As a little boy in Spain, Pedro Almodóvar sat under the table, fascinated, as his mother talked with her friends. He’s still not sure that his mother realized that he was listening or that he was absorbing so much. Hearing the passion, the emotions, the warmth, and the occasional conflict sparked something in him. And throughout his decades-long film career, he has focused on the kinds of deep female relationships that feel absent in cinema. Almodóvar describes this instinct to write about women as almost unconscious. “From a very young age, the imprint that I received is the fighting power of women,” he says. “When I get ideas to tell stories, I gravitate toward the universe of women.” With The Room Next Door, his latest, the filmmaker so firmly associated with Spain has made his first full-length feature shot in English. But while the New York locales were new for him, the story, of two friends reunited as one accepts her own death, has all the melodrama and moral ambiguity that make it purely Almodóvarean.
The director, 75, is known for how deeply he collaborates with his actors, most famously Penélope Cruz, who has appeared in seven of his films, starting with her unforgettable role in All About My Mother in 1999. “We have a very strong connection, and we have had it since the day we met, when I was 18 years old,” Cruz says. The Room Next Door stars Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and as has been the case since his earliest days as a filmmaker, the roles for his leading ladies are deep, thoughtful, and emotionally real.
Based in Madrid, Almodóvar runs his production company with his brother, Agustín; he has two older sisters and was very close with his mother. Cruz, who played a character inspired by his mother in the 2019 film Pain and Glory, sees his connection to her. “If you are in Pedro’s life, his mother is going to come up. She’s not alive anymore, but she was a very important figure for him,” she says. He is quick to note that there are more women working in film now than when he began, and credits directors like Jane Campion and Isabel Coixet with being able to capture experiences he may not be able to access. “When it comes to women’s sexuality, I don’t think that, as men, we can really come to understand and capture what that is,” he says. “There’s something that women directors are capturing that is very critical and essential.”
As she does not speak Spanish, Moore believed she’d never be able to work with the director who had dazzled her since she first saw Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and was captivated by the way he fused sorrow and humor. “It was the first time, I think, as an actor that I’d seen that kind of a juxtaposition—that someone’s utter commitment to their tragedy, to their sadness, could, with a different lens on it, be hysterically funny. I was shocked by it,” she says. Learning that he saw her in the role of Ingrid, a writer asked to aid a friend with something that terrifies her, was a thrill. Moore can’t recall another movie that takes on an adult female friendship in the same way. “Generally, when you see female-forward stories, it’s a familial relationship. It’s a mother and a daughter. It’s a romantic relationship or antagonistic. Someone’s a good one, someone’s a bad one. This is really about people who’ve been friends for a very, very long time. It’s about the nature of female friendship, which is to witness somebody’s life, to be there for them, to engage with them,” she says. More and more, Almodóvar’s films reflect the questions that he is grappling with. Like his Pain and Glory, which explores illness and aging, The Room Next Door confronts the uncomfortable parts of becoming older. “The older I’ve gotten, the more I have experienced things like pain that I didn’t use to experience in my youth, so I have begun to approach the topic from a dramatic vantage point. [I used to be] more excited by pleasure or crazy things or living intensely,” Almodóvar says.
The questions the film raises are ones he asks himself. “I remember when we were working, we were four—Tilda, Julianne, the death, and me. That is obvious in the movie, but also I felt it in my real life. I don’t understand death. I can’t quite wrap my head around it,” he says. “Not having a religious perspective toward death actually creates the opposite of hope. It takes hope away, and it adds that sense of fear. It’s perhaps a bit immature, both of Ingrid and myself, that I can’t quite come to accept that.” He assumed that making the movie would bring him to a place of understanding, but when he returned to Spain, he was confronted with the decision to put down his beloved 14-year-old cat. “I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that something that was alive and there one day is no longer there the next day,” he says.
Those are words spoken almost verbatim in the film by Moore’s Ingrid, underscoring her role as the director’s stand-in. Almodóvar could have written a character more like himself. But, he says, “even though the situations are universal—men also get cancer, men also speak to their friends— I couldn’t quite conceive of telling the story from any other point of view than the female.”
This story appears in the December 2024/January 2025 issue of ELLE.
