Toronto: Pedro Almodovar on Gay Westerns, Diversity in Casting and (Surprise!) How He’s “Not a Big Fan of Superhero Movies”

Scott Feinberg
·5 min read
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Pedro Almodóvar, the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel, will be the toast of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. There, his latest film — Strange Way of Life, a short Western starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal and set to be distributed by Sony Classics — will have its North American premiere; he’ll receive the Jeff Skoll Award in Impact Media at the TIFF Tribute Awards; and he’ll participate in an “In Conversation” discussion on Sept. 9.

Almodóvar has made 21 features, among them classics like 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which was nominated for the best foreign-language film Oscar; 1999’s All About My Mother, which won that Oscar; and 2002’s Talk to Her, for which he was nominated for best director and won the best original screenplay Oscar, marking only the fifth time that a non-English-language script had been awarded that trophy. But his past two films have been shorts: The pandemic-inspired The Human Voice from 2020 and now Strange Way of Life, which clocks in at 31 minutes.

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Recently, the 73-year-old — at times with the help of his translator, Carla Marcantonio — talked with THR about his fondness for TIFF, working in the short-film format and why he passed on Brokeback Mountain.

Congratulations on the Toronto honor. Can you share a little about your history at TIFF?

What I remember most is that the audiences were always very, very generous to me — they even gave us an award [the People’s Choice Award] for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Also, you feel less pressure at that festival, for some reason, than at Cannes or Venice. And, thinking about when I was there most recently with Antonio Banderas for Pain and Glory, I remember how quickly you can get around the city and how well organized everything is.

Since 2019’s Pain and Glory, you have released two short films, The Human Voice and Strange Way of Life. Why have you gravitated toward the shorter format?

I wrote those two stories, and the right format for them was the short. I didn’t want to artificially lengthen them because that was the right length. The thing that I discovered as I was shooting both of them is that I kind of recovered a sort of illusion, the feeling of a first-time filmmaker. I have a passion for every single film I do, otherwise I wouldn’t make the films, but there was something new and exciting for me shooting in this format, and it also allowed me a lot of room for experimentation, which has been exciting. I also think of shorts as practice — I’ve practiced through these two shorts to shoot in English, which I feel like I’m also prepared to do now.

What inspired you to tell the story of a queer love affair in the Western genre with Strange Way of Life?

Well, I’m a big fan of the genre, but I think this is territory that is not explored by Hollywood. Curiously, it’s a genre full of male characters. There is an Edward Dmytryk film, Warlock, and the protagonists are Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, and they are sort of a couple. Their relationship is absolutely a very queer relationship — it’s never made explicit, but the film makes no sense without understanding the fact that these two men have a very close relationship. But in a genre that has given us so many classics, I think we still have a lot of queer Westerns that could be made.

I understand that about 20 years ago you were approached about directing Brokeback Mountain. Why did you decide not to do that?

It was the first time that I really thought about making a movie in English because I loved that story — I knew the [book] by Annie Proulx and I loved it, and the script of Larry McMurtry was very good too. But the thing is, I was insecure with my English. Also, in Annie Proulx’s story, one of the things that to me really stood out was the physicality of the erotic encounters that were almost animalistic in nature. But some of that sort of physicality of desire I didn’t see translated into the script. I think Ang Lee made a wonderful movie — I loved Brokeback Mountain — and I think he just made it as far as possible, but I got the feeling that I would not have been completely free to do what I wanted. Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal are superb in the movie. It was better that Ang Lee did it and not me.

These days, many people feel only gay actors should play gay people, only disabled people should play disabled people, only Jewish people should play Jewish people, etc. What do you think of that conversation? 

The essence of acting is, in fact, to pretend, to be someone other than who you are, even in your own essence. That is at the core of acting. So, for example, absolutely a heterosexual actor can play a homosexual character and vice versa. If Hollywood is so obsessed, as it is right now, with representing minorities, be they Latinos, Asians or people with disabilities, they should actually hire them to do the writing. Just so I’m not misunderstood, I want to make sure that it is clear that I’m very much in favor of minorities of all types to be considered for casting in films and also to be hired behind the camera and that they be able to tell their own stories. I mean, even when you talk about the Western, we don’t have many Westerns told from the point of view of Native Americans, even though this is a genre that speaks of them, often in very unkind and unfair ways.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in the Sept. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

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