Spanish director
Pedro Almodovar said on Friday that Hollywood's
"straitjacket" production system held little attraction for
him as a filmmaker when compared to the freedom he
enjoys in Europe. The Oscar-winning director, who has
won dozens of international awards with his
Spanish-language movies, has returned to his family roots
with the bittersweet comedy Volver
(Returning) at the Cannes Film Festival, and
he says he has yet to see a proposal for a film in English
that he'd like to shoot.
"There is always
a temptation to shoot in English. But I was never
proposed a film that interested me enough," Almodovar,
speaking through a translator, told reporters in
Cannes after the presentation of Volver. "I'm
afraid that in Hollywood I would not have the same
freedoms as in Europe. If I was to shoot in English,
it would not be in Hollywood, but elsewhere where there is
less of a straitjacket production system," he said.
Almodovar
said Volver took him back to his childhood in
Spain's central region of La Mancha and was largely inspired
by his sisters and late mother. Featuring an almost
exclusively female cast, the film tells the story of
Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), a feisty housewife, and
her sister Sole (Lola Duenas), a hairdresser, who are
being visited by the very lively ghost of their dead mother.
Almodovar
said talk of appearances from dead loved ones was not
unusual in his home village, where women cultivated
memories of the departed and spent time tending to
graves--often even their own before they are
interred. "Cleaning my grave relaxes me," one cheerful woman
says in the film as others around her scrub, brush,
and polish their family tombstones.
Although
Volver deals with death, betrayal, and incest,
it also has plenty of comedy, as in a scene when the
sisters' ghostly mother, played by Carmen Maura,
requests a haircut when she sees her image in the
mirror. "I wanted to show a ghost on a daily basis. A
ghost that goes to the bathroom, hides under the bed, and
even farts in the film," Almodovar said.
The film marks
Cruz's return to Spanish cinema after spending the last
few years establishing an international career in Hollywood.
Cruz has already starred in Almodovar's All
About My Mother, which won an Oscar for best
foreign language film. "There is only one Pedro for
me," Cruz said. "I wouldn't have been the same one
without him... It's amazing how he knows how we feel and
think... He has a special eye for that."
The film also
reunites Almodovar with Maura after a 17-year split.
The actress starred in many of the director's films,
including 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown. "When we met for the first rehearsal,
it was like it always had been," Maura said. "I was
astonished because I was not sure whether we could
have the same chemistry." (Kerstin Gehmlich, Reuters)