Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (born September 25, 1949) is a Spanish filmmaker, director, screenwriter, producer, and former actor.

Quotes

• I'm an artist…and I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There, the director is part of the crew, not the main creator. I'm too old to change now. I wouldn't know how to do it.
  • On why Almodóvar has forgone directing a Hollywood film in “Pedro Almodóvar interview for The Skin I Live In” in The Telegraph (2011 Aug 13)

• I make fiction films because I like representation. That’s why I don’t make documentaries, and I don’t think I’ll ever make documentaries. The colors of my movies are not completely real, because I like that distance, that this is a movie, and reality is over there. I don’t want to make something that looks completely real. I want a representation of that. And this is what was appealing to me and why I started making movies.
  • On his love of fictional films in “'I Make Fiction Films Because I Like Representation': Director Pedro Almodóvar On All About My Mother” in Filmmaker Magazine (Fall 1999 interview reprinted 2019 Jul 6)

• Whenever I've shot my previous films, I've felt phantoms of my own cinema past and personal past hovering over me. They accompanied me through those films. But this time I felt completely on my own. For the first time this film did not go hand-in-hand with my memories. The tone is different as well. It's very austere.
  • On how his 2011 film The Skin I Live In differed from his earlier efforts in “Pedro Almodóvar interview for The Skin I Live In” in The Telegraph (2011 Aug 13)

• I rely on it, it’s an addiction, the need to tell stories. If anything, my relationship with film has become more tense, more of a problem, because there is always that question: when will my time be up? Will this be the last film I make?...Perhaps this is the reason I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. Quite the opposite, I think I’ve cut back. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have. It’s finished up being both the end and the means for me.
  • On how much filmmaking means to Almodóvar in “Pedro Almodóvar: ‘I can no longer hide’” in The Guardian (2019 Aug 11)

• In fact I was never the son my parents wanted. I mean, I think that they really loved me. But it’s something I realised from a very young age.
  • On his relationship with his parents in “Pedro Almodóvar: ‘I can no longer hide’” in The Guardian (2019 Aug 11)

• I've had a very good relationship with my mother, but there's a whole generation of Spanish women who have struggled: very strong fighting figures who carry their families. These women are now in their 80s and feel that life has been unfair to them; they don't know how to grow old and how to be happy old ladies.
  • On the dilemmas faced by generations of Spanish women in “Pedro Almodóvar on Aging, Mom and 'Pain and Glory'” in AARP Magazine (2019 Oct 4)

• But it’s one of my worries, I can’t get over it in my mind. I mean, I can’t even reconcile myself to the fact that death is real. Plus I’m an atheist, so I have no belief in the afterlife and no creed to help me out. I see the whole thing as unnatural, I know that sounds odd.” He snorts. “So yes, I’m definitely afraid of dying.
  • On his views on death in “Pedro Almodóvar: ‘I can no longer hide’” in The Guardian (2019 Aug 11)

External links