Pedro Almodóvar shares how growing up under a dictatorship shaped him as a filmmaker
The Spanish auteur sits down with Q’s Tom Power to reflect on his acclaimed career
Pedro Almodóvar helped cement Spain's place in cinematic history with bold and colourful films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Talk to Her and All About My Mother. But his defiant spirit and transgressive filmmaking style were hard-earned.
The Oscar-winning director grew up with a strict religious education under the Francoist dictatorship (the period between 1939 and 1975, when Francisco Franco ruled Spain), which had a lasting impact on his artistry.
At this year's Toronto International Film Festival, Almodóvar was honoured with a Tribute Award in recognition of his work's social impact, and he also screened his new short film, Strange Way of Life — his second English-language project following 2020's The Human Voice.
Strange Way of Life is a self-styled "queer Western" that was partly inspired by Brokeback Mountain. It's the kind of story that would have been prohibited when Almodóvar was a kid.
In an interview with Q's Tom Power, the Spanish director recalls what it was like watching censored films in Francoist Spain, including a funny instance when a classic film was inadvertently made dirty through the censorship of its love scenes.
"The censorship was very awkward," he says. "The dubbing was also a way to make the censorship. For example, I remember when I was a child, Mogambo — the movie with Ava Gardner, Clark Gable and [Donald Sinden], directed by John Ford — in the movie, Grace Kelly makes a party with her husband, but fell in love with Clark Gable.
"For this instance, it was too much for the Spanish audience. So they convert the husband into a brother. Oh, I remember very well. When we saw the movie, we really didn't get why [Donald Sinden] was so furious that his sister is caught with Clark Gable. So it became something very dirty. Even very interesting."
WATCH | Official trailer for Strange Way of Life:
After Franco died, Spain transitioned into a democracy, which afforded its people more liberties.
Having greater freedom finally allowed Almodóvar to make progressive and boundary-breaking films, like his second feature, Labyrinth of Passion, which focuses on a nymphomaniac pop star who falls in love with a gay middle-eastern prince. The film caught the spirit of liberation in Madrid and became a cult hit.
"It was the perfect moment for me to start, because they were the movies that I wanted to do, but were impossible to do before," Almodóvar tells Power.
"I could make the type of living that I saw. It didn't mean that Spain was full of transsexual, but at least, the people that I used to see in Madrid, there were many like that. So I talk about that without talking about, like, the problem of being gay, or the problem of being transsexual. No, they were part of the stories, they were part of life. And of course, I could be so explicit because we lived in a new democracy. We were really starving of freedom, but we were coming from a very dark era where nothing was possible."
WATCH | Pedro Almodóvar's interview with Tom Power:
The full interview with Pedro Almodóvar is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Pedro Almodóvar produced by Vanessa Greco.
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