The Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar starred this Saturday in Paris in a master class in which he gave keys to his way of making films, his passion for actors or color and in which he confessed that “I wouldn’t know how to tell a story about absolutely happy beings.”
“Illness and pain are always present in my films, it is a way of energizing the action through the characters’ reaction to that pain. It would be impossible to make a film in which the illness did not appear,” said the filmmaker in a cinema in the French capital, where a retrospective of his is being projected under the umbrella of the Pompidou Center in Paris, which is closed for renovation.
The event was attended by his brother and producer Agustín Almodóvar, as well as the composer of the music for many of his films, Alberto Iglesias.
Almodóvar, who answered questions from a group of film students and reacted to the excerpts broadcast on the screen of some of his films, assured that one of the common threads is “accompaniment” to people affected by a problem, as in ‘Volver’ or ‘Hable con ella’.
The director pointed out, however, that he does not usually include dramatic scenes in his films and prefers that the protagonists be the ones to narrate them.
“That shows my fascination with actors,” said the filmmaker, who confessed that the performers are the essential element of his films and congratulated himself on the fact that many of them have become stars with him.
Among them he cited Antonio Banderas, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes and Penélope Cruz: “The people who have worked with me have subsequently had great success.”
“My characters are complex. I try to explain them exhaustively, they are human beings that the viewer must understand. I don’t like to judge the characters, especially because I subject them to extreme situations. In the end, I become friends with my characters, but I don’t solve all their problems, I accompany them on a path in which I try to ensure that in the end they are in a better situation than when the film began,” he said.
The director from La Mancha began by reviewing his beginnings in cinema, that Super8 camera with which he shot scenes that he later dubbed himself, and after watching an episode of ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom and other girls of the bunch’ he assured that “at that time I still didn’t know how to make films”, although “I always knew – he said – that it was a great party.”
About to premiere his latest film, ‘Bitter Christmas’, selected in the official section of the Cannes Festival, the 76-year-old filmmaker was delighted with the tribute paid to him by the Pompidou Center.
“For me it is wonderful because it is a way to celebrate the cinema I have made and also celebrate the fact that time has respected my films quite a bit and they have not become old,” the director said a few days ago in Paris.
