YOUR FAVORITE MTV SHOWS ARE ON PARAMOUNT+

Director's Cut: Pedro Almodóvar ('I'm So Excited!')

i'm so excited almodovar

A professional dominatrix, a hitman and a psychic virgin walk onto a plane: the premise for Pedro Almodóvar's new film "I'm So Excited!" sounds like an attempt to find a new setting for an old gag. The simple setup — a plane whose landing gear is busted, circling while waiting for a runway to be made available for a potentially fatal emergency landing as its passengers go nuts — was initially presented as a return to the farcical mode of Almodóvar's 1988 international breakthrough "Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown." The film's indeed funny and frantic, but there's clear anxiety underpinning it: in the opening minutes, a character reads a newspaper article listing the top ten financial scandals of the year, an ominous harbinger of the economic chaos the plane is flying over. In interviews and in a self-written press kit, Almodóvar has been unambiguously clear about the film's metaphorical echoes of the specifics of Spain's current financial difficulties (see this interview for starters), which give the frothy film a taut charge. A few weeks ago, Almodóvar sat down in a midtown New York hotel to talk about Roberto Bolaño, synthetic mescaline and shooting his first popular musical number.

Vadim Rizov: In your movies, what your characters read is very important. The Mexican hitman is reading Roberto Bolaño's 2666" to give people the title for clarity's sake.

Pedro Almodóvar: The novels that I place in my movies used to be novels that I liked very much, but also that have an importance for the character. In this case, what I said to the Mexican actor was — have you read the book?

VR: No, I only read "The Savage Detectives."

PA: [laughs] There is a big part — [to the interpreter?] Have you?

Interpreter: No.

PA: I recommend it to you both. For me, it's the best novel in the Spanish language of this century. There is a big part — well, the novel is more than a thousand pages, but there are like 300 pages where Roberto Bolaño only talks with details that are very short, details that belong more to a journal. He speaks to the hundreds of deaths that happened in the north of Mexico, only to women, that the police never investigate. So this is part of what the novel is about. And he picks up all these stories and details from the newspapers.

I never emphasize the novel in a close-up, but the reason he's reading it and the reason you noticed it — I wanted you notice that he's reading that — is that it hits close. He himself has been charged with having to kill a woman, and these stories are about other women who have been murdered and other murderers like himself, perhaps other killers for hire. The difference is that he hates to kill women.

In the case of her — I couldn't, because I couldn't ask for the rights — I wanted to put a page of a magazine like "In Touch," these kinds of tabloids. For example, I wanted the magazine to talk about things such as celebrities sweating or having big spots on their arms or having a big ass or a little bit of a pouch. I wanted to play a little bit with that, those kind of magazines that are so invested in what Christina Aguilera has done to lose so much weight. We don't see this, but Cecilia Roth's character is herself fodder for that kind of tabloid.

The Valencia Cocktail has connotations with post-Franco nightlife. What's your relationship to it?

PA: There was a moment of two to three years where they made synthetic mescaline. It was the middle of the '80s. I took it sometimes, not very often. Anyway, they were a moment and then they disappeared. But I remember the effects of this drug, they were very social and an aphrodisiac, and mixed with the Valencia cocktail, a cocktail very famous in Valencia and everywhere else in Spain. It's a kind of tribute to the '80s, this cocktail mixed with this synthetic drug. It was a classic for that time period.

It also serves a function within the narrative of the film to free the characters into on one hand forgetting the situation that they're in, and on the other hand works as an aphrodisiac that leads them into this orgy that we see. It's like an elixir we see in classical plays, when a character drinks it and becomes more free, liberated, somewhat different. Narratively speaking, it also had the effect of something like "A Midsummer Night's Dream," where you take an elixir and characters change, something happens. There's an entire history and tradition of this in classical literature.

You've been shooting in widescreen for a long time, and then you went back in 1.85:1 for The Skin I Live In. I was wondering how that changes how you think visually.

PA: It's more like the film itself and certain particularities of the story demand a particular frame. The reason we used a 1.85 ratio is because we were shooting inside of a plane. There is not a lot of room, so that why was I made the frame smaller, let's say. And also, for this kind of comedy, I feel it is more appropriate. This is a kind of intuition, but in this case for the only set that we had — it was very small, you know — and basically that was the reason.

You're not interested in confusing people when you give interviews about your movies. The movie has clear meaning with relation to the current situation in Spain. How important is it to you to be able to explain this context and how important do you think this is for someone abroad to understand this as opposed to someone watching this at home, who'll be intuitively aware of the broader metaphorical resonances?

PA: For me, as a director, it's important to have many reasons for why I'm shooting a film. Many times, there are very secret reasons I never put on film. For example, as you've just asked me about Bolaño's book, it's very important for me, but whether the spectator gets the reference or not is not very important. The audience, it's impossible for them to know he's reading about murdered women, but for me and for the actor as well it's important to know that that's what's happening at that moment. It helps, because it gives you a base.

As far as the social metaphor: of course, in Spain it's very obvious to the spectator. Here, it's not really as important. In fact, I would really hope that the film really functions despite the spectator not knowing all the details and specifics about what the Spanish situation is. I hope and I pray that the movie will be funny without thinking about that social part. It's not the main propeller for the film, and in fact the word "crisis" never appears in the film. It's a film that is very unreal in a sense. I wanted to escape from reality, but reality is always there.

Just to give you an example that the American spectator doesn't know: that ghost airport, that's a real airport. There are 17 such airports, can you imagine? It's a result of the social and economic corruption. Just to have in the movie this airport, the movie becomes a metaphor for the Spanish situation just by showing this airport. For me, this is crazy: an airport for nothing, an embezzlement made by the banks and a misuse of the funds by the investors as well. That is one of the main problems right now, is the corruption of the banks, and one of the main generators of the Spanish crisis. So I put the character of these financiers in the movie, but I pass by his corruption problems, because I prefer to talk about his personal life, his relationship with his daughter he's going to see, and all that. It's there, it's real, it's Spain, but in the movie I'm talking about the other part of him.

For me, it's important as a director, as a writer, as a person, as a Spanish guy that lives there, it's important, all that, but let's say the movie is a comedy, it's like a big party. Even the main situation is about a whole bunch of people that are together in this, and they have no idea what's going to happen when they land. This is something you can do in a movie, is to turn the fear of death into a party. In real life, I don't know if you can do this.

im-so-excited-almodovar-19761

In Spanish, the original title ["Los amantes pasajeros"] has two meanings, "The Amorous Passengers" and "The Fleeting Passengers." Is the English title "I'm So Excited!" because the pun can't be translated?

PA: Yeah, it is because of that. I love the Spanish title — that works the same way in French and Italian — but not in English. "Pasajeros," which means "passenger," is someone who is traveling, but also something that has an ending, that's fleeting, that happens and it's gone. If you don't have the two meanings, it was better to find another title. When I decided on that song, it was in the script that they had a dance over the whole airplane. Since the beginning, I thought a lot about disco music, because for these very gay, very flamboyant stewards, disco music is very important, it's like The Bible. So I rejected completely "I Will Survive," because it's too obvious. Then I remembered that I used to like very much [The Pointer Sisters'] "I'm So Excited!" In the Spanish language, to be excited has more than one meaning. In Spain, everything has more than one meaning depending on the tone of your voice, how you pronounce it and the context. To be excited implies enthusiasm, but also to be excited is to be horny. That represents also the state of all these characters.

You've always had a lot of music in your films, but this is your first musical sequence.

PA: It's very, very much worked out. I wanted to be able to use the entire business cabin, from the hallways to the seats to everything possible. I called a choreographer, Blanca Li, a friend of mine, and I told her what I wanted. And she understood very quickly. I explained my ideas with the seats, with all that, and the three actors — they don't dance, they aren't dancers, but they really enjoyed the choreography so much that they were very enthusiastic. They worked with an assistant of the choreographer for a month, just learning how to do it in the plane. It's one of the sections in the film that is perfectly storyboarded, because I do feel it's been drawn rehearsed. You can't be spontaneous. Even though it looks spontaneous, it's not spontaneous. Also, you know, the space is very difficult. I didn't want to avoid that we are there, but you need to rehearse a lot and think about it. But for them, it was a lot of fun to just be rehearsing movement. All these things depend on the discipline of the actors, and all three were very disciplined.

This is your first time shooting in digital. Do you want to continue shooting on film? Could you even if you wanted to?

PA: I don't want to shoot everything on digital, but the problem is that a lot of the labs that process film are shut down. So in the end, it's going to depend on the viability of shooting on film. The DP that I work with, who's wonderful [José Luis Alcaine], has a lot of experience with analog cinema, so one of his tasks was trying to recreate the sense of analog in digital, but one of the difficulties of digital is that I get the sense it's always a kind of flattened image. There's something alive about about the atmosphere of what the negative does to the image that I really miss.

What he did in post-production was to paint with the colors that I wanted, to make the very sharp focus of digital softer. When I discovered that that was one of the things that made it more similar to the negative, I was happy. What he tried to recreate was something you couldn't see, just the atmosphere, the air, something that has a little more grain. That's something that he tried to recover on the post-production process. So I don't know, it will depend on the story. I will try to keep making films in analog with film. I'm nostalgic with that. What's wonderful with digital is that you can make a whole plane. We didn't have it; we had only a wall at the end, for example. All those things, it's wonderful to do that and you have to take advantage of that. But if I have to tell a story that takes place here, with three persons talking, I would prefer to do it in analog.

Latest News