“I want to be an Almodóvar girl/Like Maura, Victoria Abril,” the singer-songwriter Joaquín Sabina crooned in 1992. The song was an ode to Pedro Almodóvar, who even then was a master of passionate cinematic liaisons, often starring defiant women in love.
Over 45 years, numerous actresses have shared that desire to be part of his boldly saturated universe, where despair and elation, sex and violence, tenderness and intense hatred often occupy the same frame. “It’s a club that I really relish being in,” as Julianne Moore put it in an interview.
Film at Lincoln Center will celebrate that legacy with its highest honor, the Chaplin Award, at a gala on Monday where the presenters will include Dua Lipa, John Waters and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
“Even though he constantly reinvents himself and no two of his films are the same, you can always identify a Pedro film by watching just one frame,” said Penélope Cruz, one of his most loyal collaborators. She said Almodóvar’s films pay “homage to all women.”
She and Moore were among nine actresses who talked to me about working with the auteur, describing him as both a precise and unique collaborator. Here’s what else they said:
Julianne Moore, ‘The Room Next Door’ (2024)
The first time Moore walked into Almodóvar’s apartment for a rehearsal of “The Room Next Door,” she was stunned. She had seen almost every object there and all the hues in one of his films. Moore described this as “physicalized storytelling,” because the human drama he conjured up also materialized in the eye-catching costumes and sets.
She said she initially assumed that what she was seeing onscreen was drawn from Spain. “Talk about an uneducated thought,” she said. “I was like, ‘This must be what Spain is like, and that’s what he’s expressing.’” But once she started working with him, “I realized that no, this was completely intrinsic to Pedro. This is how he sees the world. That slightly elevated sense to his stories, the colors, the composition, the energy and the beauty, all of that is Pedro,” Moore said. The actress recalled being shocked at seeing herself in a red turtleneck during one scene while Swinton wore bright green. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, we just walked into an Almodóvar movie. We’re in it!’”
Tilda Swinton, ‘The Human Voice’ (2021)
Collaborating with Almodóvar for the first time on the short “The Human Voice” took some adjustment for Swinton, because the director was so specific in his intention. “He wants you to follow the marks on the ground but also wants enchantment,” she said. “The challenge is how to make the shape that he wants but still take him by surprise.”
Swinton recalled a moment on “The Human Voice” when Almodóvar, whom she described as a “romantic filmmaker,” instructed her to stand up dramatically. “I thought, ‘Well, do I stand up?’ And then I quite quickly realized, ‘I’m going to stand up there because that’s what I’m going do. There’s no question of it. He’s literally informing your emotion. He’s not saying, ‘I want this shape, but you find it yourself.’ He’s telling you, ‘This person, at that moment, has so much emotion that she stands up with this very dramatic gesture,’ which doesn’t come naturally to me, a very white gingery person from Scotland.”
Julieta Serrano, ‘Pain and Glory’ (2019)
The veteran performer Julieta Serrano won a Goya Award — the Spanish equivalent of the Oscar — for her role based on Almodóvar’s mother in the semiautobiographical “Pain and Glory.” Despite the significance of the part, the director didn’t specify how to portray the piercing maternal figure. “That was liberating for me,” she said. “Playing characters based on real people can be difficult, but Pedro’s brilliance was allowing us to deliver so much truth without thinking about whether we resembled the real people or not.”
But what Serrano, who also played the betrayed, gunslinging wife in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), most appreciates about Almodóvar is the way he extracts pathos from comedy. “He has a prodigious imagination and a sense of humor that digs deep into the human condition,” she said. “Through laughter he highlights the good, the bad and the ridiculous in us.”
Elena Anaya, ‘The Skin I Live In’ (2011)
Elena Anaya, who had a complicated role in “The Skin I Live In,” believes all directors who write their own screenplays are emotionally affected when they first see actors become the characters they envisioned. But this feeling is even more intense for Almodóvar, Anaya said. “Pedro speaks about the characters as if they were people he has already lived with for years, people he knows very closely, who he loves and defends regardless of the role they play in his stories,” she said. To help an actor invoke the performance he’s after, Anaya explained, he provides precise notes during rehearsals on set. “He establishes the exact points he wants you to not only reach but to surpass,” she said. “Everything you receive from Pedro is pure nourishment for an artist.”
Penélope Cruz, ‘Volver’ (2006)
While Cruz had played small parts in Almodóvar’s late-’90s films “Live Flesh” and “All About My Mother,” it was playing a woman unexpectedly reconnecting with her estranged mother in “Volver” that strengthened her creative and personal bond with Almodóvar. “Every afternoon before shooting, we would walk through the small towns, and he’d tell me things about his childhood in La Mancha” in central Spain, she said. “That film really brought us together.”
But despite their profound trust, there’s still a “healthy fear” in their working relationship. “I never go into the shoot thinking, ‘Oh, I’m working with my friend, I can relax.’ No, no, no,” she said. “He sets the bar really high, and that motivates me. It’s a very addictive feeling.”
And yet, Cruz said, the two communicate almost telepathically at this point. “When he arrives on set I take one look at him and I already know if he’s slept well or not, if he’s in a good mood, if he’s worried, if he’s happy,” she added. “And I think he can do the same with me. I can’t fool him, neither on set nor in our personal relationship.”
Leonor Watling, ‘Talk to Her’ (2002)
To play a woman who spends nearly all of “Talk to Her” in a coma, Leonor Watling practiced yoga and classic ballet for months before the shoot. “He told me, ‘I’m going to offer you a very strange role, and I want you to read it carefully, because I don’t want you to be dead. I want you to be a very alive presence while being completely still.’”
Watling remembered that Almodóvar would direct her character’s internal monologue while she was immobile in bed, eyes closed. “He would say, ‘Now you’re thinking that you’re walking through a field full of leaves and the leaves are making noise.’ He didn’t want me just lying there.” Although she can now laugh about it, the actress admitted it was difficult for her ego to accept that her first Almodóvar role would be so muted. “Pedro has always made me feel so much affection and appreciation for what I did in ‘Talk to Her,’” she said. “He understands how hard it was for me to do it.”
Cecilia Roth, ‘All About My Mother’ (1999)
After making the Oscar-winning “All About My Mother,” in which she played a woman whose son dies tragically, Cecilia Roth asked Almodóvar if he thought her performance would have been different if her own child had been born before they shot the film. “Pedro literally told me, ‘Even a German truck driver is a mother,’” she recalled. “He believes it doesn’t matter if you have a child or not. All of us who’ve had a mother also have the feeling of motherhood within us,” she explained.
Roth said the director knows the exact emotions of his actors and labors to bring these out through the characters. “Pedro knows more about you than you do, I’ll tell you that much,” she added. Roth remembers sitting next to Almodóvar at the Academy Awards in 2000 and needing to use the restroom just before the foreign language category was announced. She recalled, laughing, that the agitated director told her, “It’s always the same with you!” But she made it back in time to hear Penélope Cruz present the Oscar for their film. “Like everything with Pedro, that night was an adventure,” Roth said.
Rossy de Palma, ‘The Flower of My Secret’ (1996)
An always memorable character actor, Rossy de Palma has enlivened eight Almodóvar films. For “The Flower of My Secret,” she said, the director derived a great deal from the women in his own family for the hilariously combative scenes between the daughter and mother that she and Chus Lampreave played.
“Many of the phrases Chus said were typical” of Almodóvar’s mother, she said, describing the real matriarch as the “supreme screenwriter” given her influence on her son’s work.
De Palma said she adored Almodóvar heroines who weren’t burdened with guilt. There’s “no karmic sense of deserving whatever happened to you,” she said. “No matter how traumatic the events that occurred are, you have the ability to rise from the ashes like a phoenix and say, ‘Well, what do we do with what’s left?’ There may be tragicomedy, like in life itself, but there’s no victimhood.”
Marisa Paredes, ‘High Heels’ (1992)
In Almodóvar cinema, the defining image of Marisa Paredes is her heart-wrenching, lip-synced performance of the bolero “Piensa en Mi” in “High Heels.” Paredes recalled that the director adapted the role of the torch singer Becky del Páramo to include details of her personal life, like setting a scene in a theater where the actress often performed.
Paredes and Almodóvar formed a consummate partnership that heightened the melodrama in his movies. In her last interview weeks before her death, Paredes spoke of their collaboration ardently. “To work with Pedro, you have to jump into the pool with him without a life preserver. You have to give him everything and more,” she said. “He demands a lot, but for an actress like me, who fundamentally focuses on the contradictions of the character, a director like Pedro suits me very well, and an actress like me always suited Pedro very well.”
For Paredes, one of Almodóvar’s most notable talents was having the intuition and flexibility to take advantage of unplanned occurrences on set. She said, with a subtle laugh, “If he sees that it enriches the situation, he’ll accept it, because there’s hardly anything — or rather, nothing — foolish about him.”
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