http://www.elpais.com/articulo/english/The/Almodovar/abyss/elpepueng/20110901elpeng_1/TenHe is the world's most acclaimed Spanish film director. Each one of his releases is a momentous event in the national and international film scene. Pedro Almodóvar, who is about to release his 18th feature-length film, The Skin I Live In - probably his darkest, harshest film to date - talks at length about current events, from the likely electoral victory of the Spanish right to the 15-M grassroots protest movement and the proliferation of amateur paparazzi.
Question. You wrote in the promotional material for this film about the importance of a sentence by Bulgarian Nobel Laureate Elias Canetti: "... the interrupted coming and going of the tiger behind the bars of his cage, so he will not miss that single, brief instant of salvation," which is a reference to the attitude of your character Elena Anaya, a prisoner of her gilded cage for years. Yet that feeling of living in a cage could also apply to your own life, and it conditions the evolution of your movies, which have changed from those initial comedies to a more dramatic type of cinema.
Answer. But I'm not a prisoner, or if I am, it is only of myself. And if I am incessantly seeking a crack through which to escape, that is because I am constantly looking for elements to inspire me and stimulate me to tell new stories. And that coming and going is part of my life and my work. But there are no bars, or if they are, they are purely biological, related to the passage of time. With regard to The Skin I Live In, it's true that it is likely the darkest movie I've done to date, even though it has the closest thing to a happy ending. But there is a part of the film where the predominating genre is horror, a real kind of horror, without artifice or blood or scares, nothing to do with the way the genre is handled these days. And that horror zone weighs heavily on the spectators' emotions - at least on the hundreds that I've had a chance to talk to, mostly journalists. But it's not a dark movie. There is a lot of light, I didn't want to resort to an expressionist esthetic with shadows against the walls and so on. I sought my own way, which is definitely not the road of shadows. And for this I have to thank José Luis Alcaine for a masterful job as director of photography. He deserves the prize he got at the Cannes Festival for best film photography.
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