Few filmmakers have as distinctive a visual style as the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar. The palette for his work often includes ravaging reds, piquant pinks and bruising blues. And over four decades, Almodóvar’s aesthetic has reached far beyond the silver screen. Posters for his films adorn everything from T-shirts and tote bags to postcards and pins.
“It makes me laugh sometimes when people talk about ‘el estílo Almodóvar,’” the Argentine graphic designer Juan Gatti said in Spanish over a video call last month, cigarette in hand. “Of course he has a style that’s quite bold and recognizable. But I hear it all the time. ‘Oh, this is so Almodóvar.’ But sometimes it’s about things that are mine, actually.”
Gatti, 74, is behind some of the director’s most well-known posters. He’s designed steamy images for erotic thrillers (“Live Flesh”) and playful tableaus for campy comedies (“Kika”). And while he’s riffed on the likes of Saul Bass (“Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!”) and Andy Warhol (“Broken Embraces”), Gatti’s work with Almodóvar — including for his latest, the English language feature “The Room Next Door” — has long felt distinctly his own.
The most well-known collaboration between the two remains the artwork for “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” The 1988 dark comedy was Almodóvar’s first crossover hit. And the Argentine designer’s concept for the film’s poster helped brand the Spanish filmmaker’s sensibility for a global audience.
The collagelike image finds a pair of made-up eyes, a pair of legs and a pair of sideways, disembodied bold red lips hovering against a white background. The lettering that spells out the film’s title pays homage to 1950s Harper’s Bazaar covers, which in turn served as the inspiration behind the playful title sequence Gatti created for the film.
“Pedro’s idea was to invoke a Blake Edwards-type comedy, with hints of those 1950s Doris Day, Rock Hudson films,” Gatti said. “He wanted something that would put you in a good mood.”
Discussing Gatti’s design concepts for the film, Almodóvar told The Times in an email, “When he showed them to me, I knew our collaboration would be a long-running one.”
The two met in the early 1980s in Madrid. Gatti’s photography for the avant-garde fashion designer Sybilla, as well as his day job designing album covers, led him to run in the same circles as Almodóvar. Both were part of the countercultural movement known as La Movida Madrileña and their inspirations included everything from Disney and London’s Carnaby Street to Hammer horror films and the composer Henry Mancini.
After his work on “Women on the Verge,” Gatti was fittingly named the creative director of Vogue Italia in 1989. The job found him happily working at the intersection of art and commerce.
“What I love is for my work to interfere with people’s everyday lives,” Gatti said. “They’ll be walking down the street to get, I don’t know, eggs or something, and they’ll come in contact with one of my designs. It’s about stopping them in their tracks.”
He thinks back to the black, gun-heeled shoe that served as the centerpiece of the poster for the 1992 melodrama “High Heels.” The image doesn’t explain the film so much as it distills its essence.
“The posters I love the most are the ones that have the least amount of elements,” Gatti said. “But those few elements need to work like icons.”
Gatti has a penchant for simple, eye-catching visuals. For “Talk to Her” (2002), at Almodóvar’s request, he sought to echo one of the posters for Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona.” He took a Peter Lindbergh photograph of the film’s lead actresses (Leonor Watling in profile, awash in blue; Rosario Flores facing us, awash in red) and turned it into a transfixing image which begs you to consider what hot and cold distance is being hinted at.
“To this day that is the most copied cover Pedro and I have ever made,” Gatti said. “There’s even a Barbra Streisand [album] cover that’s almost exactly like it, and I’m taking the time here to call it out.”
The irony is that Gatti doesn’t much enjoy working with on-set or promotional photos. “I always prefer them to be more graphic,” he said. “It makes for a bolder statement.”
In the case of “Volver” (2006), Gatti set a close-up image of Penélope Cruz against a printed floral backdrop. He also adorned Cruz’s hair with a distinctive hand-drawn red flower he’d lifted from the pattern in one of the dresses Cruz’s character Raimunda wears in the film.
For “The Room Next Door,” a tale of a woman (Tilda Swinton) grappling with a terminal illness and the possibility of a dignified death, Gatti knew he’d have to match the film’s tenor — and Almodóvar’s late career melancholy, in turn.
“It’s a story about maturity, about growing up,” he said. “You know back then, the attitude was to break things. But when you get to a certain age, you want to become a builder, instead. Pedro’s films are much more serene nowadays. It wouldn’t make sense to create for ‘The Room Next Door’ something that called back to those early films.”
“We’d already made a poster that would’ve been perfect,” Almodóvar said: “‘Talk to Her.’ But we couldn’t well repeat it.”
And so, choosing to echo Bergman’s “Persona” once more, Almodóvar asked the photographer Nico Bustos to snap a shot of Swinton and Julianne Moore that would turn their faces into a kind of landscape. In the finished design, both are lying down, looking up. Their skin tones blend with the rosy brown background that encases them.
“Pedro’s style can be quite loud,” Gatti said. “Like he’s yelling almost. But this one is not like that at all. It’s deeper. More intimate. And I wanted to break my own style and create something much calmer.”
Such serenity is proof, perhaps, of how they’ve both mellowed since they first met. “We’re both quite unbearable on our own,” Almodóvar said, referring to them as “insoportable.” “But we’ve endured because we’ve evolved together and created some excellent work.”
“Pedro and I have changed a lot,” Gatti said with a smile. “We’re not so insoportables anymore. We’re growing up and maturing.”
“Well, maybe not maturing so much as ripening,” he quipped.
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