As his new film Bitter Christmas is released, the legendary Spanish director turns his fire on Donald Trump, Will Smith, Netflix – and himself
Black sunglasses indoors and a tufty cloud of cotton-wool hair: it can only be Pedro Almodóvar, bourgeois arthouse darling nonpareil and master of everything from screwball romps (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) to clammy thrillers (Live Flesh, The Skin I Live In) – and sumptuous melodramas such as his 24th film, Bitter Christmas, a cautionary tale about the perils of autofiction.
We are sitting in the library of a London hotel and Almodóvar is dressed in a thin black windcheater, grey trousers and white trainers; add a whistle on a string and he could pass for a PE teacher. The 76-year-old director may have won more than 60 awards including two Oscars, five Baftas and six Goyas but when the shades come off today, he looks momentarily sorry for himself. He has been deaf in one ear since childhood, he tells me, and now the other one is giving up the ghost. In addition, a nasty stye has turned his left eye a gluey purple. Might he have picked it up while swimming? “I do swim almost every day because I have a pool,” he sighs. Never can those words have sounded so sorrowful.
Then again, mixing contradictory flavours is part of what he does. There is the blank, blase approach to extreme material (murder, paedophilia, telekinesis) in his 1984 comedy What Have I Done to Deserve This? Or the climax of Matador, his kinky 1986 thriller, in which the race to prevent a double murder is paused while the characters gawp at a solar eclipse. A rape scene becomes comic in Kika, from 1993, and another rape is euphemised as a silent movie pastiche in 2002’s Oscar-winning Talk to Her.
The peculiarities of Bitter Christmas begin but do not end with its release date: whoever heard of a film with a festive title opening during a summer heatwave? Almodóvar agrees: “It is weird.” Though we both know his ardent base would swarm to see whatever he did. Even when he was making cheap, guerrilla-style Super-8 shorts, he has always known the love of a good fan. After the end of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, Almodóvar picked up thousands of underground followers in Madrid and Barcelona. They contributed more than $3,000 toward the budget of his 1980 debut, Pepi, Luci, Bom and the Other Girls on the Heap. Possibly the only thing he could do today to shrink his audience would be to ditch the eye-popping palette and make a film in black and white. “The colours are very important,” he says, as if anyone needed reminding.
Part of the new movie already existed as a short story called Bitter Christmas, written in 2003 and published 20 years later in Almodóvar’s collection The Last Dream. The story concerns a cult film director plagued, as Almodóvar really was at the time, by panic attacks and paralysing migraines. In the movie, Bárbara Lennie plays the stricken director, Elsa, who starts planning a new feature after years spent making commercials. “When I wrote Elsa’s little universe, I immediately got the idea that someone, a film-maker, was writing the story of Elsa that we were seeing,” he explains. That someone is Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia). Almodóvar, then, has directed a film about a director writing a film about a director writing a film.
Keeping track of what is happening on screen becomes a case of mind over meta. Why should we care about Elsa’s story, though, when it is merely the product of Raúl’s imagination? “I hope that when the audience discovers that the film-within-a-film is going to change, that this change will surprise and excite them. But you’re right, it’s very risky. I think it is the riskiest film I’ve ever made. I took a whole bunch of risks, even knowing that some might not land. It requires you to pay complete attention, and it does seem to me that film audiences are increasingly getting lazy.”
No prizes for guessing where he places the blame. Bitter Christmas sneaks in a jab at Netflix when someone suggests Raúl should take his new project there: “Don’t reduce me to making a TV movie!” he scoffs. Almodóvar made his own views plain in 2017 when he was president of the Cannes film festival jury. Two Netflix titles (Okja and The Meyerowitz Stories) were in competition that year even though they were never going to be exhibited theatrically in France; Almodóvar, who regarded the situation as a case of the US trampling all over European traditions, announced that he could not foresee awards being “given to a film that is then not seen on the big screen”. So it proved.
His passionate defence of “the hypnosis of the large screen” was countered, however, by one of his jurors, Will Smith, who stood up for Netflix. The star’s name alone causes an almighty eye-roll today from Almodóvar, stye or no stye. “Will Smith was saying very silly things. The American press said things against me and in favour of him. And then, after years, they discovered how Will Smith is.” He mimes a slap, referring to the star’s attack on Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony. Almodóvar, whose film Parallel Mothers was nominated for two Oscars that year, had a ringside view of the assault; his snowy dot of a head can clearly be seen in images of the incident. He later described the acceptance speech given by Smith after winning the best actor Oscar as resembling “that of a cult leader”.
Reminded of this now, he says he thinks Smith still sounds like he is in a cult. “In our jury discussions at Cannes, everything he said sounded like that. He also showed me in all our discussions that he had very bad taste as a person. It was not a good experience being jury president. I didn’t want to do it but my brother [his producer Agustín Almodóvar] and [Cannes festival director] Thierry Frémaux insisted so much that I had to.”
Back to Netflix. Have the streamers won the war? “They’re very close to winning,” he says gravely. “All the elements to do with releasing a film theatrically are disappearing. The film art, the posters, which we can then look back on and want to collect. Even the elements that seem banal, such as the fashion that the stars wear to a premiere.” He falls silent, then adds forlornly: “The excitement.”
His principled stand in 2017 remains a lesson in defending home turf from bullies. “You can take this attitude to the political sphere. The European Union should be a shield for the crazy stuff Trump is coming up with in the US. He has created this lawless world, and we in the EU can demonstrate to him that if there’s something he wants to do, he needs to respect European laws. Trump is very angry at the EU and especially at Spain because our president has been brave and vocal in his opposition to his actions toward Ukraine and in his alliance with Israel.”
Bitter Christmas is, however, less engaged with global issues than with the interior landscape of the artist, as so many of Almodóvar’s films have been. Insularity is to be expected from a director who admitted in The Last Dream that “writing about myself [is] pretty much the only thing I do”, and Bitter Christmas both addresses auto-fiction and represents an example of it. Raúl, whose loyal assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), turns on him after discovering he has plundered her life in his screenplay, is, Almodóvar tells me, “a form of alter ego. At least 80% of Raúl’s dialogue is something I could say.”
An obsessive, perfectionist director himself, Almodóvar has written proxy figures before, most recently in Pain and Glory from 2019, where the auteur played by Antonio Banderas admits that life without film-making is meaningless. But as long ago as The Law of Desire, the torrid 1987 masterpiece, which he described in 1995 in the book Almodóvar on Almodóvar as “the key film in my life and career”, he was already alert to the threat posed by creative types like himself: that movie ends with the defenestration of a typewriter, which then bursts implausibly but spectacularly into flames.
I ask whether he concurs with the poet Czesław Miłosz, who said: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Almodóvar offers a minor tweak: “Not finished. But they’re going to have a lot of problems. It is pain that inspires me, not happiness. The writer by nature is selfish, which makes us dangerous to the people around us. It’s not very nice but this is what it is. That’s why I painted Raúl as almost the villain of the film.” Almodóvar claims to have only ever pilfered responsibly. “When I’ve been inspired by someone from my life, I’ve changed many elements to make them unrecognisable.”
