Pedro Almodovar Quotations

Cinema can fill in the empty spaces of your life and your loneliness.

Hospitals are places that you have to stay in for a long time, even if you are a visitor. Time doesn't seem to pass in the same way in hospitals as it does in other places. Time seems to almost not exist in the same way as it does in other places.

I don't want to imitate life in movies; I want to represent it. And in that representation, you use the colors you feel, and sometimes they are fake colors. But always it's to show one emotion.

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.

I think that the consciousness of passion makes you act very differently.

I think it's a change that I did not intend at the time but it is clear that, from The Flower of My Secret on, there is a change in my films. A lot of the journalists have very generously attributed this to my growing maturity.

I think that there is always a part of utopia in any romantic relationship.

Cinema has become my life. I don't mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

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.

Yes, women are stronger than us. They face more directly the problems that confront them, and for that reason they are much more spectacular to talk about. I don't know why I am more interested in women, because I don't go to any psychiatrists, and I don't want to know why.

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

I ask myself questions that journalists don't dare to ask or don't know how to ask.

My first memory is of the eyes of my brother; he was looking at me all the time.

Even though I love my mother, I didn't want to make an idealized portrait of her. I'm fascinated more by her defects - they are funnier than her other qualities.

La Mancha is a very macho, chauvinistic society. I saw very clearly that my life had to be in Madrid, and I liberated myself from my mum and dad after high school.

All my movies are difficult to classify because they are very eclectic in mixing genres.

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

I was born at a bad time for Spain, but a really good one for cinema.

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.

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

My directors of photography light my films, but the colours of the sets, furnishings, clothes, hairstyles - that's me. Everything that's in front of the camera, I bring you.

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.

I think decor says a lot about someone's social position, their taste, their sensibility, their work - and also about the aesthetic way I have chosen to tell their story.

I think my films are always political, even if I don't put explicitly political things in them.

I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies, but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free, and then I correct it after.

I'm an artist, and I'm part of every decision in a movie.

With this silent film, I wanted to hide what was going on in the clinic. I wanted to cover it up in the best cinematic way and in an entertaining manner.

When I make a film, the mixing process is very long, and you hear and watch the material in every form, so that totally shreds your ability to perceive it. So after the mixing, there's no way I can have the emotions or the reactions to my films in the same way.

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

But, although these films express many similar ideas from my previous films, I think they express these ideas in a different way.

For there to be communication within a couple, it is enough for there to be only one person who communicates or who really wants to communicate. Even though a couple consists of two people, if one of the people in a couple puts all their effort into moving a couple along they will move along.

The problem is that I work in more than one genre. It's impossible for me to aim for a single one because, for me, comedy is mixed with tragedy. That's very Spanish, the way in which comedy and tragedy are inextricable from each other.

You can make a thousand different movies about the same subject.

Broadway musicals, where you sing the whole time, I really don't like; I like alternating dialogue and music.

There's something about uninterrupted singing that just doesn't work for me, because at some point, I need my characters to talk. Without meaning to offend anyone, a musical like 'Les Miserables' would be the last thing I'd ever be interested in.

Already when I was very young, I was a fabulador. I loved to give my own version of stories that everybody already knew.

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.

In fact, it was the women in our house who were in the saddle. If men are the gods, women are not only the presidents but all the ministers of the government.

Before shooting, I prepare with the actors much more like it's a theater play than a movie. Apparently, that way of working is very unusual.

If I'd lived like my characters, I would have been dead before I'd made 16 films.

If I make a movie in English, the money will come from Europe, so that I can keep my independence and freedom. The way they produce in Hollywood doesn't fit me.

I am partly not conscious of structure with my movies but this is when I am writing. I leave my mind very free and then I correct it after.

The life I live due to my work is difficult to share.

Both sex and death are eternal themes. You could make thousands of movies on this theme, and whether you have a human being who is painting, singing, making a film, writing, these are the themes that you will come back to and return to. If you don't have any of these artistic expressions, sex is one of the only gifts that nature gave you for free, so it is very important to celebrate it. And then, with death, we are condemned to that. This is absolutely present in our lives.

I'm a very dull passenger. I don't speak. I don't have sex. No alcohol. I don't do drugs. The thing that I like about flying is that I feel like I can really concentrate. I used to write many things, and many ideas for my movies belong to this moment where I'm not anywhere specifically in terms of time and space and geography. I am suspended, and this suspension fits me very well.

A dead love never dies.

An ample arse helps you to be weighed down and be grounded.

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.

Cinema has become my life. I dont mean a parallel world, I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film.

Each actor is a very different person, and each one has to be directed very differently.

Anything that is not autobiography is plagiarism.

I'm more interested to show the darkest places of myself, and I don't joke about it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I make a film, I never stop uncovering mysteries, making discoveries. When I'm writing, filming, editing, even doing promotional work, I discover new things about the film, about myself, and about others. That is what I'm subconsciously looking for when shooting a film: to glimpse the enigmas of life, even if I don't resolve them, but at least to uncover them. Cinema is curiosity in the most intense meaning of the word.

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.

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

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.

There is a mysterious stillness and intimacy of a woman doing her hair and make-up which attracts me.

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.

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.

As a woman Penelope Cruz has changed as she has become an adult. But, as an actress she has not changed that much. 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.

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

When I start writing, the first line might come from reality, but the second and the third one, I have to write it. So this is the genesis of my creation. If I want to know what happens, if I want to find out the secret, I have to write it.

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.

Maybe it's the culture, maybe it's the cliché of Latino machismo, but the Mediterranean male character is more dull than the female character. Women are more surprising and they have fewer prejudices.

I make movies for my needs. My goal has never, never, never been to make shocking movie.

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.