Pedro Almodóvar: "The algorithm terrifies and horrifies me"

Pedro Almodóvar premieres this Wednesday, in 70 cinemas and at a reduced price,

half-hour short film inspired by the homonymous work by Jean Cocteau.

Shot in English and with the actress Tilda Swinton as the protagonist, the film arrives in theaters after dazzling at the Venice festival but in the midst of one of the deepest crises that the sector remembers and when giants like Disney abandon the traditional exhibition for the

home.

In an interview that will appear in the November issue of

, and of which we advance part of its content, the filmmaker confesses that it seems "a miracle" to reach theaters with a film-experiment at this time of so many difficulties.

“My idea of ​​exhibition at first was different.

But after the screening in Venice, the distributors called us to premiere it in theaters in Spain and abroad and I can only say that it is wonderful that it happens and more at such a time ”.

It is not the first time that Almodóvar defends the collective ritual before a screen as a substantial part of the cinematographic experience, but the tip of the pandemic is accelerating a mutation of the spectator that alarms him.

Quoting Susan Sontag, she evokes the intensity that requires “surrendering to the screen, entering it”.

"Sontag was very concerned about the arrival of the domestic screen because she was missing that outburst that she defined so well."

"That overwhelming physical presence of the image, for which it is essential to 'go to the movies," wrote the American essayist, for whom the domestic space "lends itself to absolutely disrespectful conditions."

"For a long time the battle of cinema in theaters has been lost," adds the filmmaker, "but after all this is a catastrophe."

“Personally, I cannot complain, I am the most fortunate, but cultural activity is very slow and thousands of families depend on it.

It is regrettable that here culture is not, as in France, a matter of state.

The Government has preferred a party man [Minister José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes], who does not know well the scope of the problems.

The great paradox is that in this crisis more fiction is being consumed than ever, that everyone is verifying the ability of fiction to accompany and comfort us.

And someone should repeat that this evasion is culture and behind it there are technicians, actors and writers on whom it depends that the screen does not go blank.

The public success of

("which for me", he says, "has been a surprise, because I thought I had made a much more minority film, for my followers, but it has worked very well all over the world") , makes you feel even more independent in the face of a market that is increasingly strange to you.

“It is always unpredictable, but the truth is that now, with big data and the algorithm, what the viewer wants is reached so directly that it can only be very scary.

The intrusion into our privacy terrifies me, that simply by using a mobile phone everything is known.

We are approaching a dystopia that causes me anxiety because we are going to absolute dehumanization ”.

“The algorithm”, he adds, “is the perfect dream of all the tests, to which I have always refused.

The truth is that I also get along fatally with the algorithm, from the outset because I am very angry not to call it an

which is what my body asks of me, and because in my case it never hits its recommendations right.

I am not the typical spectator of series, although I see some, but I know from other colleagues that the large platforms control the rhythm of the dramaturgy with the happy algorithm in hand.

And although that works for them, it is something that terrifies and horrifies me.

That is why this film feeds precisely on the opposite, on the negation of the formula.

And in that denial I have felt free as a mountain goat ”.

In this freedom, Almodóvar has connected with the essence of cinema and theater through a short film where "the only thing that is not artifice" are the feelings of a woman who in half an hour passes through all possible emotional layers.

A woman who in the first minutes appears lost in an abstract space that delves into her loneliness and her “phantasmagoric” presence, to later move through a set that invokes the cinematography of the filmmaker and in which the viewer will recognize spaces, objects and colors recurring in his cinema, like the kitchens or the reds and greens of clothes, furniture and walls.

An Almodovarian concentrate open to new possibilities, such as the use of a different language - “I have largely overcome that fear, not completely, but 70%.

And I am also glad to have been alone with Tilda, without an interpreter, and to have understood each other ”-, or an unexpected song to animal love that has not occurred since

, in which Chus Lampreave was walking accompanied by his beloved lizard

.

is a story of "lack of refinement and revenge" that condenses many of Almodóvar's obsessions, from the tear of passion to solitary confinement or confinement.

But she does it from a contemporary reading, “where for a woman there is no longer room for submission”, and with an unusual actress under that dramatic skin: “I can only be grateful for Tilda's blind faith and dedication.

She has taken it as a great adventure, she has enjoyed it a lot and the truth is that I have been with her too ”.

The filmmaker speaks of a free experience in which he was very clear that the protagonist was "the artifice."

“And that's why it has been so pleasant for me to do it.

It has been a very healthy exercise because it has allowed me to feel the spirit of my Super 8 times, but 40 years later ”.

He has liked the experience so much that he considers repeating it with some other short film, always in unique spaces and with few characters.

Meanwhile he is preparing the filming for next spring of

a script that ended during the weeks of confinement last spring.

"With the difficulties of traveling that are now all over the world, we have had to put aside the project we had with Lucia Berlin's stories to make a film with fewer trips and few characters."

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