Pedro Almodóvar

had disintegrated. It is a doubly cinematic effect, that is, sonorous and visual. As well as throwing ‘the kiss with her husband’ on the floor, the scattered marbles bouncing on the floor multiply the sensation of destruction and violence. I’d bought the frame a few months before in a museum in New York (the MOMA or the Guggenheim) because I really liked it as an object. The object very quickly found a place in the film that I was going to make. I usually buy many more things than I need because ‘I know’ that many of them will end up in a film, in the environment of one of the characters I still don’t know. I buy most of the objects when I’m travelling; I need to be travelling in order to look with curiosity in the shops I pass through. New York, the Caribbean, Mexico, LA, and the various airports where at times I have to wait for hours, are the main providers of these kinds of objects. For example, I found the ’scuba diver’ from Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down in an American airport, in LA or NY. I had to wait more hours than was foreseen and I started looking in the shops. I bought it thinking of a two-year-old nephew, but from the beginning I was surprised by how well designed the swimmer’s body was, even though it was pure plastic. In Madrid I left it at home, in a drawer, and I didn’t give it to my nephew. During preparation of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down, when I was planning the scene in the bath in which Marina, Victoria Abril’s character, is thinking of the two men who had wooed her in the studio where she is making a film (one of them, the director in a wheelchair, and the other a brazen, likable young man – Antonio Banderas – who to get her attention throws himself on the floor and does a handstand), the script only said that while she is bathing she thinks of the desire of those two