiculous."
Despite the fact that the film alludes to the meeting of two men who were lovers when they were young and meet again 25 years later under different circumstances, making it clear that the passion they had never left, Almodóvar has preferred not to show scenes of explicit sex to opt for the subtlety of what is not seen on the screen. "I have already made 22 films and two shorts and I have shown explicit sex, I have never felt constrained not to show things and as such I feel freed from that need. I think that the desire is more explicit in the films of the 40s, where both the women's and the men's was in the eyes, and it had more strength than a naked body. In this film for me nudity is the situation when they are getting dressed and talking about what just happened with two totally opposite reactions It seemed to me that the most interesting narrative option was to do it through words and looks".
In the discussion he had with the public yesterday after the screening, Almodóvar announced that he has ready the script for what will be his first film in English, which will begin shooting in New York next year. "My latest films have few characters and few sets, and the next one will star two female characters and one male. I feel more comfortable like that than with a great production."
On the political front, regarding the upcoming elections in Spain, he commented that he hopes "desperately for Podemos to join forces with the entire left because if it doesn't, it will have a great historical responsibility, and that is that the right can win. We are in a It's a delicate moment because until 5 or 6 years ago we weren't used to having a far-right party and they make a lot of noise and intoxicate society, the media and the political environment a lot".
And he adds: "You begin to hear a tone of voice among politicians and attacks that make you distrust the political class because in no profession do people treat each other as badly as in politics in Spain. So I am worried about the next elections. I am a left-wing voter and what I ask of Spanish citizens is that they vote and those of the left to join and be together". In the end, our most international filmmaker has been able to answer long and hard.
