Pedro Almodóvar to 'return to the cinema of women' for new film Silencio

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/05/pedro-almodovar-silencio-new-film

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Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish director of passionate dramas such as Talk To Her and The Skin I Live In, has revealed details of his next film, Silencio.

In an interview with the FT, he says the film is is so named because “that’s the principal element that drives the worst things that happen to the main female protagonist”. He describes it as “a return to the cinema of women, of great female protagonists, and it’s a hard-hitting drama, which excites me”.

He looks set to move outside his usual repertory cast, which often includes the likes of Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas: “We are involved in casting at the moment, which is complicated because what I’ve written doesn’t quite work with my actores amigos.”

The new film looks set to join an Almodóvar tradition of strong female lead characters trying to carve out lives for themselves, as in some of his most celebrated films like Volver and All About My Mother. Another example, his musical film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, has just been adapted for the London stage, with Tamsin Greig in the lead role.

Silencio follows the frothily camp comedy I’m So Excited. “In general [comedy is] considered a lesser genre,” he says when asked about the middling critical response to the latter film. “But, on the contrary, it’s a superior genre, especially the way Ernst Lubitsch or Billy Wilder did it.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Almodóvar expresses his admiration for the long-form drama being made on American TV. “At the moment in the US they’re producing TV that is much closer to reality than the cinema is,” he says. “Breaking Bad is like early Scorsese, the most brutal, most acid television. And, over five series, every episode is a masterpiece of scriptwriting, direction and exaggeration – not that they exaggerate reality but that they’re dealing with a reality that is already very extreme. Breaking Bad, I think, is the culmination of American fictional TV.”

He also talked about his plans for Brokeback Mountain, which he was asked to direct before Ang Lee eventually took over. “Thinking about it, I don’t know if I made a mistake or not [in turning it down]. They promised me total artistic freedom and final cut but it was a story that was so physical – it’s not just that the characters sleep together once – and that has to be there. I think Ang Lee went as far as he could and I like his version very much. But I always imagined it differently and I don’t think I would have been able to make it the way I wanted. They wouldn’t have let me.”