THE SCRIPT

I finished the first draft of the script of “Broken Embraces” in the week of October 21 last. And now, I’m writing this on a peaceful Easter Saturday morning, I’m on the sixth version.

In my notebook it says that Deborah Kerr died on that same week in October. “Deborah Kerr dies without knowing she is Deborah Kerr”, was the headline in the paper where I read the news. I imagine there can be no greater loneliness, no greater feeling of emptiness than to die without knowing who you are, but perhaps I’m wrong, I hope I’m wrong.

It took me a long time to appreciate the talent and singularity of that actress. When I was an adolescent (because of the austerity of La Mancha, I guess) I was a prisoner, excessively so, of the glamour and excessiveness of the Hollywood actresses, and Deborah Kerr was too discreet for my feverish state back then. It was in adulthood that I discovered the complexity, richness, intensity and sense of humor that resided beneath her apparent discretion.

Although Deborah Kerr had an amazing filmography, after I read the news of her death, the first character who came to my mind was the one she played in “The Night of the Iguana”, the film by Huston based on a play by Tennessee Williams. To be specific, I remembered her scene with Richard Burton, when he is tied to a hammock in the throes of an attack of delirium tremens. Hannah Jelkes, Deborah Kerr’s character, is an eccentric virgin spinster (a kind of hippy nun) traveling with her poet grandfather, who is in his nineties, and she makes a living doing carbon sketches of tourist she meets on her wanderings (it takes courage to play a character like that without becoming ridiculous, but that sensation of “being on the edge” is common in Tennessee Williams’ characters).

For the alcoholic, aggressive Reverend Shannon (Richard Burton) that woman is the nearest thing to an extraterrestrial. Nevertheless, it is she who tries to calm him down with an infusion and a “self-possessed” talk, after Ava Gardner’s two mulatto boys have overpowered him by force, until his fit of rage, impotence and helplessness has passed.

In these circumstances, Shannon asks Hannah if she has ever had any love experience. It’s a spiteful question, to which she answers with disarming naturalness. And in a monologue that is a marvel of charm and subtlety she explains to him in detail about that experience.

“I was in Hong Kong”, explains Hannah. In the patio of the hotel where she was staying, she had just done a portrait of a fat, bald, insignificant and unpleasant man whom she had tried to flatter with her pencils. The fat man in question was Australian, an underwear salesman. The poor man was so flattered by the drawing that he gave her a good tip and invited her to take a ride with him on a sampan, which she couldn’t refuse. When they were alone on the sampan, the man got very agitated. He moved closer to her and, in a trembling voice, asked her if she could do him a favor, an enormous favor. She said yes, to cheer him up. Then the man dared to make his proposal: “If I turn my back and don’t look, would you mind taking off some of your clothes and tossing it to me? Just so I can touch it.”

Burton is looking at her, wide-eyed. He has practically forgotten his attack of delirium tremens and the fact that he is trussed up like a sausage and tied to a hammock. Intrigued, he asks Hannah:
“Did you do as he asked?”
“Of course”, she replied. “He didn’t look when I took off the garment, and I didn’t look when he took it.”
“And you call that sad, dirty little episode a love experience?”
“Yes, I do”, replies Hannah-Kerr.
“You mean you weren’t disgusted by it?”
“Nothing human disgusts me, Mr. Shannon, unless it’s unkind or violent.”

This outrageous and moving monologue, delivered with complete naturalness, without any fuss, was the first thing I remembered when I read of Deborah Kerr’s death. But why do I mention it now? What relationship does it have with the shooting of my next film? Apparently none, except that I finished the script and decided “I’m going to devote the next two years of my life to this” the same day I read the news about the English actress’s death. And even though it seems a bit farfetched, Deborah Kerr’s monologue made me think that there’ll be a monologue in my film too, the one delivered at the end by the character played by Blanca Portillo.

José Luis Gómez, Blanca Portillo and Lluis Homar at the first script reading. © Pedro Almodóvar

“The Night of the Iguana” isn’t the best Williams, nor is it the best film by Huston, nor even the most important performance by the actress Deborah Kerr (in any case, it’s a fascinating film) but it is a film where its director isn’t afraid of words. The film is based on a play and, with very good criteria, Huston didn’t want to de-theatricalize that golden moment of the conversation between the alcoholic ex-priest and the eccentric itinerant spinster. He could have filmed a flashback in Hong Kong, showing us the scene that Hannah describes, in all its sordidness, but he preferred to trust in Deborah Kerr’s power. And it wasn’t a decision in favor of a stage approach, it was purely cinematic. In cinema, we have something for that kind of moment which the theater lacks, the close up, and the medium shot of two characters.

When a character has captured our attention and decides to tell us something intimate, something he has never confessed to anyone, there’s nothing better than letting the actor act. There are no digital effects, no frantic editing that can compare to the intensity of an actor’s face.

I detest and reject confessions in real life, but I enjoy writing them for my characters, and especially directing the actors in that kind of scene. In all my films there is an extreme moment when one of the main characters, or two of them, deliver a confessional monologue. In that sense, “Broken Embraces” won’t be an exception.

I like films in which the characters talk, or listen. In “Broken Embraces” a lot of things happen, in fact of all the scripts I’ve written to date it is the one with the most plot, but there are many moments when the characters express themselves through words, and silence. It is a film of characters, a film of actors.

I am excited about the cast for the main roles: Lluis Homar, Penélope Cruz, Blanca Portillo and José Luis Gómez. It’s what gives me the greatest feeling of security when it comes to breathing life into this story. Them.

Table-work sessions. © Pedro Almodóvar

Penélope across from José Luis Gómez, in my office. © Pedro Almodóvar

Since that week in October when Deborah Kerr died, unaware of herself, I have rewritten the script six times. Writing a script consists basically of assembling a rigid internal structure and rewriting the elements that cover it as many times as you can until shooting begins. Even during shooting, you have to keep rewriting it. (Some directors, like Fellini or Berlanga, continued rewriting during dubbing).

I really got going with the rewriting in December and January. In these months I’ve really got to know in depth the story I want tell and now I have to distill, characterize, enrich, qualify, synthesize, visualize… etc. It’s non-stop.

We started pre-production in January and I’ve used Christmas, weekends and nights to carry on writing.

Rewriting "Broken Embraces" by the Atlantic, in Tangiers. © Pedro Almodóvar

Saying goodbye to the last sun of the year, at the Hotel "Le Mirage" in Tangiers. © Pedro Almodóvar

I’ve written, as you can see from the photos, in some incomparable settings. Looking out on the beach of the Hotel Le Mirage in Tangiers, where I brought in the New Year. And in the wonderful hotel “Las Mañanitas” in Cuernavaca, where I went to visit my adored Chavela Vargas whom I hadn’t seen in two years.

At the Hotel "Las Mañanitas" in Cuernavaca. Correcting the script, after breakfast. © Pedro Almodóvar

With Chavela Vargas, in her refuge at Tepoztlan. © Pedro Almodóvar

THE BLOG AND I

I started writing this kind of “journey notes” in October and I intend to go on recording what is happening in my life in the little free time I have for writing. I hope to carry on doing it at least until shooting finishes. It will be a way of letting off steam for me and also provide a future memento. And above all, it will increase my level of stress and anguish, because literally I haven’t even got time “to wipe my ass”, as my mother would say. What’s more, I’m not a diary writer. Apart from scripts (which I write because I’m driven by a hysterical need to tell stories, I need fiction like I need oxygen) I’ve only been able to write the rest of my literary output under pressure, in circumstances in which I never had any time. Even if it’s hell on my nerves, I’ve decided to write this blog while I’m working, even if at times it may be rushed and arbitrary. The good think about writing a blog is that no one can accuse you of being egocentric.

I promise to tell only the truth, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to tell you everything about me and about the film and its preparation. On the contrary, I intend to say as little as possible about the story and the characters, I’ll wander around on the fringes, in purely tangential elements. You’ll think I’ve got a real cheek, and I’m sure you’re right. (Anything to celebrate the lack of intermediaries). I’ve been nurturing a dream for some time. I’d like that at least once spectators would go to see one of my films without knowing what it’s about.

I know that it’s an almost impossible dream, but I’m going to try to get as near to it as possible. Still, I am going to show lots of images of the different processes, images that will be transferred directly from my camera to this page.

For the moment, most of what I have has to do with table-work sessions with the actors. We’ve had two months of rehearsal and research. Here is an advance. Penélope, Lluis, José Luis and Blanca Portillo. With the help of Sonia Grande we are investigating the

clothes that best suit and define the characters in the two periods in which the action is set, 1994 and 2008. This is a very entertaining and rigorous process.

I’ll also tell you about the books I’m reading, the music I’m listening to, the people I meet with, the news I read. Whatever catches my attention at a time when I’m possessed by the film I’m going to make and have no sensitivity left for almost anything else.

I’ll mention, for example, the books that accompanied me during the writing of the script, those which made the greatest impact on me. In the first place, two books by Colm Tóibín, which I can recommend to you. “The Blackwater Lightship” and “The Master”, a novelized biography of the life and work of the writer Henry James. Two books which are stunning for different reasons.

I have also written the script in the shadow of two books of short stories by Alice Munro, probably the best short story writer of our time. “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship,Loveship, Marrige” and “Runaway”. There is a story in “Runaway” that I would love to film. I’d also like to make a film with the fifth book that has touched me most in recent months, the memoirs of Marcos Ana, “Decidme cómo es un árbol”, the story of a young communist who was swept along by the civil war when he was only 16 and when it ended he was condemned to death and jailed for twenty years. Despite suffering unimaginable atrocities (on more than one occasion after being tortured he was left for dead), Marcos Ana was and still is a man with an almost angelical good nature. The kindest man I’ve ever known, he doesn’t have a drop of revenge in him. He is so considerate that when he tells about how, after multiple and bizarre escapes, he was caught at the end of the war due to the treachery of one of his companions, he doesn’t want to name the traitor out of respect for the man’s children and grandchildren who are still alive, so as not to tarnish the image of their grandfather. It is a different testimony about our civil war, life in the jails and exile. A book full of moving details (I cried a lot reading it) about the struggle to survive day after day in unimaginable circumstances.

In our next meeting I’ll tell you about the music that has accompanied me. But I can already recommend the latest disc by Cat Power, “Jukebox”, on which you’ll find versions of “Don’t explain” (Billie Holiday transmuted into smoked velvet) and “Angelitos negros”, with acoustic guitar and the voice, macerated by the good-bad life, of his vocalist Chan Marshall, that will wipe from your memory all traces of the version by Antonio Machín. Listening to Marshall has been one of the great emotions of the last two years.



SOCIAL COMMITMENTS

One day in January, an e-mail arrived in my office from the Principality of Monaco in which we were informed of an unprecedented project: they had thought that the theme (aesthetic and cultural, the leitmotif that would provide the ornamental and musical content) for the traditional “Rose Ball” would be the “Movida Madrileña”. As Supposed Emperor of that Movida, they were asking for my opinion about it and if I could collaborate minimally in preparing the event. My first reaction was a feeling of absurdity and the second was that I found the idea enormously flattering.

Despite being hyper-occupied I took a few minutes to tell Bárbara Peiró, my Head of Relations with the Outside World, to confirm our presence and a limited collaboration in preparing the event. I decided to take responsibility for the invitation to give authenticity to something that doesn’t need it (a charity ball in Monte Carlo is a charity ball in Monte Carlo, the authenticity is provided by the attendance of the princesses, their legitimate children, the prince and his girlfriend).

Invitation to the Rose Ball. © JUAN GATTI

The Rose Ball has its own identity, but if this year they’ve decided to seek inspiration from the Movida Madrileña, and given that I’m going to be present, I’ve taken responsibility for the invitation and for suggesting that the most important musical part should be provided by Fangoria. Nothing could be more “Movida” than Fangoria adorned by the always sparkling company of the Nancys Rubias. Juan Gatti has designed the invitation, he also took the photo. He didn’t need any instructions. Juan Gatti is the living spirit of graphic design in the 80s (and in the following three decades up to the present day).

I'm off to Monaco! © Pedro Almodóvar

Here are some photos from the “Making of” of the photo for the invitation (today everything has a “Making of”, its graphic document. You never know what will be of interest on e-Bay in twenty years. It’s the sign of the new times. Everyone has their own line of clothes, their perfume and their millions of photos. You can be dying of hunger, your career can be on a downward spiral, but designing clothes, having your own perfume and having a generous bank of photos “about yourself” is the equivalent today of knowing the four rules in the 50s).

IMAGE PROBLEMS

Bibiana Fernández arrived in a state at the photo session. From now on I’ll call her Flighty Fernández because of her extreme slimness which she cruelly displays in front of Alaska and yours truly, a life-long slaves to diet. Flighty arrived in a state because as well as the anxiety caused (although she may deny it) by having eaten nothing more than two-hundred grams of turkey breast in the last few weeks, she wasn’t sure which “model” she was going to wear for the photo until half an hour before she arrived at the studio. A Dior with a generous skirt of cascading flounces in a flesh-pale rose color saved her from tragedy.

Frenzy in the dressing room I. © Pedro Almodóvar

Frenzy in the dressing room II. © Pedro Almodóvar

Alaska and her husband, Mario Vaquerizo, spend half their life on stage so they’re not short of attitude or models. I was the only orphan as regards the suitable look. We were supposed to give an image of the “Movida” and I no longer have the body for going back to the padded housecoat, the fishnet tights and the platform shoes. It’s not that I’m prejudiced about it, but it’s been years since I’ve had the physique to show off a more or less “Movida” look. I’m over fifty and I retired a long time ago from stages, catwalks and the back rooms of bars. Something inside me prevents me from dressing like

a clown, as when I acted with Fabio at the start of the 80s. It isn’t that I’m lacking in self-confidence. Not at all. But the years have left their mark, I mean that I’m one of those people who take the hint from the passing of time. These last twenty-five years have changed me into a gentleman, despite myself. I couldn’t help it. I apologized to my companions in the photo for my conventional outfit (an always attractive Armani tuxedo). To my relief Alaska supported my choice. After fifty, she told me, you become either a gentleman or Sigfried and Roy.

Strike the pose! Vogue! © Pedro Almodóvar

A fuss on the set. © Pedro Almodóvar

And if Alaska says so she’s right. She’s been right for thirty-five years in these matters.

JEANNE M.

In February, the Paris Cinemathèque had the good idea of paying tribute to Jeanne Moreau, showing her fifty best films. It requires a vastly extensive career to be able to select fifty films! Moreau has a filmography for that and much more. The director of the Cinemathèque, Serge Toubiana, called to ask me to join in the tribute.

© Pedro Almodóvar

For me it will always be an honor to be present where a tribute is being paid to this woman. I’ve been obsessed with Jeanne Moreau since I was a child. In my adolescence, when I was studying for my high school diploma in Cáceres, I saw “La notte” by Antonioni, and although it seems outlandish, I believed, shaken, that the film was talking about me. That the tedium weighing down on the couple Mastroianni-Moreau was my tedium, my provincial tedium. I felt the non-communication and the tedium of that sophisticated bourgeois Milanese couple as if they were my own, even though I was neither Milanese nor bourgeois nor sophisticated, but just a frustrated boy from La Mancha waiting for the first chance to escape.

At the ceremony I met Juliette Binoche, stronger every day as an actress and as a woman. She gives the impression that she hasn’t lived a single day of her life in vain. She arrived with her knees covered with bruised and without any pantyhose, as if she had just been dragged along the floor, in a fight, or had hurt herself filming a scene. A simple pair of pantyhose would have covered up the bruises, but she preferred not to hide them. And I admired her for that. Her lack of embarrassment, as well as a mystery, was a symptom of independence and moral solidity. She was there because she had just worked with Jeanne Moreau in a film directed by Amos Gitai and because, naturally, like all those present, she admires and loves her.

© Pedro Almodóvar

I had prepared a little speech and when I went on stage I realized it wasn’t necessary. Jeanne was there with a vast smile and those eyes so full of life and intelligence. It would have been enough to say “Jeanne, je t’aime”, but I had something in my pocket and I had to read it. I hadn’t imagined that while I was reading it I’d have Jeanne herself at my side, holding on to my arm, feeling her breath over my shoulder.

I adore the photos with Jeanne on the stage, her complicity and affection. There are only four people for whom I am available at any hour of the day or night, in sickness and in health, any day of my life. Those four people are, in alphabetical order, Chavela Vargas, Pina Bausch, Jeanne Moreau and Mischa Baryshnikov (and my family too, of course)

SPEECH IN HONOR OF JEANNE MOREAU “At the presentation of the 50th anniversary of the Cannes Festival, Jeanne Moreau appeared on the stage in a sequined clown outfit, designed by John Galliano, a difficult outfit to wear, but Jeanne, with her immense personality, managed to multiply its effect. She had the task of reading a long list of names, titles and dates (those of the thirty winners of the Palme d’Or who were alive and present there) A very arid task for an actress. Jeanne managed to get that text, made up exclusively of Christian names, surnames, titles and dates, to sound like one of the most moving monologues I have ever seen on a stage.

© Pedro Almodóvar

I’ll never forget it.

Juliette Binoche, Pedro Almodóvar, Jeanne Moreau and Christine Albanel, the French Minister of Culture. © Pedro Almodóvar

I discovered Jeanne Moreau when I was an adolescent in “Moderato Cantabile” and since then I’ve been obsessed with her, with her voice, her mystery, her way of walking, her eyes, her mouth, her way of talking, of singing, of being silent.

She is an actress who is highly gifted for giving credibility and depth to everything she does, but she also has something very profound and mysterious, something impossible to define because it is absolutely personal.

I’m not going to sum up Jeanne’s greatness because I think it’s obvious, but I’d like to mention three little episodes which show that Moreau’s epic dimension also fits with the simple things in life.

In an interesting and entertaining interview with Marguerite Duras, regarding the origin of “Natalie Granger”, Duras explains that she chose Jeanne because she was the woman who was best at gathering up the crumbs of bread lying on the table after a meal. It’s a very comical thing to say but for me it was very revealing. Duras meant that Jeanne also has a gift for carrying out the simplest, everyday actions with total naturalness and with flair.

Four or five years ago I arranged to meet her in the hotel where I was staying. I was waiting for her in the bar. When she came through the door, the pianist, very sharp, began to play “Le tourbillon de la vie”, while she spotted me in the distance and came towards me, smiling. I got up and we embraced. For me that was a moment of total happiness. If I had to film an episode for the second part of “Paris, je t’aime” I would choose that moment.

Another gesture by Jeanne, and I’ll finish. It was at the funeral of her great friend Louis Malle. I saw it on television. The images showed a multitude of famous friends who came up to say farewell or to accompany the hearse. I don’t remember it all exactly, but what I do remember was the wreaths of flowers. There were a lot of them, with long dedications on their ribbons. I noticed one wreath which had only two words

written on its ribbon. Those words, which moved me greatly, because of their explicit simplicity, were: From Jeanne. Just that.

Tonight, I’m very happy to be here, and I feel very proud to be Jeanne’s friend.”

End of speech. Kisses, photos and embraces.



ETERNAL EMBRACES

The other day I watched “Ascenseur pour l’echafaud” again, one of the first films of Louis Malle and Jeanne Moreau. The originality of the film and its aroma of romance and despair are still intact half a century later.

At the end, when the characters of Moreau and her unfortunate lover Maurice Ronet are cornered, condemned to live in different prisons, some photos appear of the couple in their good moments, embracing. Jeanne Moreau’s voiceover talks of those photographed embraces as something eternal, something that no one will be able to break and that will remain forever, while she will waste away in prison.

My next film, “Broken Embraces” talks about that kind of embrace.

Until next time.

Pedro Almodóvar