by James Mottram
After years of ‘will he? won’t he?’, Pedro Almodóvar has finally gone and done it. The great Spanish filmmaker behind Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Volver and Talk to Her has at last made a feature in English. What’s more, after years of premiering his movies at festivals, he finally received a top accolade – with The Room Next Door winning Venice’s Golden Lion.
Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What are You Going Through, it sees Tilda Swinton play Martha, a woman dying of cancer who asks old friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be with her when she plans to take her own life after buying a pill “on the dark web”. Exploring the hot-button topic of euthanasia, it’s another typically adventurous film from Almodóvar.
This is your first feature in English. But you made shorts Strange Way of Life and The Human Voice in English. Were those done with your feature in mind?
“This is one of the reasons… just to have the experience. Part of it has been I was very scared to shoot in English, to know that I could direct actors in English, and this is in fact one of the reasons that I’ve turned down some projects that have been offered to me in English. I just wanted to try my hand at directing actors in English.”
Did you ever come close to taking up an English language movie before?
“The closest was with Brokeback Mountain. Larry McMurtry, the screenwriter, had the rights of the Annie Proulx story and asked me to do it. And that was the first time that I’ve felt very close to making an American movie. But, at the end, I was always insecure, and I refused it. At the end of the day, I was very happy with the movie that Ang Lee did. I loved that movie. He made a wonderful work. But that was the only time that I felt very close because I loved the Annie Proulx short tale. I hesitated for three months.”
The Room Next Door deals with euthanasia. Can you talk about the film’s relationship to death?
“For all religious creeds, whether they’re Catholic or not, it’s an affront to religion, particularly for those who believe that only God can decide between life and death. What I requested – or asked for in my speech [when I won the Golden Lion in] Venice – is that for those people who are believers, where a religion dictates that they should be against this, that they come to accept the fact that these are individual decisions. They should not interfere in the lives of others, that this is really, fundamentally a question of respect for others. It’s not even a political question! It’s just really a question about humanity and being a human being. But of course, it becomes a political topic as the Far Right is against euthanasia. [Right now, there is] concern around the joining of forces, so to speak, between neoliberalism and the Far Right. Neoliberalism is really about the core of a system that also wants to negate things like climate change. And the danger when you have these two forces joining is that no action will be taken on these topics, and it will affect, of course, the rest of the world.”
Who do you identify with most within your film?
“For me, it was a way to [reflect on] mortality and death, because I feel myself very immature in this sense, because I cannot understand… every day, [there are] multiple demonstrations of death everywhere. I mean, we are living in an awful world at this moment, but for me, as Julianne said at the beginning of the movie… I myself find it an unnatural thing, that something would be alive one moment and gone the next. And so, in that sense, Julianne’s character is closer to me. And one of the processes, of course, that Julianne’s character goes through is that – having had deaths so close – she comes to understand, in fact, that this is a personal decision, and that the fact that the individual gets to make this decision comes to make sense to her.”
You often place your personal objects in your films. Which featured here?
“There is a photograph that establishes that Martha has been a war correspondent. And it’s a photo of eight women all dressed in black, all covered. This took place in Georgia, I own that photo. There’s also a painting by a painter by the name of Antonio Lopez. It’s an unfinished set of flowers that’s in Tilda’s room – that also belongs to me. And there’s also two vases in her space that belong to me, and, if I keep thinking, surely I can think of many more things! And of course, there’s that moment where Julianne opens the door, and there are things like invitations to Vogue events or Christmas cards. Those actually all also belong to me, and of course, I picked the ones in English.”
The film takes the fear out of death, with its bright colour scheme. Was that intentional?
“Yeah, because I did not really want to have a dark veil over the film. It was a film in which I really wanted to express the vitality, particularly Tilda’s vitality. I really wanted it to be a luminous film, an optimist’s film, because this is ultimately a film about someone who has made a decision, and it becomes a lesson for Julianne Moore’s character who changes throughout the course of the film and learns to enjoy every single moment and to live in the moment.”
Do you feel audiences will find this an incredibly painful film to watch?
“It is true that Tilda’s character is in the midst of this personal apocalypse, so to speak. But even then, she’s able to enjoy the small things, as when she speaks about the falling snow, in reference to the James Joyce passage. And there’s a sequence where she talks about how she’s been reduced to the minimal sort of aspects of survival, right? That she could no longer read as she used to. She could no longer listen to music. These things that used to have magic for her, no longer do. And she’s really great and wonderful in the sequence. And it is true that it’s painful to watch to hear her say these things, but one of the things that I did try to do in the film is to give a lighter and more optimistic tone at the same time.”
How did you work with the two actresses on set?
“Tilda always has the perfect answer for that, which is that it’s a cinematographic language, and that’s a universal language that belongs to all of us. And with Tilda in particular, we share a lot of common interests in literature and cinema. Since I had already worked with her on The Human Voice, we had an immediate chemistry. That was already there at the base. In Julianne’s case, there were no issues directing. She took all my cues. But it is true that there were a couple of lines, maybe three or four lines, in the script, where she would say to me, ‘That’s not really how we would say it in the U.S.’, or at least not in New York, where she’s from. And I trusted her. I have no reason to challenge her knowledge of the language. And so, I did change just a couple of lines in the script.”
This film took shape very rapidly. How come?
“It was because [Venice Film Festival director Alberto] Barbera, when we were shooting, he asked about the movie to be in the festival. So, it was really, really very fast. Because in the middle of May… we were still shooting. We wanted to reach that date… I mean, the end of August, but it was because he said that he would like to have the movie, and when he could see the movie, he was very happy. Because, I mean, he trusted that we were making a good movie, but if we get to Venice in September… I mean, for me, it’s like gaining one year. Now, it’s really a lot of work, because…we are opening in the whole world, in these three months. It’s a lot of work for me, but it’s so concentrated that it’s like you gain a year to start a new movie.”
The Room Next Door is in cinemas Boxing Day 2024
