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Black sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almodóvar, bourgeois arthouse darling nonpareil and master of everything from screwball romps (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to clammy thrillers (Live Flesh, The Skin I Live In) – and sumptuous melodramas such as his 24th film, Bitter Christmas, a cautionary tale about the perils of autofiction.
We are sitting in the library of a London hotel and Almodóvar is dressed in a thin black windcheater, grey trousers and white trainers; add a whistle on a string and he could pass for a PE teacher. The 76-year-old director may have won more than 60 awards including two Oscars, five Baftas and six Goyas but when the shades come off today, he looks momentarily sorry for himself. He has been deaf in one ear since childhood, he tells me, and now the other one is giving up the ghost. In addition, a nasty stye has turned his left eye a gluey purple. Might he have picked it up while swimming? “I do swim almost every day because I have a pool,” he sighs. Never can those words have sounded so sorrowful.
Then again, mixing contradictory flavours is part of what he does. There is the blank, blase approach to extreme material (murder, paedophilia, telekinesis) in his 1984 comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? Or the climax of Matador, his kinky 1986 thriller, in which the race to prevent a double murder is paused while the characters gawp at a solar eclipse. A rape scene becomes comic in Kika, from 1993, and another rape is euphemised as a silent movie pastiche in 2002’s Oscar-winning Talk to Her.
The peculiarities of Bitter Christmas begin but do not end with its release date: whoever heard of a film with a festive title opening during a summer heatwave? Almodóvar agrees: “It is weird.” Though we both know his ardent base would swarm to see whatever he did. Even when he was making cheap, guerrilla-style Super-8 shorts, he has always known the love of a good fan. After the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, Almodóvar picked up thousands of underground followers in Madrid and Barcelona. They contributed more than $3,000 toward the budget of his 1980 debut, Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls on the Heap. Possibly the only thing he could do today to shrink his audience would be to ditch the eye-popping palette and make a film in black and white. “The colours are very important,” he says, as if anyone needed reminding.
Part of the new movie already existed as a short story called Bitter Christmas, written in 2003 and published 20 years later in Almodóvar’s collection The Last Dream. The story concerns a cult film director plagued, as Almodóvar really was at the time, by panic attacks and paralysing migraines. In the movie, Bárbara Lennie plays the stricken director, Elsa, who starts planning a new feature after years spent making commercials. “When I wrote Elsa’s little universe, I immediately got the idea that someone, a film-maker, was writing the story of Elsa that we were seeing,” he explains. That someone is Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia). Almodóvar, then, has directed a film about a director writing a film about a director writing a film.
Keeping track of what is happening on screen becomes a case of mind over meta. Why should we care about Elsa’s story, though, when it is merely the product of Raúl’s imagination? “I hope that when the audience discovers that the film-within-a-film is going to change, that this change will surprise and excite them. But you’re right, it’s very risky. I think it is the riskiest film I’ve ever made. I took a whole bunch of risks, even knowing that some might not land. It requires you to pay complete attention, and it does seem to me that film audiences are increasingly getting lazy.”
No prizes for guessing where he places the blame. Bitter Christmas sneaks in a jab at Netflix when someone suggests Raúl should take his new project there: “Don’t reduce me to making a TV movie!” he scoffs. Almodóvar made his own views plain in 2017 when he was president of the Cannes film festival jury. Two Netflix titles (Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories) were in competition that year even though they were never going to be exhibited theatrically in France; Almodóvar, who regarded the situation as a case of the US trampling all over European traditions, announced that he could not foresee awards being “given to a film that is then not seen on the big screen”. So it proved.
His passionate defence of “the hypnosis of the large screen” was countered, however, by one of his jurors, Will Smith, who stood up for Netflix. The star’s name alone causes an almighty eye-roll today from Almodóvar, stye or no stye. “Will Smith was saying very silly things. The American press said things against me and in favour of him. And then, after years, they discovered how Will Smith is.” He mimes a slap, referring to the star’s attack on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony. Almodóvar, whose film Parallel Mothers was nominated for two Oscars that year, had a ringside view of the assault; his snowy dot of a head can clearly be seen in images of the incident. He later described the acceptance speech given by Smith after winning the best actor Oscar as resembling “that of a cult leader”.
Reminded of this now, he says he thinks Smith still sounds like he is in a cult. “In our jury discussions at Cannes, everything he said sounded like that. He also showed me in all our discussions that he had very bad taste as a person. It was not a good experience being jury president. I didn’t want to do it but my brother [his producer Agustín Almodóvar] and [Cannes festival director] Thierry Frémaux insisted so much that I had to.”
Back to Netflix. Have the streamers won the war? “They’re very close to winning,” he says gravely. “All the elements to do with releasing a film theatrically are disappearing. The film art, the posters, which we can then look back on and want to collect. Even the elements that seem banal, such as the fashion that the stars wear to a premiere.” He falls silent, then adds forlornly: “The excitement.”
His principled stand in 2017 remains a lesson in defending home turf from bullies. “You can take this attitude to the political sphere. The European Union should be a shield for the crazy stuff Trump is coming up with in the US. He has created this lawless world, and we in the EU can demonstrate to him that if there’s something he wants to do, he needs to respect European laws. Trump is very angry at the EU and especially at Spain because our president has been brave and vocal in his opposition to his actions toward Ukraine and in his alliance with Israel.”
Bitter Christmas is, however, less engaged with global issues than with the interior landscape of the artist, as so many of Almodóvar’s films have been. Insularity is to be expected from a director who admitted in The Last Dream that “writing about myself [is] pretty much the only thing I do”, and Bitter Christmas both addresses auto-fiction and represents an example of it. Raúl, whose loyal assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), turns on him after discovering he has plundered her life in his screenplay, is, Almodóvar tells me, “a form of alter ego. At least 80% of Raúl’s dialogue is something I could say.”
An obsessive, perfectionist director himself, Almodóvar has written proxy figures before, most recently in Pain and Glory from 2019, where the auteur played by Antonio Banderas admits that life without film-making is meaningless. But as long ago as The Law of Desire, the torrid 1987 masterpiece, which he described in 1995 in the book Almodóvar on Almodóvar as “the key film in my life and career”, he was already alert to the threat posed by creative types like himself: that movie ends with the defenestration of a typewriter, which then bursts implausibly but spectacularly into flames.
I ask whether he concurs with the poet Czesław Miłosz, who said: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Almodóvar offers a minor tweak: “Not finished. But they’re going to have a lot of problems. It is pain that inspires me, not happiness. The writer by nature is selfish, which makes us dangerous to the people around us. It’s not very nice but this is what it is. That’s why I painted Raúl as almost the villain of the film.” Almodóvar claims to have only ever pilfered responsibly. “When I’ve been inspired by someone from my life, I’ve changed many elements to make them unrecognisable.”
That isn’t quite true. He took the facts of a friend’s traumatic encounter with Eta terrorists, made them Shias instead, and played the episode for giggles in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. The friend was aghast. “Oh yeah,” he says, remembering now. “She got very mad when she saw the film. At that time, I didn’t get it because I saw it as a homage: I’d turned something dark that happened in her life into comedy.”
Thoughts of the damage a writer can do lead to the subject of the late Alice Munro. In 2016, Almodóvar adapted three stories from Munro’s collection Runaway into his film Julieta; one of those stories, Silence, describes a woman who severs contact with her mother, as Munro’s daughter had done. It only emerged posthumously in 2024 that Munro had stayed married to her second husband after learning he had sexually abused her daughter years earlier.
“What’s overwhelming is that she wrote that story after everything that had happened,” the director says. “I try not to judge but I find that incredible. The whole family were silent, too, which is very dirty, and as dark as the position of the mother. If I knew what had happened there, my adaptation would have been completely different.” Would he still have made Julieta, then, even if the terrible facts had emerged in time? “Yes, but the story is much better with the stepfather, the mother doing nothing, the daughter escaping the family.” I don’t doubt his horror at Munro’s behaviour. There is a faint chill, though, in hearing the screenwriter within him express frustration that a vital piece of the narrative puzzle was hidden from view.
When it came to writing the scene in Bitter Christmas in which Mónica accuses Raúl of “vampiring” her, Almodóvar found the experience of self-criticism liberating. “All the things she says to him, I could easily say to myself. It’s refreshing and fun to be so nasty about yourself.” That might be because his own critics have been so thin on the ground. What they lack in number, however, they make up for in rigour. In 1993, film-maker Alex Cox pointed out that Almodóvar’s actors speak “the ‘official’ Spanish with the lisped ‘s’”, indicating “a certain societal correctness … which is naturally divisive and detrimental to the culture”. When Volver, a gumbo of ghosts, murder and mother-daughter devotion, was released in 2006, critic Peter Matthews saw only the “smooth, velvety craftsmanship” of a “failed iconoclast”. After Parallel Mothers, Leo Robson argued that, far from being rebellious, the director’s work has consistently parroted “orthodox and to some degree official Spanish attitudes”.
The auto-critique in Bitter Christmas is nowhere near as harsh as all that. Almodóvar may see Raúl, his alter ego, as something of a villain, but he has also described himself as a “victim” of his own passion for cinema. Whether villain or victim, what price has he paid? “Sometimes I’ve suffered during shoots for various reasons,” he recalls. “You can encounter problems that you can’t even fathom. There have been a lot of painful moments but that is the price. One must never complain because it’s part of the adventure.”
Almodóvar shows no evidence of slowing down, deafness and styes be damned. This October in Spain, he will even publish his first novel, The Man Who Only Wrote on Airplanes. Before we part, though, I remind him that he is now the same age that his hero Luis Buñuel was when he made his swansong, That Obscure Object of Desire, a film which ends, as The Law of Desire later would, with an explosion. How does it feel to be at that point? “Unlike Buñuel at that time, I am still completely full of desire to keep making films. Cinema is what motivates me and moves me to live. Buñuel was pressured by his producer when what he really wanted was to rest in Mexico.” A flash of defiance. “And I don’t ever want to rest.”
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