El Deseo

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¡Pedro Almodóvar and “Los amantes pasajeros” wish you happy holidays!

The teaser for “I’m So Excited!” has been received voraciously, but it has also given rise to some questions which, given that these are days for marzipan and generosity, I’m going to answer.
 
Question nº1. Are Javier Cámara, Raúl Arévalo and Carlos Areces incredibly camp, or am I becoming homophonic?
 
A- You’re not becoming homophonic (that word is a typo, but I like it so much I’m not going to correct it). You´re quite right, the characters played by our three magnificent actors are extremely camp. The thesis: if bishops make such a show of being camp, why can’t cabin stewards, for example, do the same. In any case, some fans of the hetero Raul Arevalo have confessed to me that they find him much sexier when he’s being camp than when he isn’t.
 
2. During half of the teaser, the three actors mentioned above give the impression that they’re doing a choreography of “I´m So Excited” the song. Is “I’m So Excited!” the film a musical?
 
A- No, it’s not a musical. It’s true that the cabin staff on the flight whose adventures are told in the film, at a certain point and without being asked, interpret a playback of the song by the Pointer Sisters to raise the spirits of the passengers in Business Class.
 
3. I’m intrigued by the shot of a very unsettled Lola Dueñas. Where is she looking, what is causing her such unease?
 
A-. At that moment she is looking at a torch that is set into the wall in the stewards’ area, and wondering whether to hide in the washroom and put it in her pussy. That´s the reality of the fiction, but here is its metaphor: Lola is sensing at that precise moment the enormous success “I’m So Excited!” will bring her when it opens, that’s why she seems so agitated. Although Lola has already been discovered, her work in “I’m So Excited!” will be a revelation, as was the case with María Barranco in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, Antonia San Juan in “All About my Mother”, Kiti Mánver in “Pepi, Luci, Bom”, and Chus Lampreave in “Dark Habits”.
 
4. In the shot of the plane, where Hugo Silva appears… what exactly is happening? Some people say he´s asleep but after watching the teaser dozens of times, a group of fans have come to the conclusion that his upper lip is moving a little, as if he were puffing, but we can’t agree on what exactly he´s expressing. Is Hugo Silva asleep, is he in pain, is he playing a fag too, is he in his death throes?
 
A- Too many questions in one. Hugo Silva’s character isn’t dying, he isn’t in pain, nor is he asleep. The secret is in the lower part of the cabin which we can’t see. I can’t reveal any more. But I can tell his followers, male and female, that the tan he displays in each of his films (and “I’m So Excited!” is no exception) is natural, from birth. I can also tell them that, very near the end, he has a conversation with Antonio de la Torre that makes worth watching the whole film.
 
No more for today. I’ll continue being in contact with the collective unconscious and I promise to answer the questions I pick up.
 
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all the strikers and I wish with all my heart that the Three Wise Men will bring Mr. González, president of the Community of Madrid, “a little bit of sensitivity”.
 
Pedro Almodóvar
27 December 2012

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LIST OF FAVORITES
 

We are presenting here the teaser-poster for “I’m So Excited!”, designed by Jean-Paul Goude. The idea is that everything that happens inside the plane is partying and transgression. It’s true that the threat of a very serious technical failure is hanging over the passengers, but they transform fear into abandon, and hysteria into a sentimental and physical orgy. I’m not going to say any more, the entire cast and crew have taken a vow of silence, and so have I.

In this week of binges and lists, here are my favorites in the sections of music and cinema. As I have to feed the tinnitus with sounds to distract it, I spend the whole day listening to music.
My favorite discs from 2012:

1- (alt-J) – “An Awesome Wave”

2. Mark Lanegan Band – “Blues Funeral”
3. Bill Fay – “Life Is People”
4. Four Tet – “Pink”
5. Tindersticks – “The Something Rain”
6. The XX – “Coexist”
7. Nootropics – “Lower Dens”
8. The Funkees – “Dancing Time”
9. Criolo – “Nó na Orelha”
10. Belleruche – “Rollerchain”
11. The Ting Tings – “Sounds from Nowheresville”
12. LCD Soundsystem – “London Sessions”
13. Matthew Dear – “Beams”
14. The Invisible Session – “The Invisible Session”
15. Black Marble – “A Different Arrangement”
16. Balthazar – “Rats”
17. Flip Grater – “While I’m Awake I’m at War”
18. Tristesse Contemporaine – “Tristesse Contemporaine”
19. The Gift – “Primavera”
20. Django Django – “Django Django”

CINEMA. SPANISH TRILOGY

1. “Blancanieves” (Pablo Berger)
2. “El artista y la modelo” (Fernando Trueba)
3. “Una pistola en cada mano” (Cesc Gay)

EUROPEAN CINEMA

1. “Holy Motors” (Leos Carax)
2. “Amour” (Michael Haneke)
3. “En la casa” (François Ozon)

I still haven’t seen the great American films which will arrive in the next two months.

Pedro Almodóvar
21 December 2012

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TRAFFIC JAMS, TRIBUTES AND TEASER

I recently arrived back from a London as jammed by traffic as Madrid and where I received the tribute that the American Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was kind enough to offer me, in their London headquarters. The ceremony was touching and flowed with a naturalness unusual in such events. There were no moments of sham or rhetoric, not the usual epic. Everything was so fluid and it was so well narrated that many times I forgot they were talking about me and my work.

Photocall at the Curzon Soho Cinema in London

The master of ceremonies was Sir Christopher Frayling, former director of the Royal College of Art who is currently chairman of the Arts Council of England and is the longest serving trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum which is now showing the exhibition HOLLYWOOD COSTUME, a masterpiece of its kind and absolutely recommendable. As well as all that, Sir Christopher is very knowledgeable about my films and from the beginning he linked with charm and depth the screening of long clips and the appearance of the artists who came out to talk about me. The ceremony which lasted two hours went by in a flash.

Pedro and Sir Christopher Frayling

Apart from Christopher, who is now a friend, I want to thank the contributions from Peter Morgan (screenwriter of “The Queen”), Sally Potter (“Orlando”), Stephen Frears, Quentin Tarantino, and some members of my artistic family, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alberto Iglesias, Rossy de Palma, Leonor Watling, Javier Cámara and my brother Agustín. My brother Agustín is more timid on stage than when he is talking face to face, but in London he was very calm and read a moving story of our childhood, when, before we were ten years old, we’d go to the cinema, clutching each other by the hand, in Madrigalejo, Cáceres. He also talked about my first films as a Super-8 director in which he, like I, did everything. Agustín is my memory, the eyes that, since I was born, have never stopped looking at me.

Pedro with Jean Paul Gaultier and Rossy de Palma

Javier Cámara was the last to speak and also presented the teaser of “I’m So Excited!”. We hadn’t planned it like that, but the ceremony spontaneously became the start of the launch campaign for our film.

Here you can see the teaser ad nauseam. We’ll be posting a lot more pieces as they emerge from the oven. I’ve received lots of anxious calls after it was seen on RTVE, friends and acquaintances who will not accept that they can’t see it before December 21st, the day when according to a Mayan prophecy the world will come to an end. These friends don’t care if the prophecy comes true as long as they’ve seen “I’m So Excited!” first. I’m sorry, folks, but the film isn’t finished. On Monday 17th, we start the pre-mixing, on the 19th Alberto Iglesias goes to London to record the music and in the first week of next year they’ll do the mixing and I hope that the colour-grading, which is very far advanced at the moment, will be finished. The Spanish promotion would be more relaxed if we didn’t have to do it in France and Italy too, as they will be opening there almost simultaneously with Spain. We are happy but very stressed.

I was forgetting, here are some of the photos from that night. Grace Jones erupted into the room like Attila’s horse. She confessed to her Cuban origins, announced her new record and world tour and had her photo taken with everyone. She still has the same lips and same waist as in ’78.

Pedro and Grace Jones

Grace Jones and Rossy

She and Rossy made a formidable pair. At the other extreme, I also met Kristin Scott-Thomas, an actress I always like seeing.

Kristin Scott-Thomas y Pedro

And, speaking of actresses, they put on lots of clips, as I said before, very long clips so that we could enjoy entire sequences. I don’t usually see my films, I always run into them when I’m zapping or in ceremonies like the one in London. Once again, in case I had forgotten, I was open-mouthed at the work by Carmen Maura, Victoria Abril, Marisa Paredes, Penélope Cruz, Rossy de Palma and Chus Lampreave. I mention them because they were the ones who appeared in the clips, as well as Antonio Banderas, Javier Cámara and Darío Grandinetti and a little bit of Leonor.

Leonor Watling, Rossy de Palma and Javier Cámara

Pedro with María Delgado

The tribute by the Hollywood Academy, although I capitalized on it, was for all of them and all the technicians with whom I’ve worked in the last 32 years. At the following dinner, the greatness of the actresses mentioned above was the trending topic of the night, because for everyone it had been like a revelation. It wasn’t always easy, but who thinks about that now!

Pedro Almodóvar
17th December 2012