In Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a war photographer with cancer, Martha (Tilda Swinton), decides she will die at a time and place of her choosing. She asks a novelist friend from her old days in New York, Ingrid (Julianne Moore), to join her at a house in the country, where on some unannounced morning, Ingrid will wake up to find Martha has carried out her wish. With many unsparing close-ups of people ruminating on past deeds and mortality, it can suggest Almodóvar doing Bergman. But the chamber-piece feel also picks up from his own Pain and Glory (2019), which starred Almodóvar axiom Antonio Banderas as an ageing director with debilitating pain whose mother specifies exactly how she wants to be buried (and talks about her dislike for autofiction).
Almodóvar’s reflections on death must have attracted him to the relationship in Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through, the source novel for The Room Next Door, which he adapts in part. Like other filmmakers before him, he found in Swinton an ethereal actor who can take us from one world to the next; in his telling, he and Swinton then both thought of Moore for the role of Ingrid. John Turturro also has a choice part as a doomsaying ex of both women, as if suggesting another reason not to remain and watch the world burn.
Almodóvar’s first English-language feature has surprised some audiences and engrossed others, but the well of emotion he brings to The Room Next Door was apparent in speaking with him earlier this month. Reached at his production office El Deseo in Madrid via Zoom, the legendary filmmaker was warm and disarming as he talked freely about matters great and small involved in making the film.
Nicolas Rapold: Good morning.
Pedro Almodóvar: For us, it’s good afternoon! But morning is always good—it is the start of something.
NR: Let’s start at the beginning, or one beginning. When did you first read the book by Sigrid Nunez?
PA: I think two years ago. What I remember is that it was Christmas, and Christmas for me is one of the times that I’m always very feeling bad, or I’m writing, because this is the only way to escape from the atmosphere of Christmas. I was very interested, I love Sigrid Nunez. I had already read The Friend, which is also a movie.
NR: With the big dog.
PA: Yes, very big! I love that book. I also thought about that book when I was shooting The Human Voice [2020] with Tilda Swinton. There is also a dog that is missing the owner, so it’s a couple of sentient beings waiting for the man. And I thought to include something that the protagonist does in The Friend. I don’t know if you remember, but she has discovered that when she reads poetry—Rilke or other very, very subtle things—the dog is very quiet and leans on her feet. I wanted to incorporate that into The Human Voice. But our dog didn’t want to. I mean, Tilda started reading the letters of the lover, but the dog didn’t want to sit quietly there, and he escaped, so we didn’t. That’s just to give you an impression of another way Sigrid Nunez was on my mind. When What Are You Going Through was released, I immediately started reading. I wasn’t thinking about how to make an adaptation—just for the pleasure of reading. I don’t know if you have read the novel?
NR: I haven’t yet. I wanted to see your film first.
PA: No, no, good. Now you can read the novel. It’s a kind of autofiction tale where she does many things: she talks about not only the people that we are meeting, but also about her own thoughts, so it’s impossible to adapt that for a movie. But in the middle of the book, the protagonist appears. Sigrid Nunez didn’t give a name to the character. She goes to the hospital to see a friend that is sick. But basically, when I read the chapter of the proposition [to be with her when she dies], they were not at Lincoln Center, they were in an old New York bar where they used to go. When I read the proposition, it really impressed me and hooked me. It was very inspiring, the situation with the two women.
Then I started developing it, seeing what I could do, reflecting on the subject of mortality. One of the characters doesn’t have any fear about mortality. I thought, well, that is because she works as a war reporter. The other one is very scared about the mere thought of death and is very immature with this topic. Then I developed that. I saw that I could make a movie, an adaptation, creating the two characters in my own way.
I didn’t read the book again, because I remember a line—I think it was Buñuel who said it after shooting Belle de Jour [1967], which was an adaptation of a [1928] bestseller written by Joseph Kessel. Buñuel said that to make an adaptation of a book, it was much better if the book is not so good. I mean, he said a bad novel is better—“bad” in that the novel has one interesting situation and then he develops that situation and forgets the rest.
NR: That’s the case with a few of Hitchcock’s films, right?
PA: I mean, it’s a nice line to say, but in the case of Buñuel, it was not true, because he also adapted Tristana by [Benito] Pérez Galdós, a wonderful Spanish writer at the beginning of the 20th century, and also the movie with Francisco Rabal, Nazarin [1959]. Those two novels were very good. The Sigrid Nunez book is a wonderful novel! But what I did is just to develop what I thought about the book, because that is the advice: you leave the book [behind] and only write about the things you remember about it. It is very different from the book. But Sigrid Nunez came to Lincoln Center when we were shooting. It was the first time that the author of the book was in my shoot, because I don’t like the idea. But she was in New York, so she came. She was so nice, so enthusiastic, about everything she watched! She’s really one of a kind, this lady.
NR: One of the questions you asked Sigrid Nunez was what she would bring to read if she was in Martha’s situation.
PA: Yes. I asked something about the surrounding things at Martha’s place and also at Ingrid’s—I mean, all the books. I didn’t make a close-up of the books, but there was an intention in the books that appear. I also put some of the books that Sigrid was reading at the moment. This gave me a sense of authenticity. But I also put many books that I like.
NR: Which books did you put in there that you like?
PA: Many female writers. [asks someone off screen: ¿Tienes la lista de los libros? (“Do you have the list of books?”)] I will try to look at the list that I gave to the production designer. For example, Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table, which Jane Campion made into a wonderful film. I also remember Scott Fitzgerald, Suave es la noche (Tender Is the Night). And a mix of French autofiction authors like Emmanuel Carrère, Lives Other Than My Own.
NR: I know Carrère is a big author for you.
PA: Yeah, I love him. For me, he’s very important, but at the same time, a different kind of self-fiction, which is Marguerite Duras—The Pain, for example [La Douleur, 1985]. Of course, there was also some Virginia Woolf, because they talk about Virginia Woolf and Dora Carrington.
NR: One thing I love about The Room Next Door is the kind of relationship: it’s two friends facing death. I think sometimes in movies, we see stories about losing a parent or some other family member. And there’s something different when it’s a friend, no?
PA: Yeah, and also, when it’s a friend where you are recovering the relationship with her. You can even have a small sense of guilt because you were apart over the years. Because Martha and Ingrid were professionals, they were very alive, they were doing different things. They say that they were very close in the mid-80s, at the end of the ‘80s, at the beginning of the ‘90s. Afterward, they were close, but Ingrid went to Europe, and Martha started working as a war reporter. The living that they did, separated them a little. But these two ladies are facing death in a different way. I mean, in the case of the sick person—[A cat walks in front of my camera] Ah, you have a kitty, too. I have two. One very young. [Chuckles] I have two kids and 23 movies. This is all I have. [Laughter]
Martha is not afraid at all, because she was on the frontlines and saw death many times, but she was always in the company of this other reporter. They created a kind of mobile family. This time, she doesn’t feel fear—but she doesn’t want to be alone. The problem for Ingrid is that she writes a book, like Emanuel Carrère, about different tragedies, talking about sudden death, accidental death: for example, you’re walking through the park, and a tree falls and kills you.
I myself feel quite immature around death, and that’s something I lent to the character of Ingrid. As I get older, it’s not as if I feel like I have one more day, it’s like I have one less day. The proposition is a difficult one for Ingrid because Martha is well aware that Ingrid is afraid of death. And Ingrid knows that Martha has asked a number of her friends who have all said no. So Ingrid becomes very aware of the fact that Martha is by herself, even though the last thing in the world she wants to do is find her friend dead. It terrifies her, but she says yes because in her own way, she’s also an adventuress.
NR: Martha also faces death in a way by controlling the circumstances. It’s almost as if she is arranging her own “death scene,” or her own exit, like in a film.
PA: This is something that I decided about Martha: she wants to leave as if she was going to a party, which is a way of defying death. When we premiered The Human Voice in Venice, Tilda was wearing this gorgeous yellow suit, a man’s suit, because she sometimes wears men’s clothes. And I knew I wanted that particular suit for this sequence [late in the film]. The other particular reference for this sequence is Black Narcissus [1947]. One of the nuns that lives with Deborah Kerr in the mountains has decided that she’s going to take her life. She goes crazy, she decides she’s going to kill herself, and she paints her lips red beforehand. I wanted to pull that gesture because it’s a gesture of furious determination that also reflects Martha’s will to fight against death. She has staged the way she wants to say goodbye to this life, but I decided that the way to shoot it is very, very austere. A woman can have bad hair, no makeup, but paint her lips, and I wanted it very austere: close-up this, close-up of this, she fills up a glass with water and you know she’s going to take the pill. The entire story of her death is narrated in those short sequences.
NR: You used the word austere. The camera movement in this film does feel a bit different from some other films of yours, maybe a little less mobile, fewer of these beautifully planned out sequences.
PA: Yeah. Sometimes the movement we used was just the Steadicam to follow them. It’s true that I didn’t want any movement, or crane shots. At the beginning of production, I thought of moving the camera more. But really, in the very first week, we shot entirely in the hospital, in Martha’s room, [scenes] full of words, full of monologues. I was so hooked by the speeches of Tilda Swinton that I couldn’t put distance between her and the camera. And, well, I followed my feelings in the moment. My feelings were to be very close to the faces of the two women. Of course, I make an establishing shot of the place where they are, or when they take the car or something. But I wanted to be just very respectfully very close to them, like a confessor.
I always thought that both of them [Swinton and Moore] would be great in the movie. But I was very moved when we started: they were better, they were beyond that, and also because they were alive. They were giving life to the words that I wrote in Spanish and were translated in English. I was very hooked by that. That was the reason. Sometimes you have to feel these kinds of feelings, but I never thought that it was a movie with so many close-ups.
NR: No, I love the close-ups.
PA: Yeah, yeah! I mean, sometimes you feel like the spectator is going to be bored. But if you look at so many of Bergman’s movies, from the beginning he dared to put the camera and just be there in a close-up for six minutes, seven minutes, and it worked. The danger is that you have to be aware. With a close-up, there is no possibility to lie. The close-up only allows perfection. If the actor is not completely fantastic, you have to change. And actually, I change sometimes, just to cover myself. If there’s a shot where it doesn’t work, then you have to take that shot away.
NR: Since this is for Screen Slate, I want to ask: what’s an older film you saw this year for the first time and liked?
PA: Well, by chance, I saw a film by Maurice Pialat that I had not seen, despite knowing the filmmaker’s work well: We Will Not Grow Old Together [1972]. I was very impressed by it because I’ve never seen a film where a character, a man, is so cruel to himself. Because I think that Maurice Pialat was very present in the character of Jean. I think I knew the title of the film, but it never came to Spain, and it was completely by chance. But sometimes, you know, I see the lists of the films on the different platforms. Sometimes I discover a movie that I didn’t see before. And I was very impressed by that one.
NR: It’s an incredible movie. Pialat’s movies destroy me.
PA: No, no, I can imagine. It’s 20 years since Pialat died [in 2003]. It’s still very strong.
NR: The Room Next Door is set in New York, so I wanted to ask about your New York memories. I saw the poster for Paper magazine in the film.
PA: Yes, yes. Paper magazine was very important for me when I went to New York during the ‘80s. I mean, people like Kim [Hastreiter], the editor-in-chief of Paper magazine, that were working in the middle of the ‘80s... My idea [for the film] was this kind of woman: one can be a good novelist and the other a war reporter. When I was thinking about their past, I thought, I knew that kind of New Yorker woman.
The Room Next Door screens today, December 20, and until next week, at Film at Lincoln Center.
