Odd, because you never shied away from showing rape in any of your earlier films, like Matador and Kika. In the end, I created such a relationship between myself and the character that when I came to the point of the rape, not only did I not want to see it I didn't want the audience to see it. My challenge was just to present him as a human being. It had to be a very sweet psychopath, and a psychopath who understands reality but who, at the same time, lives on a parallel plane to reality. My challenge was trying to create a psychopath for whom the audience can feel empathy. You've written some over-the-top characters in your films-transsexual fathers in All About My Mother, heroin-sniffing nuns in Dark Habits-but I imagine that rapist nurse was the most difficult character you've ever written. The most eccentric and extraordinary things that appear in my movies-the most surreal things-all come from the papers. It's almost as if a little bug sort of lands on your head and transmits this idea to you, but then you have to develop it. The origin of a plot is always very mysterious. So I was interested in the human story, in the contrast between the parents' reaction to the rape and the law's reaction. They would visit him in jail, bring him gifts. He had raped their daughter but saved her life.
But listen to this: The family of the girl was grateful to this guy. Of course, the police took him to prison. He actually saved her life? By raping her?īy raping her, yes. Well, it is alleged that this guard raped the corpse of that girl, and she woke up. And in the night-I imagine he was feeling very alone. I don't know if by now my imagination has added to the story, but her body was attended by a night watchman, a guard, who I, of course, also imagined was very guapo, handsome. One day, the body of a young woman was brought to the morgue. It happened in the old Yugoslavia, in a morgue. There was another news story I followed in the European papers that inspired Talk to Her. What grabbed me was the idea that someone who is supposedly almost dead-she was brain-dead, after all-could also engender life. I knew there was something behind it that could inspire me. A nurse impregnated a woman who had been in a coma for about nine years. And you're right, I took notes about that case. Remember when Chevy Chase used to crack, "This just in: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead," and everyone laughed? That's the exact cultural moment Almodóvar began laughing, turning the whole riotous act into theater, his own 35mm liberation movement.Īlways.
In fact, his whole career pretty neatly aligns with the death of Franco, in 1975, and the cultural awakening that followed it, known _en español _as la movida. (The men, he says, "were always out working and then going to the bars.") His passions were hemmed in by the inevitable pillars of life back then: the Catholic Church and the repressive regime of Francisco Franco.
It is the love of a hyperactive mother-insistent, highly tolerant, a little too indulgent perhaps, but always with a clean motive: to protect what she's put on this earth.Īlmodóvar grew up in small-town Spain, nurtured by a community of women from whom he learned to tell stories. There isn't a director alive who more fully loves the people he creates, even when they do bad things, like put bodies in freezers or tie up their favorite porn star. If you've never seen any of Pedro Almodóvar's movies-never embraced the high kitsch, low cleavages, and saturated colors of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the sweet sadism of Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, or the beauty (and body) of Penélope Cruz in Volver-you're missing one of the greatest love affairs ever captured on film: the one between Almodóvar and his characters.
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