What is it like working with Pedro Almodóvar? His actors say it all | VIDEO

– How would you describe Almodóvar?

Cesar Vincent: (long silence) Like a flower… You have to give it away…

– It seems that he had some ruptures, like personal.

Cesar Vincent: Do you believe?

The filmmaker Vicente Molina Foix wrote in 2007: “Outside of Spain, (Pedro) Almodóvar is Spain”. The 24 films by the Spanish director reflect the country where he suffered and was inflamed, we know that because of the emotions they provoke. Since his debut in “Salomé” in 1978, he has become both a loved and hated figure in the medium, due to the perfection with which he builds his pieces and the energy with which he defends them. According Cesar Vincentwho acted in one of his films, “Pain and Glory” (2019), working with him is a dream from which you cannot wake up.

“My experience with him and the team was very light, very calm. And I learned a lot. I mean, it wasn’t hell, really. I couldn’t put it that way. Yes, you enter another dimension. Like magic. Like when you dream and you wake up, and you have that same dream all day. It is something magical. There is a feeling that is not from here, it goes further, it shows. Beyond, because it is something of the daily. It is entering a world where you are naked and you face everything. Are you. It’s something very free”, he told Skip Intro César Vicente.

But what is the morning? Who is Pedro Almodóvar to conquer all the financiers of his films, earn a place in Spanish cinema despite the rejection of critics or be the curiosity of Angelina Jolie. Unforgettable moment. In 2012, the American actress approached the Spanish director at a press gala and made him promise that one day he would call her to film. “She has the freedom and the courage to let go and try everything,” Jolie said before the cameras.

If there is someone who loves Spain more than anything, it is him. With the memory of his childhood, Almodóvar traces the lines of his characters, but also with the stories that his mother told him about the streets of Madrid during the 1920s, as if he were a “legend”, he writes. Jean-Max Méjean. He fell in love with Italian neorealist films when he arrived in Madrid, because he hadn’t known them before. In the town where he lived as a child, there was no cinema. So Michelangelo Antonioni and Roberto Rossellini, sacred figures of Italian cinema, were his best friends, at least from the screen out.

For this reason, his relationship with the history of Spain and the love of a mother are given as they are in his cinema. It is not for nothing that “Parallel Mothers” (2021) tackles a difficult topic, such as the exhumation of the mass graves where thousands of Spaniards have remained since the Franco regime. It is a combination of loss, motherhood and historical memory. The theme is part of his past, the stories that her mother told him and the pain of her society. With the same seriousness, he touches on social themes in other films, such as transsexuality and sexual orientation, as an almost autobiographical imprint.

César Vicente, a 25-year-old actor whose father is passionate about Almodóvar’s films, learned the “Almodovarian” philosophy as a child and knows that he is a director of deep cuts, because he pauses scenes during filming as many times as necessary, 10 as in “Dolor y Gloria” (2019) or 40 as in “Carne trémula” (1997), to capture the soul of the speech.

“But it left me quite a free path. With a lot of freedom to create and make my character grow and fill out. I come from the theater and the truth is that this art demands a lot from you, the teachers too, they have never directed me audiovisually, but with him everything is very light. He transmits his beliefs to you, his truth. He transmits it to you. He gives it to you. (…) I don’t know, they are guidelines that he advised me, he always advised me. It wasn’t that hard, huh. He advised me”, says César Vicente.

Like Penélope Cruz, Antonio Banderas and Cecilia Roth, Vicente became the ‘Almodóvar boy’ for a season. One of the filmmaker’s favorite dramatic instruments that manage to embody pain, such as the trauma of two women (“Volver”), a ‘Pedro’ facing his homosexual orientation (“Madres Paralelas”) or once again a selfless mother (“Todo sobre my mother”). In the book by Jean-Max Méjean that bears the director’s name as its title, this is confirmed. “We don’t fully know what Pedro Almodóvar’s relationship is with the image of his mother and his mother in general. Adored or detested by her, we don’t know much about her, except for what he agrees to teach us with her cinema, ”writes the author. And he says that he is so risky that in at least four films he introduced the old Francisca Caballero on the screen, who gave him life. Movies in which he was seen: “What have I done to deserve this?” (1984), “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), “Tie Me Up” (1989) and “Kika” (1993).

“It seems to me that he puts his own universe so unique, and so original and so… And he gives it to you, he shares it with you. And he demands a lot from you. Because the truth is that. He is a person with whom I don’t know if it is easy for everyone to work with. He has a huge demand, but he has a lot of humor, he realizes it, fixes it. And he is a unique director,” Argentine actress Cecilia Roth told Telefé, who was in the cast of Almodóvar’s films “All about my mother” (1999), “Labyrinth of passions” (1982), “Passenger lovers” (2013 ), “What have I done to deserve this?” (1984), “Pain and glory” (2019) and “I talked to her” (2002).

“I will never charge Almodóvar what I would charge a studio. That’s no problem, I can even work for him for free,” Antonio Banderas, who acted alongside the director in “The Skin I Live In” (2011), “The Law of Desire” (1987), “Matador” ( 1986), “Labyrinth of passions”, “Pain and glory” (2019), “Tie me up!” (1989) and “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988).

“I identify a lot with him (Pedro Almodóvar) in that sense and he is always very grateful. Not only with my relationship with him, as an actress who has worked with him for many years, but also as a friend, as a spectator. Seeing what he does, not only with this topic, with everyone. It is impossible for him to judge his characters or put any kind of label on them. And the truth is that I always look for that, but sometimes I can’t find a partner like that,” Penelope Cruz told Juan Carlos Fangacio of “El Comercio” during a press round for the movie “Madres paralleles.”

For Lluís Homar, actor in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, Almodóvar involved him in a job that was difficult to cope with, so much so that he had to dope with Valium. “When we rehearsed there was already something that was not going well. ‘Sounds theatrical to me’, he told me when he passed text. I felt self-conscious, paralyzed, not knowing where to go. Everything was no”, the actor wrote in his book “Now everything begins”. He also says that he confronted Almodóvar to complain about the “hell” that he was living, in the same way that the Spanish actor Jorge Sanz did. He also did not feel comfortable during the filming of “Trembling Flesh” (1997), when the filmmaker demanded that he repeat a scene where there was a specific action. “Today Jorge doesn’t know how to order a coffee, we cut filming. Tomorrow we will see if he knows how to order a coffee”, he told her. Sanz commented to La Sexta that he doesn’t like his work technique: “Pedro breaks the actor and we actors are very fragile.”

Watching him direct is a movie in itself. Hidden in the middle of YouTube, a video shows Pedro Almodóvar directing actors in “Los abrazos rotos” (2009). In the scene, Carmen Machi and Penélope Cruz appear. He speaks into a microphone connected to Cruz’s earpiece while the actresses carry on the dialogue. While she pronounced her line, he dictated the tone and intensity of the expression in real time, insisting, in such a way that the actress had to repeat her part several times until she had what he mimicked with her body. .

“He has a very profound ease of expression, very much of the everyday, of the real. With his films, he shows life in its purest form, it shows. It’s normal for people to talk so much, because it gets to them. If not, people would shut up or say nothing. But it is so easy to talk about his films, because he lives and shows. Because there is that. There are. He is born. His films transmit a lot, they come off the screen. They are exciting”, concludes the actor César Vicente.

Likewise, in Paul Duncan’s book, Pedro Almodóvar recites: “I am not a dictator, but I am an incorruptible mirror of themselves and their work. The discomfort comes from what the actors see in that mirror: a true portrait of themselves that they don’t always like.”

FACT

“Parallel Mothers” is available on Netflix.