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MillimeterFade to Black:
Pedro Almodóvar, Director
Dec 13, 2006 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
“A movie is something that is alive, completely alive,” Pedro Almodóvar says. “You need to have control, because it's so much alive that it can be something other than you want.” It is safe to say that the idiosyncratic Spanish director — the man who carries the torch for his country's rich traditions of gaiety, morbidity, and surrealism in films such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother, and Talk to Her — always gets what he wants. His best films are a fiendish blend of styles and genres, often within the same scene. His latest film, Volver, shows the filmmaker in total control of his chaotic world.
Volver is a return of sorts for Almodóvar (the title means “coming back”) to comedy, to the female world peopled with his favorite actresses, and to the province of the director's birth, La Mancha. Although Almodóvar does not talk in technical terms, lighting is of the utmost importance to him, and he has an almost unspoken communication with the DP from four of his previous films, José Luis Alcaine.
“Alcaine knows me very well,”Almodóvar says . “I have to say that with this movie, we talked less than before. For example, half of the movie happens in La Mancha, and La Mancha has a very particular light. The interior of the houses are very special because they have shutters on the windows … because the light is very strong, so the whites are very bright and they reflect the light a lot. The effect of having those filters on the windows, even though it seems dark inside the rooms, … is a darkness that is very expressive.”
The shutters may filter the light, but no color filters were used in the film. Alcaine captured that light with a Panavision PFX-M Millennium Panaflex camera and four Primo lenses, using Kodak Vision2 500T stock for the dark interiors and Vision2 250D for the sunny exteriors. None of these technical labels are within Almodóvar's purview, but he knows exactly what he wants. Almodóvar explained to Alcaine that he wanted the narrative to be transparent. “The way I planned the shooting was in a way that the spectator never really realized where the camera was placed, which in itself is complicated to make it look that simple,” Almodóvar says. This style is inspired by the neo-realism of Rossellini, though one might not notice with all the explicit use of color. It is also very important within Almodóvar's mixing of genres — from drama to comedy within a single scene — that no technical element signal a shift in tone.
“I need to see the whole frame during the movement of the camera,” Almodóvar says. “I don't know if that is usual here in Hollywood, because it seems to me that everything is separated and you can't touch a camera and there is a cameraman there. No, in Spain we don't behave like that. So, I sit down, and once the cameraman shows me the movement that we decide, I want to see myself, and then I sit down and I do it. Then I make some correction. I decide, always, the frame.”
Almodóvar also trusts Alcaine with another important element — the radiant beauty of his actresses. “I like the women to be beautiful, because some of the DPs, they don't care about the faces of their female characters — at least in Spain. They take care of the atmosphere in general. I think that the protagonist of movies should be beautiful in a very natural sense. … I always wanted to make a kind of epic character movie with Penélope [Cruz]. She's the MOTHER, with capital letters. The movie is about maternity and about a powerful and strong kind of mother. I wanted also to treat her in the movie like that beauty is part of her strength. Alcaine is the best to make close-ups of actresses.”
Almodóvar is most creative once all the elements are in place. “I always have a plan of what I am going to shoot, but when I put the actors into the real set, making the movements, and I see the light, usually — 80 percent of the time — I change part of the lighting. I even change part of the movement of the camera. You've never had that moment of having everything together: the place where you're shooting, when the DP has finished putting the lights on, and you have finished with rehearsal. In that moment, you discover many things. It's good to have prepared everything completely, but to just improvise at the last minute.”
