Pedro Almodóvar Calls Bitter Christmas His Last Direct Self-Portrait

Pedro Almodóvar says Bitter Christmas, which opens in theaters on Friday, November 13, will be the last time he talks about himself so directly on screen. The Golden Lion winner for 2024's The Room Next Door delivered the statement in an interview with The Film Stage ahead of the film's release.

The Spanish director, now more than 45 years into his career, has spent decades dressing his obsessions — desire, motherhood, illness, the movies themselves — in melodrama and Technicolor. Pain and Glory centered him in a searing spotlight. Bitter Christmas continues the autofiction, but through what he calls an alter ego of an alter ego.

What is Bitter Christmas about?

The nesting-doll plot follows Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a film director spending a long, memory-ridden December weekend in Madrid in 2004 before making her third film. In 2026, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a filmmaker in a creative drought, writes her story — a lightly disguised version of his own. His script bleeds into the lives around him, including his assistant Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), furious to find herself on the page.

The film raises direct questions: Who owns a life once it becomes a screenplay? How much of another person's pain is a writer entitled to borrow? Almodóvar has always kept his life and work in conversation, but here, he says, they are one and the same.

Why did his style become austere?

Almodóvar traced his evolution from the baroque 1980s to today's restraint. The early films reflected Spain's new democracy and its newly available liberties — young people, he said, "had access to liberties that they did not have before," so his films were "much more baroque" and "exaggerated."

He located the first inflection in the 1990s, around All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Bad Education — his "more adult films," not necessarily deeper but more complex, where "sickness and pain begin to appear." The second turning point came with Julieta, which adapted three Alice Munro stories that demanded "a more contained and sober style of storytelling that was new for me and that I found very, very attractive."

His lifestyle shifted in parallel. "In the '80s, I lived surrounded by people going out 24 hours a day," he said. "By the 2000s I had, in essence, pulled away from social life."

The takeaway: Almodóvar now challenges himself to use fewer and fewer elements in his filmmaking while going deeper into his stories.

What does he say about pain?

"There's more to say about pain than there is about happiness," Almodóvar said. Pain, he added, "lends itself to more inspiration" than pleasure, particularly when found in people and situations around you.

He described Pain and Glory and Bitter Christmas as "twin films," a diptych. The first dealt with physical pain — Almodóvar himself has back surgery that limits him to standing no more than half an hour, and shooting is very physical. The new film deals with moral pain: a protagonist who spends four or five years without a script he feels passionate about. Almodóvar said he has never lived through such a hiatus himself.

"I do it passionately, and this is the only way, and if you don't feel that, then I don't do it," he said of filmmaking.

Where are autofiction's limits?

The director addressed the moral ambiguity of latching onto others' pain as material. "Once that idea comes to the writer, he stops thinking about the person that might have inspired the writing," he said. "In that sense writers are not quite so narcissistic, but certainly they're selfish. And we can be dangerous."

Unlike Pain and Glory, which forgives its protagonist, Bitter Christmas has Mónica directly indict Raúl. Almodóvar said he wrote the character as "the villain of the film, in a way," because "it's dangerous to be self-complacent" and he refuses to glorify himself in his own work. He called the process "healthy" and "fun."

Does he regret anything?

No. "The feeling of regret is a very Catholic feeling. I run away from that," Almodóvar said. Raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition of sin and punishment, he rejects that framework "as an ideology." He remains conscious of his mistakes but calls questioning himself "almost like a useless exercise" — mistakes, he said, are part of who you are. The one exception: "I don't think I have hurt anyone, but if that were the case, I think that is something to regret."

What comes next?

Almodóvar now has two to three stories in development: one almost done, one halfway there, one just a set of notes. All push him "outside my house, outside my comfort zone, outside of what I know," requiring research into other realities, professions and people. His reason is blunt: "Because I'm really tired of myself."

On color, he said he works from an unconscious inner palette shaped by 1960s pop culture and Madrid's post-dictatorship 1980s, chasing the bright, high-contrast Technicolor of his childhood movies — colors that are chemically impossible to reproduce. He remains involved in every detail of production design and rejects naturalism in the mode of the Dardenne brothers or Ken Loach: "I prefer to represent life and reality. And there is always something artificial."

With Bitter Christmas, Almodóvar closes the door on direct self-portraiture — and points his next three projects firmly away from home.