Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (born September 25, 1949) is a Spanish filmmaker, director, screenwriter, producer, and former actor.

Pedro Almodóvar in 2017

Quotes

Quotes from Pedro Almodóvar

• I'm an artist…and I'm part of every decision in a movie. This is not how they work in Hollywood. There, the director is part of the crew, not the main creator. I'm too old to change now. I wouldn't know how to do it.
  • On why Almodóvar has forgone directing a Hollywood film in “Pedro Almodóvar interview for The Skin I Live In” in The Telegraph (2011 Aug 13)

• I make fiction films because I like representation. That’s why I don’t make documentaries, and I don’t think I’ll ever make documentaries. The colors of my movies are not completely real, because I like that distance, that this is a movie, and reality is over there. I don’t want to make something that looks completely real. I want a representation of that. And this is what was appealing to me and why I started making movies.
  • On his love of fictional films in “'I Make Fiction Films Because I Like Representation': Director Pedro Almodóvar On All About My Mother” in Filmmaker Magazine (Fall 1999 interview reprinted 2019 Jul 6)

• Whenever I've shot my previous films, I've felt phantoms of my own cinema past and personal past hovering over me. They accompanied me through those films. But this time I felt completely on my own. For the first time this film did not go hand-in-hand with my memories. The tone is different as well. It's very austere.
  • On how his 2011 film The Skin I Live In differed from his earlier efforts in “Pedro Almodóvar interview for The Skin I Live In” in The Telegraph (2011 Aug 13)

• I rely on it, it’s an addiction, the need to tell stories. If anything, my relationship with film has become more tense, more of a problem, because there is always that question: when will my time be up? Will this be the last film I make?...Perhaps this is the reason I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. Quite the opposite, I think I’ve cut back. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have. It’s finished up being both the end and the means for me.
  • On how much filmmaking means to Almodóvar in “Pedro Almodóvar: ‘I can no longer hide’” in The Guardian (2019 Aug 11)

• In fact I was never the son my parents wanted. I mean, I think that they really loved me. But it’s something I realised from a very young age.
  • On his relationship with his parents in “Pedro Almodóvar: ‘I can no longer hide’” in The Guardian (2019 Aug 11)

• I've had a very good relationship with my mother, but there's a whole generation of Spanish women who have struggled: very strong fighting figures who carry their families. These women are now in their 80s and feel that life has been unfair to them; they don't know how to grow old and how to be happy old ladies.
  • On the dilemmas faced by generations of Spanish women in “Pedro Almodóvar on Aging, Mom and 'Pain and Glory'” in AARP Magazine (2019 Oct 4)

• But it’s one of my worries, I can’t get over it in my mind. I mean, I can’t even reconcile myself to the fact that death is real. Plus I’m an atheist, so I have no belief in the afterlife and no creed to help me out. I see the whole thing as unnatural, I know that sounds odd.” He snorts. “So yes, I’m definitely afraid of dying.
  • On his views on death in “Pedro Almodóvar: ‘I can no longer hide’” in The Guardian (2019 Aug 11)

Quotes about Pedro Almodóvar

• For me today, the most important filmmaker alive, for me personally is Pedro Almodóvar. Because he takes people on the fringes of society and they are bizarre. And If you read about them in the newspapers, you would think they were criminals. But in an Almodóvar film, you forgive them and you even learn to love them, which I think is closer to godliness, than making a film about good people running around.
  • By Yasmin Ahmad (Malaysian film director and screenwriter)
  • Yasmin Ahmad retrospective at the Honolulu Academy of Arts hosted by CSEAS (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawai`i) - Podcast: Interview with Malyasian Filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad (with Wimal Dissanayake) at 5 Min - 2007 Spring - Archive