DOORS AND CARS. SCENES BETWEEN TWOS. by Pedro Almodóvar

This week is less intense, we are shooting many of those sequences necessary for credibility where actors go in and out of houses, stop cars and park them, etc. Everything is important in a film but these sequences, required to locate the action and establish its geography, are hard for me. In La Mancha there were doors also, but people left them wide open so they didn’t interrupt action, they allowed it to flow. Those shots of entrances and exits from cars or houses are a requisite of film orthography, even if in quite a number of thrillers the screenwriter and the director decide make characters appear at each others spaces effortlessly, disregarding all obstacles. Take a look at “Basic Instinct” and you will see what I mean. Characters show up inside other people’s houses as if they walked through walls. And that’s not right.

I like all film genres and I always say I would like to touch all of them (without committing myself to their particular rules) but there are certain genres which I already know I will not tackle. For example a big budget war movie, with battles and crowd scenes.
Nothing bores me more (as Director) than a big budget film in general, with enormous amounts of people in front of, around and behind the camera.

And neither am I interested in directing the remake of a Japanese horror film. Or a biopic, not even that of “Liberace” (I was already offered this). A car and motorbike story. I don’t drive, I can’t tell one car from another and I don’t know how to make a car act, I just know that in thrillers they are a good decorative element (cars are needed for getaways and for shootouts with other cars) and that they also go very well with the young rebel style. But if I must pick a fetish from amongst the props, I’d rather take the typewriter. Without moving away from Nicholas Ray, I prefer a violent screenwriter (Bogart in “In a lonely place”) rather than the youngsters who worship cars as much as their genitals (“Rebel without a cause”).

I will not do sequels, prequels or remakes.
I won’t do a musical without spoken dialogue (I love musicals but I like to make characters talk once in a while); nor an epic movie in which the president of my country personally saves the world, or a buddy movie, or the adaptation of a Tolkien novel.

I have nothing against the “genres” which I don’t want to do, I simply don’t want to tackle them myself. (For example, I won’t do war movies but I admire “Apocalypse Now” and I’d love it if Coppola shot the sequel, dealing with the Iraq war, of course).

In general, I prefer working in scripts with few characters and I am particularly attracted to scenes with two or three characters, even at the risk of being slightly theatrical (I’m thinking of models such as Woody Allen, Bergman, Cassavetes). One can tell the story of the Universe through scenes between twos. This is not a maxim. I guess one of the advantages of a diary is the right to be subjective. I like scenes where two characters confront each other. My films are full of them. And maybe that is the reason why students at Madrid theatre schools (according to what I have been told) often pick scenes from my films for their class exercises.

Scenes with couples have a special magic. The format I am shooting in (anamorphic widescreen, that is, in scope) is the only one that enables you to have two characters together and in close up. And if there is a man inspired while lighting shots of two faces, it is the Director of Photography José Luis Alcaine. We have already shot some of these scenes and, just as I expected, Alcaine has drawn from his magic wand the darkness and the lights that connect characters.

Before beginning a film, the Director of Photography asks me for references, which are just a path to be followed in order to find your own path. I normally talk about the photography in other films (I often speak about Jack Cardiff, thinking particularly about the films he made with Michael Powell) or about painters (I frequently mention Edward Hopper and Zurbarán, as well as the pop artists) or I show him images which I have found in magazines or books.

When Alcaine asked me for references in order to create the texture and atmosphere of “Volver”, I couldn’t think of any. It is a pop comedy (pastel colours wouldn’t suit it), a false local film that involves a drama with surrealist elements, it isn’t a horror film, but some characters inhabit the darkness within the houses, the dim back rooms, it is an intimate story but with so much action that it seems like a domestic “Indiana Jones”. I didn’t tell Alcaine anything, I couldn’t think of a single film with which to compare it. But like the perfect artisan that he is, he has been able to wade into the story of “Volver” and reveal its images with the intensity and emotion of someone who is revealing an explosive and thrilling secret.

©Pedro Almodóvar
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