How Pedro Almodóvar Creates That Signature, Vibrant Look in His Films

This article contains spoilers about The Room Next Door.

Any concerns about Pedro Almodóvar sanding down his signature style for his first English-language feature film, The Room Next Door, are dispelled as soon one sees its the first shot. The vibrant colors, the emotional intimacy, the exacting compositions and dialogue—the setting may be transferred from Spain to New York, but other than that, it’s Almodóvar through and through.

the famous work by Andrew Wyeth.

Grau: Pedro, from the moment we spoke about this scene, had this reference of Andrew Wyeth’s painting in his mind. He liked the scope and the feeling of the image to be one of the important points of the scene. Obviously, it’s not a direct copy, but we wanted to connect with the American painters. Edward Hopper, for example, is also part of the film. This is the first American movie of Pedro’s, and the American references were important for us. This was shot in Spain; it was important as well to create that immense landscape, play with the clouds, play with the grass, play with the color of the clothes that Pedro’s filmography is so full of. In the same way Edward Hopper is a very big influence on the look of the film and a good translation of Pedro’s understanding of color in America.

Almodóvar: Edward Hopper with Velázquez, the Spanish painter, are two of the painters that have the most influence on directors. I remember David Lynch talking about the influence of Hopper in Blue Velvet; I remember getting the references of Edward Hopper in my earlier movies. The loneliness and all that.

In this case, I thought it was kind of funny just to imitate this painting. [Laughs] Because once we were there and we had a burning house, I said, we have to do Wyeth. I actually have it as a fridge magnet in my home. [Laughs] Whenever I can connect with something that’s popular, it’s important to me. In the case of this particular scene, there was the painting.

Ultimately, the movie is European, so even though there is some American iconography in the film—for example, a diner only exists in the United States, you don’t have diners anywhere else in the world—but really the story is a very intimate story happening between two women. The situation they’re enmeshed in is really a universal situation. And so the way the film was shot, I really couldn’t get away from their faces. It’s a film made up of a lot of close-ups, a lot of talking. It’s a story that is really told in words, told verbally. And so I didn’t really try to be citing American iconography, even though New York alludes to any number of American films or to US culture. It was a joy to have the buildings in the background of my shot. That’s something I had always wished I could do. And now I’ve done that.

The Lawn Chairs, Before

The deck is a key meeting point for Ingrid and Martha at their upstate retreat. This image of them reclining on its chairs also references a great American painter, while foreshadowing the site of the film’s climax.

Almodóvar: This is one of my favorite images in the film. I liked the contrast generated between the women in the foreground and that dark metal background with just the hint of nature on the side. This is a moment where Tilda is also referencing the Hopper painting—we’re making a comparison between them lying on the lawn chairs, as in the painting, they were also lying on the lawn chairs. There’s a foreshadowing here: She unconsciously, in a way, has already elected the place where she’s going to die. It’s almost as if the lawn chair was already waiting for her.

Tilda says to Julianne something along the lines of, “This is where we can enjoy the breeze,” much like the characters in the Hopper painting, “People in the Sun,” where you have characters on lawn chairs as well. But even in the painting, the immobility is already, in a way, connoting death. So this scene is playing that reference, foreshadowing death, foreshadowing the fact that Martha is going to come and lay on the same lawn chair where her mother died.

Grau: Pedro spends six months working very closely with Inbal Weinberg, the production designer, choosing every piece of furniture; with the costume designer, Bina Daigeler, deciding every piece of clothing. The importance of every element that he chooses and he crafts to put in front of the camera is vital to the overall look of the image.

The chairs, the mug, the table, the socks, and more especially obviously the house itself—and the contrast that that big, dark piece of metal makes with their skin. Thinking of every single detail of how the resulting image is going to be—this image speaks to that as well. All the time he spends crafting the elements that go in front of the camera, the concept that he was talking about—about death.

The Lawn Chairs, After

We return to the site in the immediate aftermath of Martha’s death, when Ingrid discovers her friend.

Almodóvar: One of the things that I really tried to do is to really strip these images of any kind of rhetoric. I wanted to make them as simple as possible. There are two moments that surround the character’s death. One is while she’s preparing herself for this moment, and then there’s the moment of the discovery, which you see pictured here. I kept it very, very simple. It is just her donning that yellow suit. I wanted to show that with great determination, she puts on this lipstick. Tilda and I were thinking about a beautiful shot from Black Narcissus by Michael Powell. When one of the nuns living with Deborah Kerr in the Himalayas goes crazy, she’s wearing a women’s dress and she’s painting her lips with this kind of fury. In Tilda, it’s determination against death. She’s facing death like facing a celebration—a party.

I just have the very simple shot, a close-up, of her grabbing the glass of water, and then that’s it. We move to the sequence where now we see Julianne discovering her. I wasn’t actually very sure about how I was going to shoot the scene, but as we were rehearsing, the way that the light was hitting Tilda felt very natural to me—and also kind of impressive, because death in many ways is both of those things. Very natural and also can give you a jolt. Edu in these sequences really also stripped the frame of any rhetorical flourishes. You see both the natural quality of the death that’s here represented, as well as the sadness on Julianne’s face. The light is all on Tilda. It’s a way of acknowledging that this is a moment, this is a frame, where death is the protagonist.

Grau: This image is very close to my heart, because it’s when all the elements that we talk about come together in one image. We chose the right time of day with the right composition, the right elements, the right costume, the right elements of decoration, the reflection of the trees, and a hint of the reflection of the trees behind the house. But the person at the center—Tilda dying, all eyes go there. It just gets stuck in your mind.

That’s a dream for a filmmaker, to create images that will resonate in people’s minds after you’re watching the film. Pedro spent a while just moving Tilda’s face around so as to grasp that perfect shadow on the lawn chair. Pedro sculpted her position and her face position. We had the perfect shadow symbolizing what remains of the previously alive.

The Apartment

Almodóvar based most of the New York locations in the film on actual places he’d visited while researching, including this apartment that Ingrid rents from a friend. It just so happened to rather closely correspond to Almodóvar’s iconic palette.

Almodóvar: It’s a replica of a place that we discovered in New York that I really loved. The apartment belongs to a jewelry designer; almost all the furniture in the apartment had been pulled out of the trash or were pieces abandoned on the street, but her taste was exquisite.

Grau: This was in Lower Manhattan. On one of the scouts that Pedro and Inbal did in the very early stages of the movie, they went to see a few apartments of real New Yorkers. Some of them were war journalists, some of them were drivers—and they fell in love with basically two apartments. One is this one. With Inbal, he reproduced the apartment exactly like it was, in Madrid. They loved this wall painted like it had all the layers of different time periods, that it was painted in such a beautiful poetic way that they spent weeks actually painting it.

Almodóvar: It was very difficult to do it, like painting a beautiful abstract. Also, it’s really a temporary space that Julianne’s character rents from a friend. This is not a writer’s apartment. This apartment belonged to someone who’s an artist, a jeweler. That’s what I was wanting to evoke for this particular moment.

The Daughter

The film ends on an epilogue that brings Martha’s daughter into the picture, as she meets Ingrid and reflects on her mother’s passing. The twist: She, too, is played by Swinton.

Almodóvar: One of the things that was important to me is that when Michelle enters the room and is looking at the bed where her mother died, the shadow presents almost as if Martha was there—as if her mother was there. The natural lighting of the scene threw that shadow on the door. But during the postproduction process, we actually accentuated it such that we could have that suggestive sense that what we’re seeing here is both mother and daughter.

Grau: There’s even a moment in this shot where Michelle, played by Tilda, disappears behind the door frame in a way that we almost don’t see her face. It’s a Polanski moment. And what we only see is the shadow drawn in the red door. Pedro thought about this red door; it was very important for him, because of what it meant for Tilda’s room and her closeness to the death. So we spent a bit of time lighting this for the shadow. The shadow was Tilda’s face. In Pedro’s films, sometimes shadow is as important as the light—the symbology that they throw your mind to. It creates a different element that is not reality. It just sends you somewhere else that has more of a poetic, magical element.

Almodóvar: We follow the shadow. We don’t see Tilda—we only see the shadow reflected in the walls and in the furniture—at the end of this shot.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Listen to Vanity Fair’s Little Gold Men podcast now.