Pedro Almodovar Quotes - Page 2

All my movies have an autobiographical dimension, but that is indirectly, through the characters. In fact I am behind everything that happens and that is said, but I am never talking about myself in first person. Something in me - probably a dislike of cheap exhibitionism- stops me from approaching a project too autobiographically.

When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

The Flower of My Secret is definitely more based in true emotions. I also wanted to make something more realistic, but not naturalistic or simple.

Once we actually have the production script after many rewrites, at that point is when I start to decide what the look and colors will be. I work like a painter, even though I'm working in three dimensions. I'm working with chairs. I'm working with walls. But even things like the floor or the walls that people might think are not important, they actually do influence the visual look of the film. These are also things that I have to think about.

My mother was an extremely creative woman, despite the fact that she lived the life of a rural housewife.

I'm really a nightmare for the fashion designer because I take away all of his authority, and I become the authority, and I turn him into my assistant. You could say I intervene, and I intervene in a very determining way in all the aspects that have to do with the visual construction of the film.

If I had not been successful as a director, then I'm sure I would still be telling stories. I would have continued on 16mm or found a different medium through which to tell them. Maybe they would have been less glamorous than films, but I would continue to tell stories.

When I was young I thought: when I am 60 my necessities will be very different. As I get near that age, I realise they are similar to what they were when I was 25.

I tried to think about these two issues very freely. With sex, I think I can manage with that. With death, this is a more difficult theme for me. I'm not a believer, even though I'm baptized. I don't practice. I don't believe in God, so I feel very alone facing death. What I discovered is that the only way to recognize death is if you are part of life, if you are part of sexual pleasure, if you link it with sexual pleasure.

I also wanted to express the strength of cinema to hide reality, while being entertaining. Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

The 1980s really ended for me in 1992 with the film Kika.

After the enormous success of All About my Mother, all the awards and everything, I wanted to start a movie in exactly the same place that I used to be before. I wanted to show that all of the success had not changed my perception.

As a woman, she [Penelope Cruz] obviously has changed as she has become an adult. But, as an actress, I actually might say that she has not changed that much. And she has something great, especially in comedy, and she hasn't been exploited as much as she could be in comedy, but particularly in that mix between comedy and drama. She's got a very special quality about her. You can place her in very extreme situations, especially very painful situations, in terms of how her character interprets it. And sometimes, the deeper and more human that pain is, the better she is at it.

I used this line to demonstrate how important colors are in movies: It's not a caprice.

Whenever I arrive on a real location, I have to move around and work out what the best angles are going to be.

The silent film has a lot of meanings. The first part of the film is comic. It represents the burlesque feel of those silent films. But I think that the second part of the film is full of tenderness and emotion.

When I was very young, I was already a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew. When I got out of a movie with my sisters, I retold them the whole story. In general they liked my version better than the one they had seen.

Never again work in the same conditions in whichyou made your first film. It's good to take risks, but not thatmuch risk.

It's a pity that I can never really enjoy my movies because, after the mixing, your capacity as a spectator just disappears. I have to think about what I felt just before the mixing.

I was always storytelling, since I was a child. I remember myself at 10 years old telling stories to my sisters and brother. This is something I did through my adolescence and even through my twenties.

The challenge to me as a director was for the audience to see the film as going on in a straight line, so that they did not sense all of these break-ups. I did not want a film to be a collage of all these images.

Cukor is one of my favorite directors. He was a master at directing women.