Pedro Almodóvar Through the Eyes of Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and 7 Other Stars

“I want to be a Almodóvar/like Maura girl, Victoria Abril”, singer and songwriter Joaquín Sabina sang in 1992. The song was an ode to Pedro Almodóvar, who was a master of passionate Cinemato, often, often.

Approximately 45 years, numerous actresses have shared that desire to be part of their boldly saturated universe, where despair and elión, sex and violence, tenderness and intense hatred of occupying the same framework. “It’s a club that I really enjoy,” as Julianne Moore said in an interview.

The film at the Lincoln Center will celebrate that legacy with its highest honor, the Chaplin Award, at a gala on Monday where the presenters will include Dua Lipa, John Waters and Mikhail Baryshnikov.

“Although constantly reinvents himself and not two or his films are the same, you can always identify a Pedro movie watching only one painting,” said Penelope Cruz, one of his most loyal collaborators. She said Almodóvar’s films pay “tribute to all women.”

She and Moore were among the nine actresses who talked to me about working with the author, describing him as a precise and unique collaborator. This is what they said:

Julianne Moore, ‘The next by By’ room (2024)

The first time Moore entered the Almodóvar apartment for an essay of “The next room”, was stunned. She had seen almost all the objects there and all the tones in one of her films. Moore described this as “physical narration”, the human drama that conjured also materialized in the striking costumes and sets.

She said she initially assumed that what she was seeing on the screen was extracted from Spain. “Talk about an unitled thought,” he said. “I thought,” this must be what Spain is, and that is what is expression. “Energy and beauty, all that is Pedro,” said Moore. The actress recalled that she was surprised to see herself in a red turtle neck scene, while Swinton had bright green. “I thought,” My God, we just enter a Almodóvar movie. We are in that! “

Tilda Swinton, ‘The human voice’ (2021)

Collaborating with Almodóvar for the first time in the brief “The Human Voice”, an adjustment for Swinton, because the director was so specific in his intention. “Hey, he wants you to follow the brands on the ground, but they also want charm,” he said. “The challenge is how to make the way he hears, but still surprise it.”

Swinton remembered a moment in “The Human Voice” when Almodóvar, whom he described as a “romantic filmmaker”, told him to stand dramatically. “I thought:” Well, do I stand up? “And then I realized: ‘I’m still there, that’s what is not a matter. He tells you,” this person, at that time, has so much emotion that she stands with this very dramatic gesture, that it is kind to me, a very white Gingery person of Scotland. “

Julieta Serrano, ‘Pain and Glory’ (2019)

The veteran interpreter Julieta Serrano won a Goya award, the Spanish Oscar’s equivalent, for her role based on Almodóvar’s mother in “pain and glory” semi -autobiographical. Despite the importance of the part, the director did not specify how to portray the penetrating maternal figure. “That was liberating for me,” he said. “Reproducing characters based on real people can be difficult, but Peter’s brilliance was allowing us to offer so much truth without thinking about what we look like real or not.”

But what Serrano, who also interprets the betrayed wife and turning in “women on the verge of a nervous breakdown” (1988), appreciates the majority of Almodóvar is the way in which he extracts catheterism from comedy. “He has a prodigious imagination and a sense of humor that focuses on the human condition,” he said. “Through laughter, it highlights the good, the bad and the ridiculous in us.”

Elena Anaya, ‘The Skin I Live’ (2011)

Elena Anaya, who had a complicated role in “The Skin I Live”, believes that all directors who write their own scripts are emotionally affected when they see the actors of the actors they imagined. But this feeling is equally more intense for Almodóvar, Anaya said. “Pedro talks about the characters as if the people he has already lived for for years, people who know very closely, who love and defend independently of the role they play in their stories,” he said. To help an actor to enter the performance he is looking for, Anaya explained, provides tests of precise notes in the set. “Establish the exact points, Hey wants not only to scope but you overcome,” he said. “Everything you receive from Pedro is pure food for an artist.”

While Cruz had played small parts in the films of the late 990 of Almodóvar “Live Flesh” and “All About My Mother”, was playing an unexpectedly reconnecting with his mother separated in “Full” that fortress. “Every afternoon before firing, we walked through the small cities, and he talked to me about his childhood in La Mancha” in the center of Spain, he said. “That movie really gathered us.”

But despite his deep confidence, there is still a “healthy fear” in his employment relationship. “I never enter the shooting,” Oh, I’m working with my friend, I can relax. “No, no, no,” he said. “Set the really tall bar, and that motivates me. It is a very addictive feeling.”

And yet, Cruz said, the two communicate almost telepathic at this point. “When he reaches the set, I look at him and I know if he is fine or not, if he is in a good mood, if he is worried, if he is happy,” he added. “And I think he can do the same with me. I can’t fool him, Neith in the set or in our personal relationship.”

Leonor Watling, ‘Talk to her’ (2002)

To play a woman who spends almost everything or “talk to her” in a coma, Leonor Watling practiced classic yoga and ballet for months before filming. “He told me:” I’m going to sacrifice a very strange role, and I want you to read it carefully, because you’re dead. I want you to be a very lively presence while you are completely still. “

Watling recalled that Almodóvar immediately the internal monologue of his character while he was real in bed, with his eyes closed. “He said:” Now you are thinking that you are walking through a field full of leaves and the leaves are making noise. “Hey, not because I was just lying there.” Althehe can now laugh at that, the actress admitted that it was difficult for her ego to accept that her first role as Almodóvar would be so silenced. “Pedro has always made me feel so much affection and appreciation for what I did when talking to her,” he said. “He understands how difficult it was to me.”

Cecilia Roth, ‘All About My Mother’ (1999)

After making the “All About My Mother”, winner of an Oscar “, played a woman whose son dies tragically, Cecilia Roth asked Almodóvar if she thought her performance would have been different if her own son had been born before the movie filmed.” Pedro literally told me, “even a German truck driver is a mother,” he recalled. “He believes that it doesn’t matter if you have a child or not. All of us who have also had a mother of maternity within us,” he explained.

Roth said the director knows the exact emotions of his actors and work to bring thesis through the characters. “Pedro knows more about you than you, I will tell you a lot,” he added. Roth remembers sitting next to Almodóvar at the Academy Awards in 2000 and need to use the bathroom just before the foreign language category was announced. She recalled, laughing, that the agitated director said: “It’s always the same with you!” But she returned in time to listen to Penelope Cruz present the Oscar for her film. “Like everything with Pedro, that night was an adventure,” Roth said.

Rossy de Palma, ‘The flower of my secret’ (1996)

An always memorable characters, Palma Rossy has encouraged eight Almodóvar films. Because “the flower of my secret,” he said, the director obtained a lot from the women of his own family for the hilarated scenes between the daughter and the mother that she and Chus Lampreave played.

“Many of the phrases that Chus said were typical” or Almodóvar’s mother, he said, describing the true matriarch as the “supreme screenwriter” given his influence on her work.

La Palma said he adored the Almodóvar heroines who were not loaded with guilt. “There is no karmic sense of deserving what happened to you,” he said. “No matter how traumatic the events that occurred, you have the ability to get up from ashes as a phoenix and say:” Well, what do we do with what is left? “There may be a tragicomedy, as in life itself, but there is no hood of the victim.”

Marisa Paredes, ‘High Heels’ (1992)

In the Almodóvar cinema, the defining image of Marisa Paredes, its heartbreaking and synchronized synchronized performance of the bolero “thinks and my” is in “high heels”. Paredes recalled that the director adapted the role of the Becky torches singer of the Páramo to include details of his personal life, such as establishing a scene in a theater where the actress offered acted.

Paredes and Almodóvar formed a consumption association that seized melodrama in their films. In his last interview weeks before his death, Paredes talked about his collaboration ardently. “To work with Pedro, you have to jump to the pool with him without a life preserving. You have to give everything and more,” he said. “They demand them a lot, but for an actress like me, which is fundamental in the character’s contradictions, a director like Pedro adapts me very well to an actress like me whenever she adapts very well to Pedro.”

For Paredes, one of the most notable talents of Almodóvar was to have intuition and flexibility to take advantage of unplanned events in the set. She said, with a subtle laugh: “If he sees that he enriches the situation, he will accept it, because there is almost nothing, or rather, nothing, silly about him.”