New York Film Festival: Pedro Almodovar (‘Strange Way of Life’) breaks the taboo of ‘desire between men’ in Western genre [WATCH]
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Director Pedro Almodovar “didn’t pay a lot of attention” to Westerns early in his life because he didn’t think the Spaghetti Western movies he was exposed to at the time were very good. But around when he was 18 he discovered American Westerns and “fell completely in love with the genre.” Now he has made a romantic Western short film, “Strange Way of Life,” and discussed it at the New York Film Festival. Watch his complete Q&A below.
It was “in the last three years that I started writing this,” Almodovar explained about this script, about two men (Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal) who are reunited after decades apart, but divided again by loyalty to their families. “I didn’t know it would become a short, but sometimes I write just for fun, and then I have many set pieces in my computer, and sometimes those set pieces become part of a movie or a short like in this case.”
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In the very masculine tradition of the Western, there has been very little “homosexual expression or desire between men,” a taboo that extends beyond the genre. It’s “incredible” to Almodovar that these prejudices “last so much” in the culture, all the way up to 2023. “It is curious that they never approach this subject in a genre that is full of males.” So in a way, “it was an advantage for me to talk about this because I didn’t find it.”
But the Western is “very alive,” with female filmmakers like Kelly Reichardt (“Meek’s Cutoff”), Chloe Zhao (“The Rider”) and Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) finding new and original ways into the genre. So there was room for Almodovar to add his own voice to it. And it was “quite a wonderful feeling” to do it in a short film because “I felt like I was recovering my sense of youth, as if I was just beginning to make films.”
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