CRISES AND LIES
by Pedro Almodóvar

There’s a moment, during every one of the processes involved in the manufacture of a film, when I go to pieces and think that I have irretrievably lost control of my movie. It happens when I write it, while we are shooting (when editing I suffer more that one crisis) and, certainly, when the film is ready and no one has seen it yet, that’s when I truly shit myself.
For the crises to be short lived, you need to have a very close relationship with what you are shooting. I know them, I’ve experienced them in every single one of my earlier fifteen films. Always. Like in all passions (and for me, making movies is essentially a passion) crises evaporate when one irrationally loves what one is doing. (And it has nothing to do with whether the film afterwards turns out to be good or bad, whether the crises were justified or not; often crises arise out of very specific problems. I’m talking about the crises that surface without a justifiable reason and still manage to drag you down into a sea of confusion).
I’m currently living one of those moments. I feel (and I am sometimes absolutely positive) that all I am doing is a mistake, including this “dear” diary. Experience tells me that the only thing I can do is take the plunge and closely watch every movement, every shot, every phrase, every pause, every tear and every joke. I shouldn’t be talking about this. A director’s loneliness is sacred. And the director himself should be the first one to respect it, without sharing it with you as I am doing right now.
You can take it as yet another contradiction. It’s the problem of thinking/writing out loud. This diary is a monologue in shouts.
It’s now twelve days since I wrote all of the above. I’m a different person. I feel much more optimistic.
I think I’ve mentioned it before: a shooting is a closed home from which you do not leave until it is finished.
My existence in “Volver” is very poor in anecdotes not related to the shooting. I read at nights but I can’t really grasp a thing, I don’t watch TV. I do listen to music during the long trips to the set. I don’t see anyone (I don’t go out). Sometimes someone comes to visit. There’s not much worth mentioning and that is why the rare things that leave an imprint and manage to captivate me acquire an enormous proportion, for sure an exaggerated one.
I’ll mention some of them.
Music. For me, finding an album that stuns me (or a book) is as tremendous and important as finding a good friend. This year I’ve discovered Antony and the Johnsons, Cat Power, Nouvelle Vague, Feist, Rufus Wainright, Julien Jacob, CocoRosie, M. Ward and rediscovered my Brazilian classics (Elis Regina, Maysa Matarazzo, Tom Zé, the Gilberto family and the Veloso family, etc. Jobim and Mina always). I recommend all of them. I cannot think of better company than the one this music has provided during the daily journeys to the sets were we were shooting. With books and films I haven’t been quite as lucky. I go to the cinema faithfully every Saturday, but I haven’t seen anything interesting. My latest discovery is still Kim Ki-Duk (3-Iron, Spring, Summer…) and that was last year. The only thing I remember from this year is Pan Cham Wook’s “Old Boy” and Hirokazo Koreeda’s “Nobody Knows”, a title redolent of Cesare Pavese (“Laborare stanca”) and a story which grows with each passing day inside Juan José Millás’ memory, as he himself confessed when he came to see us one day during the shooting.
Millás is the only author whose words have managed to captivate me during the summer exile in which I am still immersed. His photo captions in El País during August, as well as his columns, were widely discussed by the whole crew. A critical and incisive mirror of Spanish reality. Very inspired. (In my desk I’ve kept the page of August 22. The photo that he comments depicts three Spanish bishops during the demonstration against the legalization of gay marriages and in defence of the traditional family. All three are dressed in black and wear sunglasses of a style between policemen and gangsters. The June sun hits them straight in the face and gives the three of them an extremely sinister expression. Juanjo Millás began the literary illustration of the photo like this: “If God had wanted his representatives on earth to be these three men in black, he wouldn’t have put so much colour in nature”. Is there a better way to begin a text about the politicization of the Spanish Catholic church, that has sided with the most brutish faction of the right-wing?
I have a debt towards Juanjo Millas which I will settle right now. In one of the chapters of this diary, the one devoted to Almagro, I recounted a conversation I had with a stranger in the street about “Pedro Páramo” and its relationship with “Volver” or viceversa. In that conversation I shrewdly stressed the coexistence of the dead and the living both in “Pedro Páramo” and in “Volver”. The truth is I was lying. I wasn’t the author of my words, Juanjo Millás was. It’s true that I met a boy in the street who asked me whether “Volver” was inspired in “Pedro Páramo”. By chance, that same day I received an email from Juanjo who had just read my script and was telling me what he had thought about it. Amongst other compliments, Juanjo described the parallelism with Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece, the latter being furiously Mexican and mine furiously from La Mancha. I stole some of Juanjo’s words and inserted them into a conversation that never actually took place but which almost did.
I lie very little when I talk about my films. During the promotion and the premiere, naturally I hide or conceal information about the crew, the actors and my own assessment of the film. The level of concealment varies from 15% (in “Speak to Her”, for example) to 30% in “Bad Education”. So far in the shooting/diary, my lies are no higher than five percent. At the end I promise to say the exact percentage.
Juanjo visited us on a very special day, the day we shot what could be termed as the film’s baptism. The moment when Penélope sings in an open air restaurant the famous tango, “Volver”, with a bulería rhythm. The voice that had fitted it perfectly when the song was recorded had been Estrella Morente’s. I say “had” because when we shot the playback, Penélope made it hers with such precision and passion that she left us all crying in admiration. I swear that what I’m telling you is one hundred percent true, Penélope Cruz is turning this film into a personal festival. Watching her act every day is a true spectacle for the eyes of the face and the soul. We still have four weeks of shooting before us, I don’t know who has taken over whom, the character over Penélope or Penélope over the character, but Penélope is Raimunda (the character in the film) as much as Raimunda is Penélope. And for me, being able to witness this fusion, gives me a pleasure which I wouldn’t know how to explain.

©Pedro Almodóvar
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