ALMAGRO by Pedro Almodóvar

The best is, without doubt, to take a stroll at night, on the way to the hotel, and find that the villagers still sit outside by their doors, on wicker chairs, to get a breath of fresh air. I thought this habit had almost vanished but no, the whole family sits, almost in silence, enjoying the breeze that travels through the streets before and after midnight. Time stands still. We greet every family group that me encounter along our way and they answer in one voice, infecting us with their balsamic silence.

The first week of shooting is over. I came to Madrid on Friday, at the end of the day’s work. The “girls” and most of the team stayed behind in Almagro. I miss them and I like that. I can concentrate better in the solitude of Madrid and I prefer to feel homesick for the shoot and see it from a distance, in perspective. I go away from Almagro to be able to miss it. I feel that my films are getting progressively more autobiographical. At least, I am much more aware of how my memories stroll along the sets, like the breeze along the streets of Almagro, in the night.

When I hear Chus Lampreave, I hear my mother. The wafers (local confectionery) which she gives Lola Dueñas and Penélope Cruz for the road were done by my sister María Jesús, and so was the ratatouille. When I have any doubts, I call my other sister, Antonia, for whom the memories of our childhood remain spotlessly clear. I’ve even asked her about the kind of cloths and brushes that are normally taken to the cemetery to clean the tombstones. My mother left her, as part of her inheritance, the respect for all the social, religious, familiar and neighbourly rites traditional of La Mancha.

Anyway, everything in “Volver” is fiction. But the best way to tell a fiction (at least in my case) is to dress it with reality. Reality and fiction come together without confusion. I feel that I can now hold a direct conversation with the film I’m making. This is neither an endogamous nor a nostalgic feeling but by now it is easier for me to accept that films are my life, that they arise from it and sometimes give rise to it.

Penélope gave me a very special present during the first day of shooting; she had told me about it some time ago. It’s a book, perfectly bound and printed, covering the last five years in our relationship. It is called “Pedro and Me”. It has the shape and the volume of a coffee table book, with more images than text. The texts are an anthology of the emails we have exchanged in the last years. The images represent our common history since we did “Live Flesh”. The winter night in Madrid. Penélope giving birth in the bus, with the help of Pilar Bardem. Our promotional tours. The Palm Springs desert were the old Hollywood stars end their days, desiccated by the sun. The strolls in Central Park. Our lunches at the Sunset Marquis with Billy Bob Thorton or Salma Hayek. Hugs and awards. Photos along Sunset Boulevard with its scattered billboards. Fantastic outfits (hers) and my faithful all black Armany tuxedo. The smiling and tense hours inside the limousines. Hugs in Madrid, in New York, in L.A., in Paris, in Cannes. Cheek to cheek. The passage of time is much more obvious in me, she starts out looking like a child and ends in her current splendour.

Reading the messages gives me a weird impression. They are so real. She is concise, and it’s obvious she is prompting me to make me tell her more things because she plans to do a book. All my states of mind appear in my messages, she has censored some bits of gossip, in case someone reads them. But in those messages I manage to see myself with the eyes of a furtive spectator.
A wonderful present.

We leave Almagro today. I’m writing from a patio that is swamped with electric material and rocking chairs with ‘no sitting’ signs. It is one in the afternoon and all the shots we have to do today take place in the street and it’s impossible to shoot until at least four because the sun multiplies on the white walls, the light is blinding and far to flat. We have to wait. The team has disbanded, at this point I like to stay at one of the lifeless interior sets and enjoy the solitude, the clutter of objects and the silence.

During these two weeks, contact with the villagers has been wonderful. Both with those we cross in the streets and with the ones that have worked with us as extras. In most of the sequences of La Mancha there are groups of women and men and, I must say, I’ve never had better extras. There is something priceless, all they are supposed to do in front of the camera mirrors their own lives. Their presence has given depth and truth to those sequences where they participate. Women from this land know well what it is like to clean a tombstone, to pray at a wake, greet the neighbours, etc. And the faces of the men, slowly weathered by the sun and the wind, have a weight and an expressiveness that would be impossible to improvise.

Yesterday when I was on my way to the catering I met a young man who wished me luck for the shooting. He seemed well informed (almost a specialist, I would say). He asked me if the film had anything in common with Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece. At first I thought of the title, that includes my name and the word “páramo” (wilderness in Spanish), which in a sense evokes the flatness common in the geography of La Mancha, particularly in the area where I grew up. And I also thought about Rulfo’s other masterpiece, “El Llano en Llamas” (The Burning Plain). In “Volver”, the main characters’ parents die, burned to death in a fire caused by the east wind. The question surprised me but I answered anyway, flattered. Our dialogue was as follows: It could be that the story in “Volver” recalls that of “Pedro Páramo” but my script has nothing to do with the novel, except that in both the living and the dead coexist with great ease, as well as the real with the unreal, the fantastic with the everyday, the imagined with the truly experienced, dreams with wakefulness. While watching the film (like when reading the book) I would like spectators to be overwhelmed by a permanent dreamlike feeling. I dream that the spectator, even while awake, feels trapped in a dream that is nothing other than my film. And in any case, Rulfo’s novel is furiously Mexican while the script of “Volver” is furiously from La Mancha.

Do you like films with ghosts?

Not normally. I’m interested in how Buñuel or Bergman treat the apparition of the dead, without changing the light or creating an extraordinary effect. Ghosts appear in front of the person who is thinking about them without pyrotechnical effects. They are inner ghosts. I like Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and “Vertigo”. And “Sunset Boulevard” where the leading character who is floating dead in the pool talks about himself when he was alive as if he were a ghost, trapped by the desires of another ghost (Norma Desmond, who is in turn cared for by the phantasmagorical Erich von Stroheim). William Holden when alive is the ghost of the drowned William Holden. A wonderful use of the off-screen voice, endlessly imitated since then. I also like Tourneur, when he tells stories about beings of other species. In general, I don’t like horror stories with ghosts (M. Night Shyamalan), or films with angels, or with Presidents of the United States who keep on saving the world.
What ghost does “Volver” evoke?
It isn’t a ghost, but the whole film is infused with the presence of my absent mother.
Were there any ghosts in “Bad Education” ?
My childhood, memory turned into legend. One of the actors also turned out to be quite ghostly, but that is a different kettle of fish.
And at this point I decide to end this dialogue which has become a monologue.

P.S. I feel that this chapter has turned out a little soft-hearted. But I have really enjoyed the last two weeks and happiness is not a good muse. The actresses have delighted me, all of them. The beauty, freshness and visceral nature of Penélope. The burning look of the adolescent Yohana Cobo. The intensity and truth of Lola Dueñas. The ease and precision of Carmen Maura, capable of giving a moving performance on the spot, without rehearsals or trial takes. And the powerful revelation, sublime, accurate, of a true cinematographic animal: Blanca Portillo (a mixture between María Casares and the Gutiérrez Caba sisters). Thanks to all of them.

©Pedro Almodóvar
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