Pedro Almodóvar

Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar (left) with Penélope Cruz
Born	(1951-09-24) September 24, 1951 Calzada de Calatrava, Ciudad Real, Spain
Occupation	Filmmaker

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero (pronounced [ˈpe.ðro al.moˈðo.βar ka.ba.'je.ro]) (born September 24, 1951, in Calzada de Calatrava, Spain) is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer. He is the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor, strong colors and glossy décor. Almodóvar never judges his characters actions, whatever they do, but he presents them as they are in all their complexity. Desire, passion, family and identity are the director's favorite themes. Almodóvar’s films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema.

As a gay person, Almodóvar has helped fight for equal rights.

Life

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero was born on September 24, 1951 in Calzada de Calatrava, a rural small town of Ciudad Real, a province of Castile-La Mancha in the administrative district of Almagro. La Mancha is the windswept region of flat lands made famous by Don Quijote. He was born as one of four children (two boys, two girls) in a large and impoverished family of peasant stock. His father, Antonio Almodóvar, who could barely read or write worked most of his life hauling barrels of wine by mule. Almodóvar's mother, Francisca Caballero, turned him into a part time teacher of literacy in the village and also a letter reader and transcriber for the neighbors. When Pedro was eight years old, the family sent him to study at a religious boarding school in the city of Cáceres, Extremadura, in the west of the country, with the hope that he might someday become a priest. His family eventually joined him in Cáceres, where his father opened a gas station, and his mother opened a bodega where she sold her own wine.

While Calzada did not even have a cinema, the streets where he lived in Cáceres contained not only the school, but also a movie theatre. Thus, for Almodóvar, his entire education took place in one street . “ Cinema became my real education, much more than the one I received from the priest” he said later said in an interview .

Almodóvar would receive the influence of such directors as Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Alfred Hitchcock, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Luis Buñuel, Edgar Neville, Federico Fellini, Luis García Berlanga and neorealist Marco Ferreri Gómez.

Against his parents wishes, Pedro Almodóvar moved to Madrid in 1967. After completing the compulsory military service, the young man from rural Spain found in Madrid of the late 60's the city, the culture and the freedom. His goal was to be a film director, but he lacked the economical means to do it and besides, Franco had just closed the National School of Cinema so he would be completely self-taught. To support himself, Almodóvar worked a number of odd jobs, including a stint selling used items in the famous Madrid flea market El Rastro. He eventually found full-time employment with Spain's national phone company, where he worked for twelve years as an administrative assistant. Since he worked only until three in the afternoon, he had the rest of the day to pursue his own interest.

In the early seventies, Almodóvar grew interested in experimental cinema and theatre. He collaborated with the vanguard theatrical group, Los Goliardos, where he played his first professional roles and met Carmen Maura. He was also writing comics and contributing articles and stories to a number of counterculture magazines, such as Star and Víbora y Vibraciones.

Madrid’s flourishing alternative cultural scene became the perfect scenario for Almodóvar social talents. He was a crucial figure in La Movida Madrileña (Madriliene Movement), a cultural renaissance that followed the fall of the Francisco Franco dictatorship. Alongside Fabio McNamara, Almodóvar sang in a punk-glam-rock parody duo. He published a novella, Fuego en las entrañas (Fire in the Guts), and writing under the pseudonym "Patty Difusa" penned various articles for major newspapers and magazines, such as El País, Diario 16 and La Luna. He kept writing stories that were eventually published in a compilation volume: El sueño de la razón.

Around 1974, Almodóvar began making his first short films on his own (Super-8). They gave him the freedom to film what he wanted, cheaply, and they also provided his only training in technique. By the end of the seventies they were shown in the night circuit of Madrid. This shorts had overtly sexual narratives and no soundtrack: Dos putas, o, Historia de amor que termina en boda (1974)(Two Whores, or, A Love Story that Ends in Marriage); La caida de Sodoma (1975) (The Fall of Sodom); Homenaje (1976) (Homage); La estrella (1977) (The Star) 1977 Sexo Va: Sexo viene (Sex Comes and Goes) (Super-8); Complementos (shorts) 1978; (16mm).

“ I show them in bars, in parties… I could not add a soundtrack because it was very difficult. The magnetic strip was very poor, very thin. I remember that I became very famous in Madrid because, as the films had no sound, I took a cassette with music while I personally did the voices of all the characters, songs and dialogues.” . After four years of working with shorts films in Super- 8 format, in 1978 Almodóvar made his first Super-8, full-length film: Folle, folle, folleme, Tim (1978) (Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Fuck Me, Tim), a magazine style melodrama. In addition, he made his first 16mm short: Salome, his first contact with the professional world of cinema. Carmen Maura and Felix Rotaeta, the actors of Salome, compelled him to make his first feature film in 16 mm and helped him raise the money to finance what would be Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón.

Almodóvar's Cinematic Work

Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Women on the Heap (1980)

Almodóvar made his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Women on the Heap (Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón), in 1980 with a very low budget and a team of volunteers shooting on weekends. The film was based on his photo-novella, General Erections previously published in the magazine, El Víbora (The Viper). Pepi, Luci, Bom… consists of a series of loosely connected sketches rather than a fully formed plot. It follows the adventures of the three characters of the title: Pepi, who wants revenge from the corrupt policeman who raped her, Luci, a mousy, masochist housewife and Bom, a punk lesbian singer. The central theme of the film, friendship and female solidarity, would appear repeatedly in Almodóvar’s filmography.

Pepi, Luci, Bom… was plagued by financial and technical problems. The film’s limitations include: amateurship cinematography, framing and continuity problems. However, Almodóvar would look back fondly to his first film: "Pepi, Luci, Bom… is a film full of defects. When a film has only one or two, it is considered an imperfect film, while when there is a profusion of technical flaws, it is called style. That’s what I said joking around when I was promoting the film, but I believe that that was closer to the truth” .

The film captured the spirit of the times – above all the sense of cultural and sexual freedom – and established Almodóvar as an agent provocateur. With its many Kitsch elements, campy style, outrageous humor, and explicit sexuality (there is a famous golden shower scene in the middle of a knitting lesson), " Pepi, Luci, Bom… " became immediately a cult film. It toured the independent circuits and then spent four years on the late night showing of the Alphaville Theater in Madrid that provided the funds for Almodovar second film.

Labyrinth of Passions (1982)

Labyrinth of Passions (Laberinto de Pasiones) is a Kitsch screwball comedy about multiple identities, one of Almodovar’s favorite subjects. This movie, with a soap opera style, shows already one of the characteristics of Almodóvar’s films: a devilish complicated plot that defies description.

The film follows the adventures of two sex-crazy characters: Sexilia, an aptly named nymphomaniac, and Riza, the gay son of the leader of a fictional Middle-Eastern country, who are meant to be together. The campy roundelay also involves Queti, Sexilia’s “biggest fan,” whose delusional father rapes her.

Labyrinth of Passions, still a very low budget film, was a great improvement over its predecessor and far more cohesive. The film is very much a reflection of its time, La Movida Madrileña , and it is more enjoyable for its energy and humor that for its quality. The film was well accepted by the public and Pedro Almodóvar was already becoming a reference for Spanish filmmaking.

Dark Habits (1983)

Dark Habits (Entre Tinieblas) heralds a change in tone, from the upbeat comedies before it, to a sombre melodrama with comic elements. This film has an almost all female cast and many of Almodóvar's great leading ladies are here: Carmen Maura, Julieta Serrano, Marisa Paredes and Chus Lampreave. The narrative centers in a cabaret singer, who running away from justice find refuge in a convent of destitute nuns, each one of which explore a different sin. The mother superior, a drug addict worse than the fallen women that is trying to redeem, falls in love with the singer.

Wickedly funny and irreverent, the film is a satire of the religious Spain, portraying spiritual desolation and moral bankruptcy. Dark Habits explores the force of desire in characters who are rule for their intuition rather than reason. This is also Almodóvar’s first film in which he clearly uses popular music to express emotion: in a pivotal scene the mother superior and her protege sing along Lucho Gatica’s bolero: Encadenados (chained together).

Still with elements of La Movida Madrileña , as in his previous films (particularly the drug used displayed), Dark Habits had a modest success and with its irreverent critique of the religious institutions cemented Almodovar’s fate as the "Enfant terrible" of the Spanish cinema”.

What Have I Done to Deserve This? (1984)

Almodóvar next film “What Have I Done to Deserve This ?” (¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?) was inspired by the Spanish black comedies of the late 50s and early 60s. It is the tale of a struggling housewife and her dysfunctional family: her abusive husband, who works as a taxi driver; her oldest son is a heroin dealer and the youngest, barely pubescent, is a hustler, the grandmother, hating the city, just wants to return to her rural village.

The theme of the downtrodden housewife, coping with the travails of everyday life would arise repeatedly in the director's work, as would other issues of female independence and solidarity. “What I Have done to Deserve This ?” is also a critique on consumerism and patriarchal culture. The desperate housewife in one famous scene trades her own son for a curling iron and the only witness of a crime is a lizard with the aptly name of “Money”.

“What I Have done to deserve this ?” was more successful that Almodóvar’s previous films and became his first with international distribution. After “What I Have done to Deserve This ?”, Almodóvar's films made a sudden change, one affecting both its vision and subject.

Matador (1986)

Almodóvar's subsequent films deepened his exploration of sexual desire and the sometimes brutal laws governing it. Matador is a complex dark story that include a retired bullfighter and a female lawyer both fascinated with killing. The film offered up desire as a bridge between sexual attraction and death.

Matador drew away from the naturalism and humor of the director’s previous work into a deeper and darker terrain in a stylistically audacious portrait of love, death, fate, and violence. Almodóvar established the interrelation between sexuality and savagery as seen in his cinematographic quotation of the final sequence from King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun. Matador, Almodóvar fifth film, was more ambitious than his previous four and remained one of his darkest tales.

Law of Desire (1987)

Almodóvar solidified his creative independence when he started the production company El Deseo, together with his brother Agustín, who also have had many cameos roles in his films. From 1986 on, Pedro Almódovar produces his own films.

The first movie that came out from El Deseo was the aptly named Law of Desire ( La Ley del Deseo). The film has an operatically tragic plot line and is one of Almodóvar’s richest and most disturbing movies. The narrative follows three main characters: a gay film director who embarks in a new project; his sister, an actress who used to be his brother (played by Carmen Maura), and a repressed murderously obsessive stalker (played by Antonio Banderas).

The film presents a gay love triangle and drew away from most representations of gays in films. These characters are neither coming out nor confront sexual guilt or homophobia, they are already liberated like the gays in Fassbinder’s films.

Almódovar films rely heavily on the capacity of his actors to pull truth difficult roles in a complex narrative. In Law of Desire, Carmen Maura plays the role of Tina, a woman who used to be a man. Almodóvar explains “Carmen is requested to imitate a woman, to savor the imitation, to be conscious of the kitsch part that there is in the imitation, completely renouncing parody, but not humor”. .

Elements from Law of Desire grew into the bases for two later films: Carmen Maura appears in a stage production of Cocteau’s The Human Voice, which inspired Almodóvar’s next film, Women on the Verge, and her confrontation scene with an abusive priest formed a partial genesis for Bad Education.

Women on The Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)

Almodóvar’s next film was his first huge international success: Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios), a feminist light comedy that further established Almodóvar as a "women's director" like George Cukor and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Almodóvar has said that women make better characters: “women are more spectacular as dramatic subjects, they have a greater range of registers, etc. ”

The film, staged as a faux adaptation of a theatrical work, details a two day period in the life of Pepa, a professional movie dubber who has been abruptly abandoned by her married lover and frantically tries to track him down. In the course of her search, she discovers some of his secrets.

Inspired by the Hollywood comedies of the 1950s, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown became the stepping stone for Pedro Almodóvar's work. This light comedy of rapid-fire dialogue and fast paced action remains one of Almodóvar’s most accessible films (there is no drugs or sex). The film received public and critical success worldwide and brought Almodóvar to the attention of Americans audiences. “Women...” was showered with many awards including an Oscar nomination as best foreign language film.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)

Almodóvar's next film marked the breaking-off with his reference actress, Carmen Maura, and the beginning of a fruitful collaboration with another great actress of the Spanish and European cinema: Victoria Abril. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (¡Átame!) was also the director's fourth and most important collaboration with Antonio Banderas.

In Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Ricky (played by Antonio Banderas), a recently released psychiatric patient, kidnaps and holds hostage an actress (played by Victoria Abril) in order to maker her fall in love with him. “I’m 23 years old, I have fifty thousand pesetas and I am alone in the world. I will try to be a good husband for you and a good father for your children,” he tells her.

Rather than populate the film with many characters, as in his previous films, here the story focuses on the compelling relationship at its center: the actress and her kidnapper literally struggling for power and desperate for love. The film’s title line !Tie Me Up! is unexpectedly uttered by the actress as a genuine request. She does not know if she will try to escape or not, and when she realizes she has feelings for her captor, she prefers not to be given a chance.

In spite of some dark elements, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! can be described as a romantic comedy, and the director's most clear love story, with a plot similar to William Wyler's thriller, The Collector. Nevertheless, the film was the subject of heated debate, it was decried by feminists and women's advocacy groups for what they perceived as the film sadomasochist undertones. Its U.S. release was marked by further scandal and controversy. The Motion Picture Association of America, which determines film ratings in the U.S., marginalized its distribution with the stigma of an 'X'. Backed by the film's distribution company, Miramax, Almodóvar filed a lawsuit, resulting in a stubborn legal battle. The result of it was the birth of a new rating, NC17, applicable to those films of explicit nature previously regarded unfairly as pornographic.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which did not enjoy the wide acclaim of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, rather had a negative reception among some Spanish critics, who declared that Almodóvar had lost his sense of direction; similar criticism was leveled at his two subsequent films.

High Heels (1991)

The family melodrama High Heels (Tacones Lejanos) is built around the fractured relationship between a self-involved mother, a famous torch song singer, and the grown daughter she abandoned as a child, who works as TV newscaster. The daughter has married her mother's ex-lover and has befriended a female impersonator of her mother. Popular songs, always a key element in Almodóvar’s work, are never more present than in this film full of boleros. High Heels also contains an unexpected prison yard dance sequence.

The film has the feel of other mother-daughter melodramas like Stella Dallas, Mildred Pierce, Imitation of Life and particularly Autumn Sonata, which is quoted directly in the film. High Heels was an interpretative tour de force for two essential actresses of the "Almodovarian universe": Marisa Paredes and Victoria Abril.

Kika (1993)

After the melodramatic intensity of High Heels, Almodóvar took another sudden turn in his career by shooting one of his most unclassifiable movies: Kika, a choral film where each character belongs to a different film genre, thus generating a very free and heterodox movie. The plot centers on Kika, a clueless but good-hearted make-up artist involved with an older expatriate American writer and his bewildered stepson. A vampy, oddball television reporter who is constantly on search of sensational stories follows Kika misadventures.

Kika is a critique of mass media, particularly its sensationalism. Here Almodóvar gives a cameo role to his real life elderly mother, Francisca Caballero, who plays an ill-qualified hostess of a literary T.V program. She reads badly and not much as her eyesight is bad, but she explains to the audience that she has been giving her job as presenter by her son, the director (a self-reflexive Almodóvar) so that mother and son can spend time together.

Kika created a certain amount of controversy in the United States thanks to a humurous rape scene that was perceived as both misogynistic and exploitative. The film was not well received by critics, but opened the door to a new era in the director’s career.

The Flower of My Secret (1995)

Almodóvar changed gears with his next effort, 1995's The Flower of My Secret (La Flor de mi Secreto). An exploration of denial in its various forms, a film in which melodrama is treated more as theme rather than a plot line. The Flower of My Secret is the story of Leo Macias, a successful pulp romance writer who has to confront both a professional and personal crisis.

Starring Almodóvar regular Marisa Paredes, this psychological drama was hailed by many as his most mature film to date and remains one of the directors humblest films. Leaving Almodovar's usual choral exercises aside, the story was centered on the love torn writer. The Flower of My Secret has many common elements with All About My Mother and Talk to her. The tree film are about “loss, growth and recovery” .

The Flower of my secret heralded a change in Almodóvar's filmography to a more mature period.

Live Flesh (1997)

All of Almodóvar’s films have been written by him, but with Live Flesh the director as, in Matador (another male center film), shared script writing credits. This was his first, and so far, only, script inspired by another writer, a Ruth Rendell’s novel of the same name. All that remains in the film from the book is the plot line of the two male protagonist: David, a police detective, and Victor, the man falsely accused of wounding him and paralyzing him. Upon his release, Víctor looking for revenge is soon entangled in the lives not only of David, and his wife, but also with David’s former partner, Sancho, and Sancho’s wife .

Live Flesh explored love, loss, and suffering with a sober restraint only briefly glimpsed in the director's earlier work. The film is closer to the thriller and again tells the story of several characters seeking one another in time. Live Flesh is historically framed from 1970 when Franco declared a state of emergency to twenty-six years later when Spain has completely left behind the confinements of the Franco regime. With this film, critics widely praised the confirmation of Almodóvar new found maturity as a director.

All About My Mother (1999)

Almodóvar then continued to work in more serious dramatic confines, directing All About My Mother. The film grew out of a brief scene in The Flower of My Secret and tells the story of a mourning mother who, after reading the last entry in her dead son's journal about how he wishes to meet his father for the first time, decides to travel to Barcelona in search of the boy's father. She must tell the father that not only did she have their son after she left him many years ago, but that he has now died. Once there, she encounters a number of odd characters including a transvestite prostitute, a pregnant nun and a lesbian actress who help to support her emotional pain.

The film revisited Almodóvar's familiar themes of the inherent force of sisterhood and the power of family, no matter how unconventional that family may be. Dedicated to Bette Davis, Romy Schneider, and Gena Rowlands, All About My Mother is explicitly steeped in theatricality, from its backstage setting to its plot modeled on the works of Federico Garcia Lorca and Tennessee Williams and theirs largely female characters' preoccupation with modes of performance.

The comic relief on the film centers on the character of Agrado, a half-operated transsexual. In a famous scene, she tells the story of her body and its relationship to plastic surgery and silicone culminating with a piece of her own philosophy: “The more you become like what you have dreamed for yourself, the more authentic you are” .

All about my mother is one of Almodóvar's most acclaimed films. Its recognition includes include an Oscar for the Best Foreign Language film, a Golden Globe in the same category, Best Director and Ecumenical Award at Cannes; the French Cesar for Best Foreign Film, Goya Award as best film of the year and a twelfth Annual European Film Award. .

Talk to Her (2002)

Two years later, Almodóvar hit another career high with Talk to Her. The film revolves around two men who become friends taking care of the comatose women they love. Their lives flow in all directions, past, present and future, dragging them towards an unsuspected destiny. Combining elements of modern dance and silent filmmaking with a narrative that embraces coincidence and fate, Almodóvar plots the course of his characters, thrown together by unimaginably bad luck, towards an unexpected conclusion. The film was hailed by critics and embraced by arthouse audiences. Almodóvar won numerous honors across the world for his film, including a French César for Best Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Bad Education (2004)

Almodóvar followed two worldwide cinematic successes with Bad Education (La Mala Educación), a richly baroque tale of child sexual abuse and mixed identities. Two kids, Ignacio and Enrique, discover love, cinema and fear in a religious school at the start of the 1960s. Father Manolo, the school principal and their literature teacher, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three characters meet twice again, at the end of the 1970s and in the 1980s, or so it seems.

Almodóvar used elements of film noir, borrowing in particular from Double Indemnity, and for the character of Juan he took many elements from Patricia Highsmith’s character: Tom Ripley. Like his male-driven films (Matador, Live Flesh, Talk to Her), Bad Education is darker in tone than his female-centered films (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, Volver).

Volver (2006)

Almodóvar’s 16th film, Volver is set in part in La Mancha (the director’s native region). The film opens showing dozens of women furiously scrubbing the graves of their deceased, establishing the influence of the dead over the living as a key theme. The plot follows the story of three generations of women of the same family who survive wind, fire and even death, thanks to goodness, audacity and limitless vitality. The film is a playful ode to female resilience, where men are literally disposable.

A richly evocative return to his childhood roots, Volver is cinematically and dramatically Almodovar’s most contained film since The Flower of My Secret. While representing Almodovar's most conventional piece to date, it is also his most reflective, a subdued, sometimes intense and often comic homecoming that celebrates the town and people that shaped his imagination.

Many Almodóvar stylistic hallmarks are present: the stand-alone song, (a redemption of the tango classic, "Volver,”) references to the mindless cruelty of reality TV and the homage to classic film (in this case to Visconti's "Bellissima").

'Volver' started as a story of la España negra, or 'black Spain' – the rural, superstitious and conservative part of the country still often associated, he says, with violence, tragedy, even backwardness: 'It looks like they are living a century before. But I tried to demonstrate that the same Spain, in the same local places with the same local characters, could be called "white Spain", because the neighbors are in complete solidarity, all the women join together and create a kind of family. The movie really talks about women who survive, women who fight fiercely.

Future Projects

Almodóvar is currently working on a stage adaptation of All About My Mother that is going to open in the autumn 2007. There is interest for this production on Broadway, Europe, Australia and Japan.

"After" Volver, Almodóvar explains “concludes the films I have made about women’s universe and the type of families that have moved from rural areas to the capital in search of prosperity. Therefore, it ends a cycle. .

His next film, La Piel Que Habito, a movie about revenge, will be a new collaboration with his favorite actress of recent years, Penélope Cruz.

Filmography

Year	Original Spanish title	English title	Notes
1980	Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón	Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap	Original Script
1982	Laberinto de Pasiones	Labyrinth of Passions	Original Script
1983	Entre tinieblas	Dark Habits	Original Script
1984	¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer ésto?	What Have I Done to Deserve This?	Original Script
1986	Matador	Matador	Original Script with Jesús Ferrero
1987	La ley del deseo	Law of Desire	Original Script
1988	Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios	Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown	Original Script
1989	¡Átame!	Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!	Original Script
1991	Tacones Lejanos	High Heels	Original Script
1993	Kika	Kika	Original Script
1995	La flor de mi secreto	The Flower of My Secret	Original Script
1997	Carne tremula	Live Flesh	Script with Ray Loriga and Jorge Guerricaechevarría, loosely based on Ruth Rendell’s novel
1999	Todo sobre mi madre	All About My Mother	Original Script - Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
2002	Hable con ella	Talk to Her	Original Script - Winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay
2004	La Mala Educacion	Bad Education	Original Script
2006	Volver	Volver	Original Script - Winner of the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay.

Bibliography

• Edwards, Gwyne, : Almodóvar: labyrinths of Passion. London: Peter Owen. 2001, ISBN-10: 0720611210
• D’ Lugo, Marvin: Pedro Almodóvar, University of Illinois Press, 2006, ISBN 0-252-073614 - 4
• Allinson, Mark: A Spanish Labyrinth : The Films of Pedro Almodóvar, I.B Tauris Publishers, 2001, ISBN 1-86064-507 - 0
• Cobos, Juan and Miguel Marias: Almodóvar Secreto, Nickel Odeon, 1995

External links

• Viva Pedro Official website of the Viva Pedro series, featuring the theatrical re-release of 8 of the celebrated auteur's films.
• Pedro Almodóvar at IMDb
• Official website includes comments on many of his movies and a diary on the making of his new one, Volver
• Almodóvar Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• Interview with Pedro Almodóvar from 1996 about The Flower of My Secret
• Interview with Pedro Almodóvar about Talk to Her
• Biography of Pedro Almodóvar MundoCine
• Pedro Almodóvar's Complete Filmography, Reviewed
• Pedro Almodóvar & Volver Full production notes, images and many more on Volver.
• All about Almodóvar's women (and men) An article from Turkish Daily News