For the past decade, Pedro Almodóvar has been in a reflective mood. He’s revisited memories of his own career in movies like Pain And Glory, explored the trauma left behind by the Spanish Civil War in Parallel Mothers, and, with his latest film, Bitter Christmas, he’s re-examining his own creative process and its ability to hurt those he draws inspiration from. In the process of looking backwards, he’s also been incorporating different lessons and sources of inspiration from his previous movies, creating a self-referential tapestry that’s less directly autobiographical as Pain And Glory but just as thoughtful.
Almodóvar spoke to The A.V. Club about Bitter Christmas being the final film in his reflection series, the perils of autofiction, and learning from fellow artists like Chavela Vargas and Pina Bausch.
The A.V. Club: I want to ask about the concept of autofiction in Bitter Christmas. What inspired you to take a closer look at this creative process that borrows so much from reality and lived experiences?
Pedro Almodóvar: When you speak about fiction, you’re really talking about how you’re going to base your story on real facts [and] on things that have actually happened. Sometimes, it’s based on people in your surroundings, and you’re going to turn those stories into fiction. I’ve always been someone who’s been very interested in the origin of creativity. From the moment that you sit down in front of your computer, let’s just say to write, you are turning reality into fiction. Autofiction in general has been more of a novelistic genre. In France, there’s a lot of authors that work in this genre. In my case, what really attracts me to the genre is the question [of if] are there moral limits to what you can adapt into a fictional story. Once you start writing and you find the idea that’s actually going to resolve the story that you’re working on, at that point you latch onto the idea, you develop the idea because the idea itself becomes the most important thing. In that sense, writers are very selfish, because they don’t think about the person who might have inspired that idea. In my case, this has happened maybe two or three times, but I have tried not to hurt anyone. I would say that’s my self-imposed limit.
AVC: Speaking about those limits, a character in Bitter Christmas pushes back and accuses the writer of sort of a vampirism over taking details from her life and putting them into his story. How did you formulate that side of the argument, of people who feel exposed having their lives used as inspiration for somebody else’s art?
PA: It happened about one hour into having started writing the script. This idea came to me that one character was going to literally confront the writer about what he was doing. If you like an interesting exercise in dramaturgy and in developing a narrative where the writer is taking this inspiration to build their story, it’s not something that you see that often in cinema. It’s something that’s more theatrical, like Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters In Search Of An Author. I found this very exciting because I didn’t want to be complacent with myself. So, Monica [in Bitter Christmas] here becomes a character who criticizes the author in a way that I would also criticize myself.
AVC: So much of Bitter Christmas revisits themes and collaborators, like Chavela’s music, from your previous movies. How did you decide what to weave into the fabric of your latest film?
PA: Obviously, this film is the most like Pain And Glory, where we have a director also in pain, but it’s a physical kind of pain. He’s had back surgery. He has other ailments. In this particular film, the pain is more moral pain. It’s a pain of the soul because you have a writer-director that is not satisfied with what he’s doing. Much like with myself, he needs to feel passionately about what he’s writing, and he doesn’t feel taken or grabbed by the story that he’s writing. This provokes great agony in him. His assistant has a line where she says to him, “We are all losers here and you in particular have lost your grace.” In this case, by grace, she means something like inspiration. She says to him, “I imagine how painful that is for you.”
These two directors are similar in that way. They’re also similar because they resemble myself as well and each of them reflects a part of my own history. In the case of the Chavela songs, which also recurs in other films—in this case, the Chavela song actually provokes a change in the particular character who’s listening, who decides at that point that she’s going to leave her husband. Another theme that you see in the film I would trace all the way back to my first film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, and that has to do with what I would call a sort of sorority, the relationships between feminine female characters, in particular female characters who are dealing with pain. In this particular film, you have Elsa providing a kind of shelter or a kind of blanket for her friends who are suffering. This kind of sorority is something that I experienced since I was a child. I always witnessed women talking to each other, helping each other, solving each other’s problems, like [in] All About My Mother.
AVC: Your films are also known for their bright colors, but each color palette is ever so slightly changed, so that they each have their own identity reflected in the production design, the costumes, and even the makeup and the way the women wear their hair. How did you find the visual identity for Bitter Christmas?
PA: One of the key elements in the film was Lanzarote Island, with its volcanic black sand, where my characters go to hide out or to even maybe say goodbye to life. That black sand envelops my three female protagonists and is like a character within the world of the film. Outside of that, I approached the other colors quite intuitively. Red, of course, is a color that appears in my films a lot and it has multiple significations in Spanish culture. I intuitively change the colors almost as if I was a painter, but I’m a painter working in three dimensions. For example, I will first pick the color of the ground, of the floor, then the color of the walls. Then I might ask for a particular piece of furniture to be brought. I’m a nightmare for my art directors because it might be five different pieces of furniture that I ask for. Then I have my actress come already in makeup and dress and hair. I also try her out in different dresses and makeup and hair.
AVC: You’ve been inspired by musicians like Chavela, dancers like Pina Bausch, and numerous other artists. How do you continue to find inspiration and incorporate it into your work?
PA: I find all of these inspirations by chance. You suddenly hear a song and you like it, you’re inspired by it. This was the case with Chavela. With the case of Pina, [it] was a particular case. I was already waiting for her when I found her because I had already finished the script for Talk To Her, and I needed something moving to include at the beginning of the script because my script started with two men who were watching a performance on stage. One of them began to cry and the other one looked at him with surprise, and marveled at the fact that the man was crying. I needed something that would make me cry as well. Because the script was finished, I was searching for this scene. I was going to flamenco shows. I was going to different kinds of theater. For three months, I was looking for something. Then suddenly Pina Bausch came to Madrid to present Café Müller, and I realized that this was exactly what I was looking for because I was quite moved. The show actually moved me to tears. The women, the dancers, who are like sleepwalkers in the theater, in some sense, became for me like a metaphor for the women [in Talk To Her] who are lying in a coma. This is how you find things by chance.
In Chavela’s case, it had been 25 years since she was on stage due to one single drunken episode, according to her. But she had returned to singing and nobody really remembered who she was at that point. The people who were going to run the show asked me if I would be willing to present her, that if I would be willing to present her, they would hire her, and so I did. Then I entered into very direct contact with Chavela, and just as with Pina, it became a vital lesson for me in life. In Chavela’s case, she sang about abandonment in a way that I don’t think many people— or anyone, perhaps—has. I also really admired her Bohemian way of living, where she was free in her way of being. Both she and Pina became teachers for me.
AVC: Are you looking forward or are you looking back for your next project?
PA: I’m going to stop looking within me. I’m not going to write about any directors. I’m going to go outside of my home. My next one, which I’m almost practically finished doing, is going to be very different from the last two. I’m looking forward to going outside of myself, outside of my home, and dealing with things that don’t have to do with myself.
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