'It Just Takes One Madman'

On a blank little street in Madrid called the Calle Navacerrada, near a park devoted to Eva Perón, stands the headquarters of El Deseo. “Desire”—it’s the perfect name for Pedro Almodóvar’s production company, the crucible for all his films including Law of Desire, the movie that helped make a star out of a young Spanish actor named Antonio Banderas. Through anonymous blinds one can glimpse an illuminated poster for Almodóvar’s latest film, La Piel Que Habito (“The Skin I Live In”): it shows the eyes of Banderas and a woman in a flesh-colored mask. Almodóvar’s tale of a mad surgeon who creates an experimental -woman out of transgenic tissue is a thriller that harks back to the German expressionist thrillers of the 1920s, like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the early films of Fritz Lang.

Pedro Almodóvar

In an upstairs office hung with enormous versions of his movie posters, along with one for All About Eve (a key inspiration for Almodóvar), the director sits at his desk with a tray of coffee cups and sheaves of papers. The office has the look of a small library—there are handsome volumes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Dior on the shelves—and the feel of a novelist’s study. “I work like one,” he admits. “I carry different projects around for years, just like a novelist. I write like a writer, if you see what I mean.”

At 62, he has not lost his voluble, boyish electricity. Almodóvar is a great talker, but—perhaps surprisingly—he talks without gesticulation or exaggerations. He slips between English and Spanish quite easily, and he likes to chat, charlar, but without too much small talk.

Asked why his new film differs so widely from the French novel upon which it was based—Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale, which was published as Tarantula in English—Almodóvar says, “It’s always that way.”

In an upstairs office hung with enormous versions of his movie posters, along with one for All About Eve (a key inspiration for Almodóvar), the director sits at his desk with a tray of coffee cups and sheaves of papers. The office has the look of a small library—there are handsome volumes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Dior on the shelves—and the feel of a novelist’s study. “I work like one,” he admits. “I carry different projects around for years, just like a novelist. I write like a writer, if you see what I mean.”

At 62, he has not lost his voluble, boyish electricity. Almodóvar is a great talker, but—perhaps surprisingly—he talks without gesticulation or exaggerations. He slips between English and Spanish quite easily, and he likes to chat, charlar, but without too much small talk.

Asked why his new film differs so widely from the French novel upon which it was based—Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale, which was published as Tarantula in English—Almodóvar says, “It’s always that way.”