Pedro Almodóvar has spent more than 45 years making movies about himself without fully flipping the mirror. The provocateur-turned-veteran (and Golden Lion winner for 2024’s The Room Next Door) has dressed his obsessions––desire, motherhood, illness, the movies themselves––in melodrama and technicolor and handed them to others, from the frenzied ensemble of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in the ’80s to the more poised, patient, and sincere characters of recent years. But with Pain and Glory, Almodóvar centered himself and his struggles in searing spotlight. Bitter Christmas isn’t quite so harsh, but it picks up with the autofiction where Pain and Glory left off, characterizing and criticizing the filmmaker through an alter ego of an alter ego.
The meta, nesting-doll plot follows Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a film director, as she spends a long, unpleasant, memory-ridden December weekend in Madrid in 2004 before embarking on her third film. Meanwhile, in 2026, Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), a filmmaker in the middle of a creative drought, is writing her story, which happens to be a lightly disguised version of his own. As he does, the script begins to bleed into the lives of those around him, including his assistant, Mónica (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), who is furious to find herself on the page.
Bitter Christmas raises questions about the people who end up as material and those who use them. Who owns a life once it’s been turned into a screenplay? How much of another person’s pain is a writer entitled to borrow? What does a filmmaker make of the complicated feelings that come after prying into subjects’ lives? Almodóvar has always kept his life and his work in close conversation, but here they’re one in the same.
Ahead of the film’s release, we sat down with Almodóvar to talk about how his approach to style has evolved over the years, the transformation of pain through art, the difference between self-critique and regret, and, of course, color.
The Film Stage: Your work these days is more restrained in its evocation of style. I’m thinking about the way that in, say, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, almost every shot is some sort of experiment or style exercise, compared to Bitter Christmas or The Room Next Door, where it’s much more about framing the character and their setting more plainly, perhaps more accessibly.
Pedro Almodóvar: First of all: I’m happy to have changed, because you can’t always be making the same movie. If you think about the ’80s, which are the films from my youth, they’re really the films from when democracy was just taking hold in Spain, and young people had access to liberties that they did not have before. So my films were much more baroque—sort of scandalous, if you like. Or at least some people were scandalized by them. They were also exaggerated. And so I needed that explosion to be able to also reflect what was happening democratically.
It’s also a kind of natural evolution that has to do with the passing of time, and my own experience, and my own wish to not repeat myself. If I had started being an austere director, it might be the case that now I would be a more baroque director. I would say that the first change in my films probably happened in the ’90s, right around the time All About My Mother, Talk to Her, and Bad Education came out. In a way, you could call them my sort of more adult films. And they were not films that were necessarily deeper, but they were in fact more complex. And the films where things like sickness and pain begin to appear.
And I would say that another point of inflection for me, and the point where my filmmaking truly became much more austere, begins with Julieta. It’s also part of a natural process, again, with the kind of lifestyle that you lead. In the ’80s, I lived surrounded by people going out 24 hours a day. By the 2000s I had, in essence, pulled away from social life, and my style for this particular film is also adapting to the three stories by Alice Munro. Those stories demanded of me a more contained and sober style of storytelling that was new for me and that I found very, very attractive. And it was a mode of narration that I continued to want to explore, and I felt that need to continue to be sober and austere even though my stories are still recognizable. They’re still, fortunately, my stories, but they’ve also changed. So I keep challenging myself, if you like, to use less and less elements in my filmmaking but use them in a way that helps me go deeper into my stories.
Bitter Christmas makes the case that not all suffering should be turned into a story. Do you ever feel that about your own material, or about the material you’re working with?
There is something about pain that lends itself to more inspiration, or is perhaps more interesting than pleasure, or inspires me more. It’s an interesting thing to explore. But there’s something about pain, particularly when you find it in people surrounding you or in situations surrounding you that are painful. It’s like there’s more to say about pain than there is about happiness.
Can you talk about the disparate structures between Pain and Glory and Bitter Christmas?
I think they’re like twin films. They’re like a diptych. In Pain and Glory, I talk about the physical pain, the variety of physical pains that the protagonist has, and how that limits him. And also the pain of the preoccupation of the fact that he can’t work. Because, you know, I also have this surgery in my back, and the thing is that you cannot be stood up for more than half an hour. So it’s a limitation, and shooting is very physical. So, I mean, the protagonist, he was afraid to not keep making movies, and that was a big suffering for him.
In Bitter Christmas, there is also a pain, but it’s more like a moral pain based on the fact that the protagonist is living in a period of four or five years where he doesn’t find anything interesting. Because he needs, like me, to have a script that’s really, really passionate. You live with passion, and this is the same way that I live to make movies. I mean, this is more than work, yes. I do it passionately, and this is the only way, and if you don’t feel that, then I don’t do it. And I never felt, in my experience, this kind of hiatus of four or five years, of not being completely hooked on the script that he was doing. This is very painful, very painful, especially for someone who the first and last and only thing that matters to you is making films.
One of the things that we have to think about in the film is that, you know, when the pain that you find in your surroundings—it might be kind of an ambiguous, morally ambiguous thing to decide that you’re going to latch on to that and develop that particular story. And that’s where you have to start to think about the limits of autofiction, in the sense that you have to ask yourself how much of that story are you going to include, how much are you going to exclude, are you going to keep yourself from telling some parts of that story or not. And this is one of the debates that the film actually picks up. Because at these very moments, the writer is only thinking about themselves, right? Once that idea comes to the writer, he stops thinking about the person that might have inspired the writing, and you start to think about the idea as the thing that is helping you develop the script. And in that sense writers are not quite so narcissistic, but certainly they’re selfish. And we can be dangerous.
In terms of your recent autofiction, Pain and Glory really forgives its protagonist, and it stuck out to me in Bitter Christmas that Mónica directly indicts Raúl. It makes me wonder: has growing older made you harder on yourself, or has something else in life made you harder on yourself?
One should be hard on oneself and not be complacent either with what you’re doing or with your own life. From the second that I’m writing Sbaraglia’s character as sort of my alter ego, the last thing I want to do is be self-complacent. I actually want to be more self-critical, and in fact I sort of turn out to write myself, or in this case the character, as the villain of the film, in a way, because I do think that it’s dangerous to be self-complacent. And it’s not so much a question about whether you forgive yourself or not, but it’s more about not wanting to sort of glorify myself in my own work, but rather to be conscious of those ways in which some of what I do myself might be ambiguous or questionable. And I think, you know, in that sense it was a healthy process for me, and also a fun process for me.
Do you feel like you have become more critical of yourself over the years?
I mean, I don’t regret anything that I did. I don’t regret even if I made many mistakes. The feeling of regret is a very Catholic feeling. I run away from that. In this movie I talk about creation and its relation with life, with reality. And that was always a topic that really fascinated me, and I was very interested in it from the beginning. But the creation process is very mysterious. You don’t know how it happens. I mean, the important thing is just to pay attention, but when it happens, you have to catch it. But you don’t know exactly. I mean, at least I don’t know. It depends on many, many things. So I always was fascinated by that relation between creation and life. And in this case, I think that relation is very organic. It’s an organic part of the story. And I think I’m quite satisfied with how it is in the movie, so I think this is the last time that I talk about myself so directly. And also about the creation process.
You said that you don’t have any regrets about anything. Is there any feeling similar to regret, like a feeling that you wish you would’ve done something differently or treated someone differently?
I was raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition, right, where you have the concepts of sin and punishment, and that’s something I’ve always rejected from the get-go. As an ideology, even. It doesn’t mean that I’m not conscious that sometimes I did something wrong. Right? I don’t regret it. It’s not like I’m not conscious that I’ve made mistakes, or I’ve done something wrong that could have been done a different way. It’s more like I find it almost like a useless exercise to question myself, because at the end of the day, you’ve already done what you’ve done, and what I think is more useful is to sort of understand that this is also a part of you, that it’s also part of who you are, that it’s part of life that you’ve also made these mistakes.
And so really the work is more for me about recognizing both the good parts and the bad parts of myself, and that becomes part of my whole identity. I might feel differently about, say, if the question is about really hurting someone. I don’t think I have hurt anyone, but if that were the case, I think that is something to regret.
You just mentioned this is probably your last autobiographical film, at least for now. What do you see coming next? What kind of stories do you want to tell?
When you think about a writer writing a story, you’re always going to be in some way inspired by the things that surround you, right? Because you’re sort of working with a story, but the details on which that story rests are part of your real life at some level, and they’re seeping into the narrative. So in that sense, they’re always slightly autobiographical. But as far as wanting to make any more stories about myself as a director, where I have to sort of, you know, have somebody reflect myself within the film, that’s something that really doesn’t appeal to me right now.
What appeals to me right now is to think about stories that are happening sort of outside of my house, outside of home. Right now I have about two to three stories. One of them is almost done, one of them is halfway there, the other one is just a set of notes, and they’re all very, very different from the story that I’ve just told. The three stories that I’m working on are stories that are actually pushing me to go outside my house, outside my comfort zone, outside of what I know. I’m having to do some research. I’m having to look at other realities, other professions, other people. Because I’m really tired of myself.
Color has always played such a major role in your films, regardless of style. It’s always such a significant communicator of theme and tone and what’s going on in the film. How do you address color going into a film? Do you write it into the screenplay? Are you finding the colors as you make the film? Are they all planned out in pre-production?
I usually start visualizing the story after having the first script, but I know that this is part of myself. I mean, I have an inner palette of colors that I’m going to use in all my movies, because they are really part of my sensibility. This is something unconscious. In any case, for example, I was raised in the decade of the ’60s, and it was the pop style. So I was raised by the pop culture of the ’60s, but that was when I was very young, very adolescent. But after, in Madrid, the ’80s were again a new period of pop culture, because at that moment we didn’t have a dictatorship, and that explosion became something very pop in terms of music, of colors, of ways of living, of everything. And I belonged to that culture.
And also, as a director, I remember when I was a child, the movies that I saw were always in Technicolor. And the Technicolor was very bright with a lot of contrast. In a way, I’m looking for the colors of my childhood, and that’s impossible because it depended on the chemical liquids that they used. But I just try to put all the colors in front of the camera. Because I’m involved in everything, in every detail of the production design. And I do it through intuition.
I always wanted to make a representation of life, of reality. So I never did, and I’m not going to do, let’s say, a naturalistic movie, where everything you see is like it is in real life. This is not my style. I mean, I can give you an example: the Dardenne brothers or Ken Loach. I feel very far from that style because I prefer to represent life and reality. And there is always something artificial.
Bitter Christmas opens in theaters on Friday, November 13.
