With a career marked by transgression and irreverence, it hurts Pedro Almodóvar to see how spontaneity and freedom are currently in decline. “Political correctness has become the worst of censorship, you have to always be looking to see who you offend.”
This was one of the many pearls with which the film director truffled his meeting this Friday with the almost 2,000 people who came to listen to him at the Zaragoza Auditorium, where this Saturday he received the Feroz de Honor Award for his prolific career. An acknowledgment that he had already been offered on previous occasions but that he had refused to accept until now. “An award for my entire career forces me to think about my past and review it, an exercise not without melancholy (…) I don’t like to look back,” he acknowledged.
Even so, the man from La Mancha had no qualms about reviewing what his life has been like before the public. Those first films of his childhood in Calzada de Calatrava, where what he saw on the screen “was infinitely more real than what was around me”. His passing through the small town of Poleñino in Huesca, where he made his first communion “dressed as a little sailor” and saw a lot of Italian, Mexican or Spanish folk films.
Life in Cuenca, when he discovered the figures of the scriptwriter and the director and “that this was the place he wanted to occupy.” Or his first years in Madrid, where he came to request up to six leaves of absence from his work at Telefónica to be able to take his first serious steps in the world of cinema.
Almodóvar, for whom Luis Buñuel, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock make up “the holy trinity”, is considered a “result of the Transition”. But if in those early years he was not interested in politics-“then I thought about getting high, fucking and making my little movies with Super-8”, he said-, he believes that his cinema has evolved along with the country .
In this way, previously overlooked issues such as mass graves take center stage in recent works such as “Parallel Mothers” (2021). “But Spain is much more than what I tell in my films,” she asserted about the fact of the parallelism that is sometimes made abroad about her career and that of the country.
Regarding his work behind the camera, he stressed the “enormous power” that a director has, an authority that he should be able to transmit “in a natural way” and use it delicately so as not to hurt the actors or the rest of the staff. “There are many people who are willing to put what you have dreamed of on your feet, and that is something extraordinary,” she stressed.
During the almost two-hour session before a dedicated audience, Almodóvar also addressed other issues, such as the fact that his mother did not see his films – “I sensed that she was not going to like them”, he joked – despite the fact that he participated in some of them or that his latest filming, a 31-minute western titled “Strange Way of Life,” will be released in theaters in May.
He also acknowledged that he would like to write about younger characters, but that he does not do so because the new generations “are a mystery to me”, or that he thinks he will work with actress Penélope Cruz again in the future.
And as a climax, the winner of two Oscars gave two keys to the new blood entering the profession. “Persistence and never throw in the towel. You have to insist, if there is something worth living for, it is for a passion”.