Pedro Almodóvar leaves the project 'Manual for cleaning women', which will continue with Cate Blanchett

Ten days after finishing shooting the medium-length film

the western in English co-starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, Pedro Almodóvar has decided to get off

the adaptation of several of the 43 stories that make up the homonymous volume by Lucia Berlin, a project with which she had been working for almost five years.

According to sources from El Deseo, the production company of the Almodóvar brothers, to EL PAÍS, the filmmaker does not consider himself ready to tackle "such a monumental production in English", as the

More information

Cate Blanchett leads the project 'Manual for cleaning women' with a script by Pedro Almodóvar

The film continues because its protagonist, Cate Blanchett, is also the producer, through her production company Dirty Films, who is now looking for a replacement for the direction.

“It has been a painful decision for me,” says the filmmaker in

"Also, I've dreamed of working with Cate for a long time."

In the last awards of the Spanish Academy of cinema, in February in Valencia, Almodóvar presented the first International Goya to the then leading actress of it.

At the premiere of

Agustín Almodóvar told EL PAÍS that Berlin's book had impressed his brother since he read it, and that the stories would take place between Texas, Oakland and Mexico, in English and Spanish.

“Two-fifths of the script takes place in Mexico,” recalled the producer.

“So it could be shot in Spain on locations in the Canary Islands, Andalusia...”.

The script impressed who would have been its protagonist, Cate Blanchett.

“Although the female character changes her profession and sometimes her physique, she is always, deep down, Lucia”, he explained.

was going to be the filmmaker's debut in a feature film in English.

Almodóvar had already been offered projects to direct in the US, including

or

although they were commissions and he never felt that they came organically from him.

He even wrote

based on texts by Alice Munro for Meryl Streep, before deciding that the story would work much better in Spain and moving it from place to place and language, losing the Hollywood star on the way.

In that October of last year, Agustín Almodóvar warned that they had not closed the contract.

“The transfer of rights to the book is over.

The script was done and Cate was excited about it.

We, faced with doubts about the economic effort involved in renewing the rights, decided not to make the payment.

Now, Cate has decided to stick with it, and she would stick with Pedro's script."

And then several possibilities arose, from Almodóvar directing to only appearing as a screenwriter and the two brothers as co-producers.

At that time, Agustín Almodóvar already warned: "It is not at all clear that this is Pedro's next shoot."

Today it is clear that the first, that it be a film directed by the Spaniard, will not happen.

Before

Almodóvar had shot in English the medium-length film

(2020),

with Tilda Swinton,