Over the past decade, Pedro Almodóvar has been in a thoughtful mood. He revisited memories of his own career in films like Pain and gloryexplored the trauma left by the Spanish Civil War in Parallel mothers, and, with his last movie, Bitter Christmashe re-examines his own creative process and its capacity to hurt those from whom he draws inspiration. In the process of looking back, he also incorporated different lessons and sources of inspiration from his previous films, creating a self-referential tapestry less directly autobiographical than Pain and glory but just as thoughtful.
Almodovar spoke to The AV Club about Bitter Christmas being the latest film in his series of reflections, the perils of autofiction and learning from other artists like Chavela Vargas and Pina Bausch.
The AV Club: I want to ask about the concept of autofiction in Bitter Christmas. What pushed you to take a closer interest in this creative process which borrows so much from reality and lived experiences?
Pedro Almodóvar: When you talk about fiction, you’re really talking about how you’re going to base your story on real events (and) things that actually happened. Sometimes it’s based on people around you, and you’ll turn those stories into fiction. I have always been someone who was very interested in the origins of creativity. From the moment you sit down at your computer, let’s just say to write, you transform reality into fiction. Autofiction in general is more of the romance genre. In France, there are many authors who work in this genre. In my case, what really draws me to the genre is the question of (whether) there are moral limits to what you can adapt into a fictional story. Once you start writing and you find the idea that’s actually going to resolve the story you’re working on, at that point you hold on to the idea, you develop the idea because the idea itself becomes the most important thing. In this sense, writers are very selfish, because they do not think about the person who could have inspired this idea. In my case it happened maybe two or three times, but I tried not to hurt anyone. I would say that’s the limit I impose on myself.
AVC: Speaking of these limits, a character from Bitter Christmas pushes back and accuses the writer of a kind of vampirism for having taken details of his life and integrating them into his story. How did you frame this side of the argument, that people feel exposed and have their lives used as inspiration for someone else’s art?
PENNSYLVANIA: This happened about an hour after I started writing the script. This idea came to me that a character was literally going to confront the writer about what he was doing. If you like an interesting exercise in dramaturgy and the development of a narrative where the writer draws on that inspiration to construct their story, it’s not something you see so often in cinema. It’s something more theatrical, like that of Luigi Pirandello Six characters in search of an author. I found this very exciting because I didn’t want to be complacent with myself. So, Monica (in Bitter Christmas) here becomes a character who criticizes the author in a way that I would criticize myself.
AVC: So many Bitter Christmas revisits themes and collaborators, like Chavela’s music, from your previous films. How did you decide what you were going to include in the plot of your latest film?
Gn entert
