After ‘Bitter Christmas,’ Pedro Almodóvar Might Be Done with English-Language Movies

With Cannes entry “Bitter Christmas,” Oscar-winning Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar (“Talk to Her”) is back. My bet: he will not shoot another film in English and will stick to making movies in his native language. Since his debut “Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls Like Mom” in 1980, Almodóvar has written singularly identifiable, heightened, rhythmic, and mellifluous Spanish dialogue.

While Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore adeptly wrangled his translated English in Golden Lion-winner “The Room Next Door,” which deployed his bright Almodóvar colors and exacting mise-en-scène, the director did not enjoy dealing with the unions in New York. “In Spain everything is much more immediate, and also it is my language, it’s my culture,” he told me during the New York Film Festival. While he doesn’t rule out making another English-language movie, it would have to be small-scale. “I don’t find myself, anymore, capable of dealing with a production that is chaotic with a lot of people and a lot of characters.”

Now he’s back to his self-referential, meta autofiction mode in full force. The results are exhilarating. “Bitter Christmas” offers a movie within a movie, as writer-director Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia) crafts a script that lifts some key story points from his friends’ experiences. Even though Almodóvar considers the movie one of his riskiest, it’s the filmmaker’s biggest hit in Spain since “Volver.”

Almodóvar considers “Bitter Christmas” to be “twins” with Oscar-nominated “Pain and Glory,” which starred his old favorite Antonio Banderas as his alter ego. “‘Pain and Glory’ is more about the physical pain, right?,” he said. “The character [Raul] has had a lot of surgeries, and his fear is about that the fact that he’s not going to be physically able to to handle another another film shoot. Whereas in this film I deal with a different pain, which is the pain of writer’s block, of the blank page, or writing something that doesn’t quite come together for you. The character of Aitana in the film says to Raul, ‘you know we are all losers, you have lost grace.’ And by grace it means inspiration, something that is equally painful to that writer-director as the physical pain was to the writer director in ‘Pain and Glory.'”

Penelope Cruz, Pedro Almodovar and Antonio Banderas
‘Pain and Glory’ photocall, 72nd Cannes Film Festival, France – 18 May 2019David Fisher/REX/Shutterstock

Mostly when Almodóvar sits down to write, he’s making things up. He’s gotten into trouble in the past for raiding his friends’ stories. “There is not any law that creates the limits of the autofiction,” he said. “There is no law that’s going to define the limits of what you can appropriate and what you can’t appropriate. But if I’m inspired by the life of someone who’s close to me, who’s going through a difficult time, as a writer, you are selfish, because what propels you is the idea, even if it means going against the relationship. I don’t feel comfortable the two or three times that I did it. This is the limit: not to hurt anyone. But it’s normal that writers are influenced by everything in life you see, you talk to with others, you read, you see movies. So it’s impossible to renounce the influence of the life of others.”

And he’s passionate about making movies. As Raúl says in the film, “This is all there is to my life.” But Almodóvar has never suffered writer’s block. “I inspire myself because this is the profession that I know better than anyone, than any other,” he said. “The only thing that separates me from this alter ego is that I never lived a creative crisis. The experience I have had is more scripts that have taken me a long time to find the solution and to get them to gel together. But I’ve always succeeded ultimately.”

And he only recently discovered panic attacks, which took him by surprise. “I hadn’t previously experienced panic attacks, but now I have,” he said. “At that moment I was unconscious, and it was something awful, awful.”

‘Bitter Christmas’Sony Pictures Classics

Needless to say Almodóvar spends most of his days sitting at his desk at the computer. (Hence his legendary bad back.) Mostly he enjoys writing but also feels the clock ticking. “You always feel like time is lacking, right?” he said. “Especially that moment when you get that idea that’s going to become the motor of your story, you feel like there’s no time to breathe, because you want to get it all down as fast as possible. They’re quite intense days as we’re trying to get this. And then once I’ve started the story, my process is to get up in the morning and start writing. Those are some of the most pleasurable days in my life because you know where you’re going. But also, I have to pay attention to everything, because in that moment that you are possessed by the idea, you experience everything in your life filtered through the sensibility of the story that you’re writing.”

Listening to music feeds his creative beast. While he was writing “Talk to Her,” he listened to Caetano Veloso’s “A Kukuku Paloma,” a song that he had heard thousands of times, “but then it was like an epiphany. I discovered the song, and you feel it in a different way.” And in “Bitter Christmas,” his two actresses in the movie-within-the-movie listen to “Weeping Woman” from the filmmaker’s longtime muse, Mexican chanteuse Chavela Vargas.

Pedro Almodovar on the set of “Bitter Christmas.”” “

Finally, the filmmaker had fun making himself the bad guy. “This was a new structure for me,” he said. “What I liked about it was that I could talk about myself as a writer-director, but mostly I also enjoyed the part of becoming the villain in a sense of that story. But the spectator does have to pay a lot of attention because if they go to the bathroom for two minutes, they’re going to miss something and be lost.”

In one scene, the filmmaker offers a close-up of the cursor on the computer screen. “Even though the cursor itself is not a very cinematic thing to see,” he said, “it’s his call to creativity, right? It’s the thing that calls him and pulls him in to have to tell his story. So it’s autofiction.”

Going forward, Almodóvar has no plans to put himself at the center of another film. “I promise not to talk about me anymore,” he said. “I was interested since the beginning of my career about the origin of creation and the relation with reality. Inspiration and life together, like the two sides of a coin. This mysterious question that so fascinates me is about not just where does creativity come from, how does it come, when does it come, how does it manifest? I have reached the end of my exploration around this.”

Up next: He’s writing, he said. “This is almost the opposite of this one. The new one will be very different.”

A Sony Pictures Classic release, “Bitter Christmas” is now playing in theaters in New York and Los Angeles. It expands nationally on November 25.