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Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpeðɾo almoˈðoβar kaβaˈʎeɾo]; born 25 September 1949) is a Spanish film director, screenwriter, producer and former actor.

He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and received an honorary doctoral degree in 2009 from Harvard University for his contribution to the arts.

Early life

His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.

While Calzada did not have a cinema, the streets where he lived in Cáceres contained not only the school, but also a movie theater. "Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest," he said later in an interview.

Short films

Almodóvar bought his first camera, a Super-8, with his first paycheck from Telefónica when he was 22 years old, and began to make hand-held short films. These shorts had overtly sexual narratives and no soundtrack: Dos putas, o, Historia de amor que termina en boda (1974) (Two Whores, or, A Love Story that Ends in Marriage); La caída de Sodoma (1975) (The Fall of Sodom); Homenaje (1976) (Homage); La estrella (1977) (The Star) 1977 Sexo Va: Sexo viene (Sex Comes and Goes) (Super-8); Complementos (shorts) 1978; (16mm).

“I showed them in bars, at parties… I could not add a soundtrack because it was very difficult. The magnetic strip was very poor, very thin. I remember that I became very famous in Madrid because, as the films had no sound, I took a cassette with music while I personally did the voices of all the characters, songs and dialogues. In addition, he made his first 16 mm short, Salome. This was his first contact with the professional world of cinema.

Film career

Almodóvar at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival

Asked to explain the success of his films, he says that they are very entertaining. "It's important not to forget that films are made to entertain. That's the key." He was heavily influenced by old Hollywood movies in which everything happens around a female main character, and aims to continue in that tradition.

Almodóvar is openly gay, and he has incorporated elements of underground and gay culture into mainstream forms with wide crossover appeal, thus redefining perceptions of Spanish cinema and Spain. He acknowledges, however, that his films are also very personal--"[M]y films are very Spanish, but on the other hand they are capriciously personal. You cannot measure Spain by my films."

In 2013, he was honoured for his European achievement to world cinema at the 26th European Film Awards.

Pepi, Luci, Bom (1980)

The film was plagued by financial and technical problems. However, Almodóvar would look back fondly to his first film: "Pepi, Luci, Bom… is a film full of defects. When a film has only one or two, it is considered an imperfect film, while when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style. That’s what I said joking around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was closer to the truth".

Labyrinth of Passions (1982)

The film is an outrageous look at love and sex, framed in Madrid of the early 1980s, during the so-called Movida madrileña, a period of sexual adventurousness between the dissolution of Franco's authoritarian regime and the onset of AIDS consciousness. Labyrinth of Passions caught the spirit of liberation which then ruled in Madrid and it became a cult film.

But precisely because there are so many secondary characters, there's a lot in the film I like."

Matador (1986)

Almodóvar went on to note, "I have my own morality. And so do my films. If you see Matador through the perspective of traditional morality, it's a dangerous film because it's just a celebration of killing. Matador is like a legend. I don't try to be realistic; it's very abstract, so you don't feel identification with the things that are happening, but with the sensibility of this kind of romanticism".

Law of Desire (1987)

Almodóvar said about Law of Desire : " It's the key film in my life and career. It deals with my vision of desire, something that's both very hard and very human. By this I mean the absolute necessity of being desired and the fact that in the interplay of desires it's rare that two desires meet and correspond".

Almodóvar explains: "Carmen is required to imitate a woman, to savour the imitation, to be conscious of the kitsch part that there is in the imitation, completely renouncing parody, but not humour."

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Almodóvar has said that women make better characters: “women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects, they have a greater range of registers, etc.”

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990)

In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Ricky (played by Antonio Banderas), a recently released psychiatric patient, kidnaps and holds hostage an actress (played by Victoria Abril) in order to make her fall in love with him. “I’m 23 years old, I have fifty thousand pesetas and I am alone in the world. I will try to be a good husband for you and a good father for your children,” he tells her.

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), which determines film ratings in the U.S., marginalized its distribution with the stigma of an 'X' rating. The film's distribution company, Miramax, filed a lawsuit against the MPAA over the X rating, but lost in court. However, numerous other filmmakers had complained about the X rating given to their films, and in September 1990 the MPAA dropped the X rating and replaced it with the NC-17 rating. This was especially helpful to films of explicit nature that were previously regarded unfairly as pornographic because of the X rating.

The Flower of My Secret (1995)

The Flower of My Secret has many common elements with All About My Mother and Talk to Her. The three films are about “loss, growth and recovery”.

Live Flesh (1997)

Upon his release, Víctor, looking for revenge, is soon entangled in the lives not only of David and his wife, but also of David’s former partner, Sancho, and Sancho’s wife.

All About My Mother (1999)

The comic relief on the film centers on Agrado, a pre-operative transsexual. In one scene, she tells the story of her body and its relationship to plastic surgery and silicone, culminating with a statement of her own philosophy: “you get to be more authentic the more you become like what you have dreamed of yourself”.

All About My Mother received more awards and honors than any other film in the Spanish motion picture industry. Its recognition includes an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a Golden Globe in the same category, Best Director Award and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury Award at Cannes; the French Cesar for Best Foreign Film, the Goya Award as best film of the year, best Actress in a Leading Role for Argentine actress Cecilia Roth and a twelfth Annual European Film Award.

Talk to Her (2002)

Talk to Her was hailed by critics and embraced by arthouse audiences, particularly in America. Almodóvar won numerous honors across the world for his film, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, a César Award for Best Film and both a BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In addition, he garnered his first and yet only Best Director nod at the Oscars.

Almodóvar (left) and Tim Burton (right) at the première of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street in Madrid, in 2007

Bad Education (2004)

The film's protagonist, Juan (Gael Garcia Bernal), was modeled largely on Patricia Highsmith’s most famous character, Tom Ripley, as played by Alain Delon in René Clément's Purple Noon. Almodóvar explains : "He also represents a classic film noir character - the femme fatale. Which means that when other characters come into contact with him, he embodies fate, in the most tragic and noir sense of the word." Almodóvar worked over ten years on the screenplay for the film, which received the honor of opening in the 57th Cannes Film Festival in 2004, the first Spanish film to do so.

Volver (2006)

Volver started as a story of la España negra, or 'black Spain'--the rural, superstitious and conservative part of the country still often associated, the director says, with violence, tragedy, even backwardness: "It looks like they are living a century before. But I tried to demonstrate that the same Spain, in the same local places with the same local characters, could be called 'white Spain', because the neighbors are in complete solidarity, all the women join together and create a kind of family. The movie really talks about women who survive, women who fight fiercely.

Broken Embraces (2009)

Almodóvar with actresses Rossy de Palma (left) and Penélope Cruz presenting Broken Embraces at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.

Broken Embraces was accepted into the main selection at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival in competition for the prestigious Palme d'Or, his third film to do so and fourth to screen at the festival.

The Skin I Live In (2011)

Identity, creativity and survival, frequent themes in Almodóvar's films, were given another twist in The Skin I Live In, the director's first incursion into the physiological horror genre. The doctor is played by Antonio Banderas, reunited after 21 years with the director who launched him to international stardom. The Skin I Live In has many cinematic influences, most notably the French horror film Eyes Without a Face directed by Georges Franju, but also refers to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo and the style of the films of David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Umberto Lenzi and Lucio Fulci while also paying tribute to the films of Fritz Lang and F. W. Murnau. Moving away from the comedies and female driven melodramas that made him famous, Almodóvar set this tale of voyeurism and a cruel act of revenge, loosely based on the French novel Tarantula, in a cold and austere atmosphere.

I'm So Excited (2013)

In February 2012, El Deseo announced that Almodóvar would start filming his next project, a "witty" comedy entitled I'm So Excited (Los amantes pasajeros), in summer 2012, with cameos by Antonio Banderas and Penélope Cruz.

References

• Allinson, Mark. A Spanish Labyrinth: The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, I.B Tauris Publishers, 2001, ISBN 1-86064-507-0
• Almodóvar, Pedro. Some Notes About the Skin I Live In. Taschen Magazine, Winter 2011/12.
• Bergan, Ronald. Film, D.K Publishing, 2006, ISBN 0-7566-2203-4
• Cobos, Juan and Marias Miguel. Almodóvar Secreto, Nickel Odeon, 1995
• D’ Lugo, Marvin. Pedro Almodóvar, University of Illinois Press, 2006, ISBN 0-252-07361-4-4
• Edwards, Gwyne. Almodóvar: labyrinths of Passion. London: Peter Owen. 2001, ISBN 0-7206-1121-0
• Strauss, Frederick. Almodóvar on Almodóvar, Faber and Faber, 2006, ISBN 0-571-23192-6

External links

• Pedro Almodóvar at IMDb
• Almodóvar Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)