Pedro Almodóvar May Be Done With English-Language Film

Pedro Almodóvar has signalled he may never shoot another film in English. His new Cannes entry "Bitter Christmas," a Sony Pictures Classics release now playing in New York and Los Angeles, arrives as his biggest Spanish hit since 2006's "Volver" — and as a likely farewell to Hollywood-scale production.

"In Spain everything is much more immediate, and also it is my language, it's my culture," Almodóvar said during the New York Film Festival. Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore handled his translated English in "The Room Next Door," which won the Golden Lion. He still didn't enjoy the process, citing New York union rules.

He doesn't rule out another English-language film outright. But it would have to be small. "I don't find myself, anymore, capable of dealing with a production that is chaotic with a lot of people and a lot of characters," he said.

What is 'Bitter Christmas' about?

The film is autofiction (fiction built from the author's own life) at full throttle: a movie within a movie. Writer-director Raúl, played by Leonardo Sbaraglia, lifts key story points from his friends' lives for his script. Almodóvar calls the result one of his riskiest films. Spain's box office disagreed.

He considers it "twins" with the Oscar-nominated "Pain and Glory," which starred Antonio Banderas as his alter ego. "'Pain and Glory' is more about the physical pain, right?" he said. "Whereas in this film I deal with a different pain, which is the pain of writer's block, of the blank page, or writing something that doesn't quite come together for you."

Raúl fears his surgeries have left him unable to handle another shoot. His character Aitana tells him: "you know we are all losers, you have lost grace." By grace, she means inspiration.

Where does the story end and friends' lives begin?

Almodóvar has been burned before by raiding friends' stories. "There is not any law that creates the limits of the autofiction," he said. "There is no law that's going to define the limits of what you can appropriate and what you can't appropriate."

Still, he admits the moral calculus gets ugly. "If I'm inspired by the life of someone who's close to me, who's going through a difficult time, as a writer, you are selfish, because what propels you is the idea, even if it means going against the relationship," he said. "This is the limit: not to hurt anyone."

What about his own creative struggles?

Here's the irony: Almodóvar has never had writer's block. "The only thing that separates me from this alter ego is that I never lived a creative crisis," he said. "I've always succeeded ultimately." Panic attacks, however, are new. "At that moment I was unconscious, and it was something awful, awful," he said of the experience.

Music feeds the machine. Writing "Talk to Her," he played Caetano Veloso's "A Kukuku Paloma" thousands of times until "it was like an epiphany." In "Bitter Christmas," his two actresses listen to "Weeping Woman" by his longtime muse, Mexican chanteuse Chavela Vargas.

He also relished playing the villain — his own. "I could talk about myself as a writer-director, but mostly I also enjoyed the part of becoming the villain in a sense of that story," he said. Warned the director: "if they go to the bathroom for two minutes, they're going to miss something and be lost."

One scene gives a close-up of a computer cursor. "Even though the cursor itself is not a very cinematic thing to see," he said, "it's his call to creativity."

What comes next?

The self-portrait cycle is closed, he insists. "I promise not to talk about me anymore," Almodóvar said, adding that he has "reached the end" of his exploration of where creativity comes from. He is already writing the next film. "This is almost the opposite of this one," he said. "Bitter Christmas" expands nationally on November 25.