Pedro Almodóvar
Jeremy Brock: Good afternoon, early evening.
Welcome, I’m Jeremy Brock. On behalf of BAFTA,
welcome to the tenth edition of the BAFTA
International Screenwriters Lectures in conjunction
with Lucy Gard and the JJ Charitable Trust.
In case any of you don’t know, all the lectures are
available on the BAFTA Guru website and form part
of BAFTA’s learning and new talent programme, of
which we’re enormously proud. Our thanks also go to
the Curzon Cinema for hosting us while we do up the
front room.
 
It gives us huge pride to be hosting this year’s opening
night speaker with Pedro Almodóvar, feted countless
times at Cannes, the winner of multiple BAFTAs,
Goyas, Césars and Golden Globes, Pedro is
internationally renowned as one of the world’s
foremost filmmakers. Since his first feature in 1980, his
works as a writer and director include Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me
Down!, All About My Mother, Volver, Julieta and this
year’s wonderful Pain and Glory.
 
We’ll begin with a montage which will feature the
work of all this year’s speakers, that includes this
wonderful list Céline Sciamma, Noah Baumbach,
Robert Eggers, Bong Joon-ho and of course Pedro.
Pedro will lecture, followed by a Q&A with the
foremost UK producer Duncan Kenworthy, after
which we will as we always do open it up to questions
from the floor. So if you’d very kindly cue the montage
now please.
[Applause]
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to
introduce Pedro Almodóvar.
[Applause]
Pedro Almodóvar: Good afternoon. The title of this
lecture is ‘Telling Stories,’ and I will try to read directly
in English so wish me good luck.
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[Laughter]
 
I suppose this is part of being a screenwriter, I always
put titles on everything that I do, at least that I write.
I have always conceived of cinema, the things I’ve
made, as having a representation of life. Not of life
itself, but its representation, and perhaps for that
reason the scripts I’ve written until now have been
inspired by reality. Reality in all its manifestations:
what I hear, what I see, what I experience in my own
life, the fears that affect me, the most atrocious events
that I’ve read about in the newspaper, or the most
surprising and moving ones. Family life, friends,
solitude, beauty, the failures and pleasure one finds
throughout life and in the origin of fiction.
 
I have always been fascinated by creation in itself and
by the interaction between the process of creation and
its creator. New items in the newspaper, exaggerated
and extraordinary incidents, are usually a great source
of inspiration. For example, I’ll read in the newspaper
that in New York a woman in a coma for nine years
became pregnant and gave birth to a child. A few days
later they discovered that the culprit was an orderly in
the clinic. Beyond the moral judgment, what struck
me most was that a body which science had defined as
clinically dead, that is determined by the brain, could
engender a new life. That extraordinary fact inspired
me to make the first note on Talk to Her, the story of a
perfect nurse who looks after a young woman in a
coma with whom he ends up falling in love.
But I’m not inspired only by extraordinary facts. At
times, inspiration comes from everyday situations. It’s
best if I give you another example. I was in a bar
having a coffee, it was time for the news programme
and the television was on. The main newsreader talked
about a murder; a man had been found dead. It
suddenly occurred to me that I’d like the newsreader
to continue saying ‘and I know who killed him.’
[Laughter]
‘And I’m going to tell you.’ The idea amused me
enough so as to make a few notes. I went home, I

developed and developed the situation that had just
occurred to me. First clip please.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Amazing Victoria Abril, I was very lucky to meet her
for this character. Well this is the part of my success I
have to say, that I could work with wonderful actors
and actresses; that they understood me perfectly since
the very beginning, because the stories were not the
usual stories they’re used to doing in Spain. So thank
you Victoria Abril.
 
Well after reading—this block of sequences was like
ten pages, and then I thought it was a good idea for a
short film. Then in a few days I read the minute story
again, and I found it interesting. I was intrigued by
someone who could do what this newsreader did, and
fascinated about the idea of a confession of such a
calibre taking place right in the middle of a news
programme. I immediately wanted to write, I mean to
know, the reason why the newsreader killed someone
and then confessed it, and also what happened to her
after the public confession. But to satisfy my curiosity,
I had to write everything that happened before the
television programme, and what happened afterwards.
 
Reality provides you with the first lines of the story,
but the writer—if he’s sufficiently curious—must write
the rest to know what happens. In certain everyday
situations as having a coffee in a bar while the
television is showing a news programme, I found the
seed of High Heels.
 
It can also happen that what inspired the first idea
disappears while the film, I mean the script, is being
developed. At times the inspiration, the starting point
of a narrative is an excuse that leads you to a story you
couldn’t imagine before. And the origin of the story,
what drove you to write it, disappears along the way.
Chance is an essential part of writing, as is tenacity
and curiosity and talent. Writing a script is always an
adventure; I always have the impression that I’m not
the owner of the story I’m writing, but rather the story
chooses me as a way of manifesting itself. I act as a
medium; the author’s relationship, at least in my case,
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with the origin of the story and its development is
always mysterious and unpredictable. I am not the one
who decides it, at least until a first draft. That is where
the most important work in writing begins: correcting
the material, time and again. Writing a script is
rewriting it continuously until it’s done for the sound
mixers.
 
When I say that inspiration always comes from reality,
I include myself as part of reality. Generally
inspiration has its origin in a serial reality: a book, a
film, a conversation, something you’ve done and so on,
but inspiration can also come from inside oneself. We
are still in the realm of reality, but in this case the
reality is inside you, inside your heart, and your
memory. It’s an intimate reality that doesn’t always
have to be confessional because fiction always appears
couched in the first ideas, feeding off them and
dominating this reality from a certain level of writing.
 
I have fallen back on certain elements on more than
one occasion in order to write my scripts: my mother
and my childhood; I also mix in stories or texts that I
have written before and that find their place years later
in some of my stories. Cinema, films, both as a
spectator and director, and the memory of a love cut
short when it was still alive and beating.
 
Motherhood is a recurrent element in my filmography.
What have I done to deserve this? High Heels, Volver,
The Flower of My Secret, All About My Mother and
Pain and Glory. Please let’s see the second clip.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
Antonio moves me always in this sequence.
 
And now in Spanish [interpreter continues] I didn’t
think about my childhood until this century when I
turned fifty. I suppose that I didn’t like what I
remembered and deliberately relegated it to a dark
corner of my memory, but the passing of time drives
you to look back in a natural death. I suppose that’s
what we call maturity.
 

When I started making films in 1979, I was in a great
hurry to live and to tell stories. I only looked ahead,
greatly stimulated by my present as a young man in
Madrid, enthusiastically devouring the first years of
the Spanish Transition. Also the past was
contaminated by Franco’s dictatorship, and I
consciously erased it from my memory as if it never
existed. All the films I wrote and directed in the ‘80s,
from Pepi, Luci, Bom and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
were made from the denial of the dictatorship, as if
Madrid, the city where I lived, and the characters I was
writing, had been born in 1977 after the death of the
dictator. I only looked ahead, I didn’t feel the need to
look back until the start of the new century. That
retrospective look led to two very different films, Bad
Education and Volver.
 
Bad Education showed the worst of my childhood, the
darkest memories of my relationship with a Silesian
and Franciscan priest with whom I studied for my
high school diploma. So can we see the third clip?
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
In an equally spontaneous way, I recovered the
memory of another part of my childhood, which, with
time, had turned into the opposite of the education I
had received from the priests. I’m referring to my early
rural childhood up until the age of eight. Those first
eight years surrounded by women, my mother and her
neighbours, were my real formation as a person. It was
the ‘50s, I paid a lot of attention to them and was
fascinated by the lives of the women around me,
strong women, fighters, cheerful. They initiated me
into life and into fiction. Even though there is no child
in Volver the story is based on conversations that I
heard from the neighbours in the La Mancha patios,
stories of dead people who appeared of incestuous
rapes. Or when I went with my mother to wash
clothes in the river with other women; it’s one of the
happiest memories of my childhood. Next clip.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
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Another element that forms part of my scripts is the
texts that I wrote at different times of my life and that
I’ve kept in the form of notes, personal reflections,
short stories or unfinished scripts. I can give you an
example: in Talk to Her there is the set piece, The
Shrinking Lover, the narration of a silent film, which
Benigno Martín has seen at the cinema, a film which
disturbs him and which he recounts to Alicia, Alicia,
the young woman in a coma who he cares for in the
hospital. It’s a set piece in black and white which can
function independently, but which uses its narrative to
hide what is actually happening in the hospital room
between Benigno and Alicia.
 
During the writing I had already empathised with the
sweet psychopath played by Javier Cámara. I knew that
at some point he was going to rape the young woman
in a coma, because that was the original idea. As I said
in the beginning, I had read the news item about a
woman in a coma in a New York hospital who, after
being lifeless for nine years, had given birth to a baby.
After a few days it was discovered that she had been
raped by an orderly. I turned the orderly into a nurse
and, even though I knew from the start that he was
going to commit a criminal act, my duty as a narrator
was to show the character in all of his humanity,
without justifying him, but explaining how he was.
 
A bit of advice for writers, actors and directors: never
judge a character to whom you must give life, even if
he’s a psychopath. Personally, if I’m incapable of
sympathising with a character, I don’t keep writing his
story. And I had empathised with the character of
Benigno the nurse, and as if he were a real friend I
didn’t want to see him raping a girl in a coma.
Something inside me rebelled against showing that
scene to the spectator. Nevertheless, as narrator I had
to transmit to the spectator what was happening in the
hospital room between a nurse and the patient. Then I
had the idea of covering over the rape scene with
another narrative through which the spectator would
understand what was really happening between
Benigno and the patient. That was how I thought of
using The Shrinking Lover as a front, which also
suggested what was happening in that room. I had
already written that piece as a first draft, you don’t
invent something like that overnight. I cannibalised
part of this previous script and introduced it into the

narrative of Talk To Her. So it’s time to see The
Shrinking Lover, the new clip.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
I’ve never wanted to have my biography written; my
life is reflected in the twenty-one films I’ve made to
date. All my life, in its different stages, my family, my
country, my loves, my relationship with creation, are
behind the characters in the first twenty films.
 
[Pedro speaks] Excuse me, I haven’t seen this clip since
a long time ago, and I’m shaking.
 
[Interpreter continues] In the latest one, Pain and
Glory, my presence in front and behind the camera is
more obvious and more intimate. In this latest film
there is as much fiction as in other films, but for the
first time my reference for the protagonist is myself.
The research I had to do for Antonio Banderas’
character was in my entrails and in my memory, in my
own solitude, in my own pains and in my own fears.
Two summers ago I used to submerge myself every
day in the swimming pool, and I’d remain underwater,
motionless, for as long as my lungs held out, and then
I’d submerge myself again. I had recently been
operated on because of my back, and all the
musculature which had been affected after the
operation that immobilised the lumber half of my
back. The most enjoyable time of the day was when I
remained submerged in the water. Under the water,
because of the lack of gravity, all musculature tension
disappeared.
 
After repeating this ritual for weeks, I got someone to
take my photo in this situation. Resting under the
water with my arms extended, floating, I wanted to
know what that image was like. I thought the photo
was sufficiently mysterious and suggestive and without
knowing, that would become a script that I started
writing. The water in the pool, the stillness and the
darkness—under the water I always had my eyes
closed—transported me to another liquid current, the
river of my childhood, the river where my mother and
her neighbours went to wash clothes. As we have seen
already, for me this was a real party. The pain and the
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glory were established in those first two sequences. But
I still hadn’t decided to write a script in which my
personal life would be so present. I thought, if I write
in such a direct way about myself, it means for the
next two years I’ll have to talk about my personal life
in all the promotional interviews, and I’m a very
reserved person.
 
[Laughter]
 
After a moment of that, I did what I usually do when
I’m inspired by an exterior reality, mixed reality with
fiction. Becoming aware of myself helped me look at
myself with sufficient distance so as to write. I didn’t
have the impression that I was Antonio Banderas’
character, but rather than he was someone who
seemed very much like me and to whom I could
assign my world. When I write a script, it doesn’t
matter what the inspiration is, there’s a moment where
fiction dominates the story. And what matters is the
result is plausible as fiction, even if it has moved away
from reality.
 
Water, the liquid current, had appeared from the
outset as the element that would define the narrative.
The different periods in the script had to flow like the
water in the river flows. The protagonist had already
been decided, a sixty year-old film director who suffers
from various ailments and lives alone, isolated in his
home, depressed at the idea that he won’t be able to
make any more films because he physically isn’t able to
do so. Salvador Mallo hadn’t stopped until then. He
had left an explosive, fast-paced life, both
professionally and personally, and suddenly a back
operation along with other physical problems, forces
him to stop. He had never taken the time to think
about himself, he was always occupied with the film he
was writing, shooting, editing or promoting. Those
were the four temporal cycles of his existence: His
spring, his summer, his autumn and his winter were
always marked by the film he was working on. This
situation of isolation and inactivity, which he is living
for the first time, forces him to look back. He invokes
the memory of his childhood, his life as a young adult
in the Madrid of the ‘80s, the importance of cinema
and of the big screen in his life, the memory of a great
love that he had to end when it was still alive and the
bittersweet memory of his mother’s last years.

 
In this plot panorama, the three texts which I spoke
about fit perfectly with the subject. Salvador would get
in touch with an actor with whom he’d worked thirty
years before and they’d ended up fighting.
Paradoxically, this actor performs in an alternative
theatre, the monologue Addiction, whose author is
Salvador and which I had written in the ‘90s. I could
also recover the story of The First Desire and attribute
it to Salvador’s childhood. This annex didn’t occur
until the very last moment in the final stage of writing
the script. And now the sixth clip please.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
During the writing I wanted to save Salvador because
it was like saving myself, but I couldn’t force it. I lived
through some weeks of uncertainty until I found the
solution, when in the radiologist consultancy, his
assistant Mercedes shows him the invitation to an
exhibition of anonymous popular art. The invitation
shows a watercolour of a boy sitting in an interior
patio, surrounded by flowerpots reading a book—this
is what you saw. That child is Salvador, who
remembers the moment when a young labourer drew
the scene and then washed naked with water from a
basin. Salvador remembers the child’s perturbation at
the first impulse of desire. This memory gave me the
key to saving Salvador. After speaking to the
radiologist, he goes to the art gallery and buys the
watercolour. Fifty years later, the watercolour of the
child surrounded by flowerpots arrives in the hands of
the person for whom it was intended, and for the first
time in a long time, Salvador feels the pressing need to
tell that story. When he arrives home, he dives
feverishly onto the computer and starts writing it, first
the title The First Desire. The need to tell that story
provided me with the best way to save my protagonist.
He should be the one to make the film about his
childhood, everything that until that moment in Pain
and Glory the spectator has believed to be flashbacks
is, in reality, the film that Salvador is shooting.
Because the character’s true dependency isn’t on drugs,
but on cinema, on making films. Finding a story to tell
that possesses him completely, a story that will
transport him to a place without pain. The territory
5
where stories and their narrators live, it was the best
ending I could imagine for Salvador and for me. And
now the final clip please.
 
[Clip plays]
 
[Applause]
 
And now, Duncan can join me for the Q&A.
 
[Applause]
 
Duncan Kenworthy: Well that was rather fantastic,
wasn’t it? We have to finish by 5:30, so I’m going to ask
a couple of questions then throw it open to the floor.
 
How many screenwriters or proto-screenwriters are
there here, people who are interested? It’s a
screenwriters lecture, but obviously Pedro is both
screenwriter and director, so go on—you can put your
hands up, admit it.
 
I wanted to start, actually, just by making a point
rather than asking a question. Because it’s so clear
through Pedro’s talk and his career, twenty-one films—
incidentally I was born two weeks before you and I
feel as though I’ve done nothing in my life now.
 
[Laughter]
 
So just talking as he did at the beginning of his talk
about getting inspiration from newspapers, finding
interesting incidents, things that he could turn into a
story, just I think there’s a real lesson for screenwriters
here, where I think when people write screenplays in
the UK, generally in order to find a connection to the
audience they think about genre. So what are they
going to write, is it going to be a period film, is it a
biopic, is it an adaptation, is it a comedy, a horror?
They start with a genre and then somehow I think feel
the responsibility to stick to the dictates of that genre
the whole way through, and I think Pedro’s way is so
interesting, that all you’re concerned about as you
write is what the director—in this case obviously it’s
himself—is going to be able to make of interest to his
audience all the time.
 
PA: No I don’t think about the audience.

 
DK: There goes my theory!
 
PA: I love the audience and there is a moment when I
only think about the audience, but that moment is
when I finish the movie, I mean week before the
opening, then I’m shaking just thinking about the
audience, but never before. When I’m writing I’m a
more free person, I’m more free than in my real life.
I’m completely free and don’t think of anything but the
story, and as I said I think usually as a medium of a
story and it’s the story that asks me to do something
and something the story asks me to write something
that I don’t want, but the story demands it very clearly.
So I never did these twenty-one movies that I did—
because also I don’t know how is the audience, I don’t
know what face they have; it’s something amorphous.
The audience is something amorphous that one cannot
really know truly, and I’m always very surprised by
who they are. I think even when the writer and
director think too much about the audience they often
make mistakes or are surprised.
 
DK: I’m going to disagree with your own work,
because I think if you look at some of your early work,
Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie
Me Up! Tie Me Down!, All About My Mother, High
Heels, Talk To Her, if you look at—I would say people
at film school should study the first five minutes of
each of those films. Every single moment of those first
five minutes is of enormous interest, the graphics, the
music, the sound, it’s so clear to me that you are a
master at holding the audience’s attention—and that’s a
critical five minutes at the beginning of a movie; if
people are lost, they turn away.
 
PA: You know, I mean always I try to be very clear to
the audience; in this case yes I think about the
audience. And I try in the first five minutes to tell
what the story will be about. So like, in those first five
minutes, the spectator must decide what territory we’re
moving in and in every film I make my intention is
always to make that very clear in the first five minutes.
 
DK: Another example is from Talk To Her, the idea
that the other chap, the one who’s not the nurse, his
relationship is with a female bullfighter. Such an
unusual choice of role, I think, and yet it pays off
6
brilliantly at one moment when we see her fighting a
bull and with this extraordinary Albert Iglesias song,
and it just seems to me as though you’re thinking
about moments and how they’re connecting, well to
you probably, but I think of it as connecting to the
audience, but it’s a sequence that you could not have
had if she hadn’t been a bullfighter obviously. It’s just
an extraordinary—it feels to me as if you find
extraordinary moments that are going to connect to
you and the audience, whether they’re dramatic or
beautiful, or they remind us of our childhood, all the
time you are finding—you feel the responsibility to
find those things, I think you probably think of them
as being for yourself not for the audience.
 
PA: It’s wonderful when that connection happens, and
thinking about Pain and Glory, I listened to many
people telling me they don’t see my mother when the
young and the old mother appear; all they see is their
own mother. Of course I was thinking about a love
that was cut in a moment that it was still alive, but the
audience isn’t thinking about my biography and my
love affairs in the past, but because this is the kind of
experience I hope everyone has in their lives, yes to
love someone, and that sometimes you have to cut.
This is a kind of miracle when that happens but this is
how it is.
 
What you need is to be sincere when you are telling
this kind of story. Then everyone can feel identified
with that. The case of Talk To Her, the reason I chose a
bullfighter, a female bullfighter, was because I wanted a
profession very close to death. I didn’t want a killer—I
mean I cannot say that but in Spanish you call it
matador, which is exactly ‘killer’. So I wanted someone
very close to that experience, and also because just
being in a coma is, for the science, a death, a physical
death of the brain. So it was because of that. But really
—I’m thinking about England, I’m overwhelmed that
my movies worked so well here because really our
cultures are very different and at the beginning I
always thought I’d be too outrageous for the British
audience. So it’s just, to feel this kind of reciprocity
with the British audience.
 
DK: I love the fact that you chose those particular
sequences to show us, because they’re very much when

taken out of context quite shocking to the English
sensibility. But you succeeded in that.
 
PA: I was trying to illustrate what I was telling. I never
tried, even in my beginning that I had a reputation of
being the Spanish enfant terrible, I never tried or
wanted to outrage anyone. It was my way of telling the
story, it was my way of watching the world around me,
so I respect when I was outrageous but I didn’t try.
Not in the sense for example that Madonna tried to be
all the time outrageous. It was not my point.
 
DK: All I can say is whenever I need some tiling done,
I’m calling Eduardo.
 
[Laughter]
 
Because we don’t have that much time, can we open it
up to questions from the audience? There will be
somebody with a microphone.
 
Q: Thank you very much. I was at the Q&A last night
and there was a question I was going to ask you:
There’s a moment in Pain and Glory about the kid
teaching the older kid to write because he’s illiterate,
and I’m just curious to know, was that something in
your development, or is it meant to be a statement on
illiteracy in Spain? Could you tell us a bit more about
how you came to that choice in the script for Pain and
Glory?
 
PA: Well you know, all that block of sequences when
they go to live in a cave, part is reality. In that moment
I’m talking about the ‘60s, early ‘60s in Spain, we were
living under a very tough post-war, so almost half the
country were migrating to other places, to Valencia, to
Barcelona, sometimes to France, to Germany, and then
my family, we migrated to Extremadura. This family
goes to a little village in Valencia. So I didn’t live in a
cave, but I know very well what it meant to live in a
very precarious way. The lessons, that was true. It’s
unbelievable but that was part of my childhood. The
street we were living on, my family, was a very
illiterate street. It didn’t look like a street because—it
was a street you could barely call a street because the
houses were made out of the kind of material from
which bricks are made; it kind of looked like the
background of a Western more than it looked like a
7
street where people could live. That for my mother was
awful, but for me it was a space of fantasy. They were
completely illiterate, all of them, and then my mother
started reading letters of the neighbours and I used to
write them, they’d dictate to me and I’d write. Also it
was my mother’s idea, because she thought we could
tell the mothers of the other guys ‘I think Pedro can
teach the boys’—well guys, they were tall, eighteen
years-old. My mother thought ‘Pedro could teach the
other boys,’ who were really young men, the four rules
and how to read and how to sum. So I was nine years
old at this moment and after the war in the country I
had five or six students, big guys, and I did that. I
taught them how to write, how to read and all that. I
don’t remember—the sequence of the hands, I didn’t
take the hands of all of them, that part’s fiction, but I
did that and then I put it here. The rest is fiction, I
never fell in love with any labourer, but it could be.
 
You cannot take this movie like my biography in a
literal way, but I was always very close to that, I mean
I knew all the paths that Antonio’s character lived and
I feel very familiar with everything that happens in the
movie. But it’s basically fiction, I’m the reference but
it’s basically a fiction. This bit was true, it was part of
reality.
 
DK: I’m going to jump in again, it seems to me that
when you started making films it was just after Franco
had died and censorship had been banished in ’77 I
think it was, so it must have been a bit like London
ten years ago, enormous excitement, and it feels as
though that spirit is in your films of that time;
fantastically funny as well as outrageous. Is there a
sense over your career of that turning into comedy as
a natural move, is not necessary anymore. That
somehow you’ve got a little more serious? There’s not
much comedy in your latest film, very, very touching,
strong emotional stuff, and I wonder if you don’t need
that vivacious sort of quality anymore?
 
PA: Well I would like to come back to comedy, but I
don’t know how and when. I really would like to write
a new comedy. But as I said I’m not the owner of the
story, the story comes to me and I have the first idea,
and do you know the latest ideas are always very
dramatic and then I have to play my role as the
medium of the narrative to develop them the best I

can, but it’s true that it’s been a while since I’ve had a
comedy idea. I don’t know if it’s the passage of time, or
if I’m just getting old, but I would like to recover the
spirit of those early films.
 
DK: We’ve got three minutes left, I think that’s right.
Oh, two more questions. Who’s the lucky one? In the
front row?
 
Q: Hello Pedro. Thank you for the lecture, it was
wonderful. Could you talk a little bit about the
amazing actors and actresses throughout your
filmography, because obviously unlike a lot of
directors you come back constantly to a small group of
amazing people, and Duncan you referenced it, in
some of the later films we’ve watched you grow, your
film style grow, your storytelling grow, but we’ve also
watched this group of actors grow with you. Could
you talk a little bit about that group of people you
work with?
 
PA: That’s fantastic because I get the feeling that I have
like a family of actors. This is an idea that belongs
more to a theatre but you spend a lot of time with
actors and once you have an experience with them,
this is something that gives me more security. So when
I’ve finished writing a script, I always think there is a
role for an actor I’ve worked with in the past. Because
you know, we know each other, we know we
understand each other, so it’s this kind of advantage,
and also because we have a friendly relationship—
thinking about Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas,
Marisa Paredes; I think I was very lucky just to meet
them, because really just watching the profile, or the
screening of the clips, I was very moved that I’m a
very lucky guy meeting these actors. When I direct,
I’m very demanding, and they’ve even changed, they
are different with me than with other directors. I even
change the way of pronouncing our language, I mean
the music of the Spanish language, and they, all of
them, come devoted to do what I ask. I feel so lucky
that they are giving life to a fantasy that belongs to me,
that this is a kind of treasure. This is unbelievable for a
director who writes his own stories. I saw them
develop and grow in their careers, and fortunately
many of them became big stars not only in Spain but
also out of Spain, and I feel like the mother of them,
very proud when I see them awarded in Hollywood or
8
doing, working with fantastic directors. This is a
wonderful experience. I employ a lot of the time with
the actors; everything, every detail, every small detail
is important; everything you see on screen, the small
little detail, is important. And I try to control that, but
you know, the eyes, the soul, the mouth of the story,
they are the actors. They give their body and more
than that to the movie, so I mean, I’m in awe of the
other disciplines; I employ a lot of time with the actors
because I think they are the main things in a movie.
 
Q: [Question in Spanish]
 
Translator: The question was: There’s a lot of empathy
for the ‘strangest characters’ in Pedro’s films and the
question is, is that coming from his need to empathise
with them, and does he have a favourite character?
 
PA: As you know, for me they are not strange
characters, I look at them in a very natural way. In
many cases they were part of my life or at least in
something. For example like Agrado was based on
someone that someone told me about a character like
that. The other character of Victoria Abril was just a
flash of inspiration, but you know, I feel very close to
all of them, even in the case of the nurse who’s going
to commit a crime. If I’m writing about him I need to
understand him and I need to explain him. I cannot
blame the character for anything. So all of them, and
of course the more extreme of them, I feel are very
close to my heart. I feel empathy and I feel very, very
close and I suffer with them. I work from inside them.
There was I think only one time I started writing
something about a psycho that I felt very bad with the
character and then I quit it. I need to have this kind—I
don’t want to say compassion, because compassion
reminds me of a very Catholic word, but just to feel
very close to them. Because they are human and my
responsibility as a writer and a director is to explain
them, to explain how they are. Of course they’re very
unperfect and there is the tale, you cannot narrate a
story about a perfect family, a perfect couple, a perfect
someone. There is nothing to say about that. So I
always feel very close to all the extreme characters and
to what they do.
 
 9
DK: I wish we could go on for the next hour, but
apparently we can’t. So what a privilege it’s been, and a
pleasure.
 
PA: Thank you, thank you.
 
DK: Will you join me in thanking Pedro.
 
[Applause]
 
PA: Thank you, you were a wonderful audience. I’d like
to always have an audience like that. Have a nice day.