Pedro Almodóvar

almost secondary to me. Entering that atmosphere of a unique sensibility and its latest intricate and finely crafted fantasy is the trip for me – and Almodóvar is one of these directors.
     I tell Almodóvar something similar during our visit and he tells me this is one of the most satisfying compliments a director could get. Then I ask him what directors made him feel that way when he was more a viewer of film than a master of it. The first three names off his lips are Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, and Federico Fellini. “Oh, and little bit Buñuel,” he says. All this seems entirely apropos. After all, it’s his personal digestion of these influences that has resulted in the work we have come to know and love as vintage Almodóvar.

You mentioned how you place certain objects in your films as symbols and markers, such as books and art. What I found interesting is how you said you do this not only for the audience as cues and added layers in the story, but also for yourself as signposts in the making of the film. Could you comment more on this and your relationship to the objects you place within the films?
I could write reams of pages explaining the number of objects that fill my films and their particular relationship to the characters, the scene where they appear, or to me, or cinema in general. I’ll give you two or three examples. In The Flower of My Secret, when the writer Leo Macías has just broken up with her husband, she picks up a framed photo that she has on her bedside table (the frame is made of transparent marbles and in the centre there is a small photo of Leo kissing her husband), she hurls it with fury on the floor and there’s a great crash. The pile of marbles, freed from the frame that contained them, bounce on the wooden floor, as if the frame