Pedro Almodóvar TWO OR THREE THINGS I KNOW ABOUT IT (Actors and comedy) Comedy is the genre where humor predominates. There is humor of various colors and comedies of various kinds, and like all genres it also combines with others, drama, tragedy, social criticism, and multiplies into all kinds of bastard, parodic genres. There is humor in all my films, at times comedy bursts into other genres, embodied in one of the characters, forgive the self-‐quote. Agrado (Antonia San Juan) in “All About My Mother” and Paca (Javier Cámara) in “Bad Education” fulfilled that function. When they appear on scene, they bring comedy with them and impose themselves on the general tone of the narrative. As a writer and director I really enjoy those kinds of incursions and it has taken me time to impose them in dramatic films, especially with Anglo-‐Saxon critics, less flexible when it comes to accepting a mix of genres, something as natural in life as it is in cinema. From you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night, you move through various, sometimes opposing, genres. Since the start of my career that is how I’ve understood cinematic narrative. Within that constant mix that I have gradually distilled over the past thirty years, the last pure comedy that I made would be “Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”: In “Volver”, “ The Flower of My Secret” and “All About My Mother” there is a lot of humor but only on occasions or attached to one of the characters, as I have explained. In “ The Flower of My Secret”, Chus Lampreave-‐Rossy de Palma is a comic duo, but the theme was the weakness of the writer Leo on her road to madness. Therefore, “I’m So Excited!” is the first comedy I’ve made since “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown”, twenty five years ago.
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Aspects that I’ve kept very much in mind: Rehearsal/Rhythm. Despite the spontaneity typical of the genre, the comedies I’ve made to date, and this one is no exception, are rehearsed exhaustively during pre-‐production and afterwards during shooting. Spontaneity is always the product of rehearsal. A script isn’t finished until the film has opened. I rehearse a script as if it was a play. Coincidentally, both “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “I’m So Excited!” seem like plays, in both the action takes place mainly on one set. I rehearse them like plays, but I don’t film them like plays (in fact, I’ve never directed a play, I don’t know what it’s like). They’re very oral comedies, the action lies basically in the words and the characters’ openness. I usually improvise a lot in rehearsals, then I rewrite the scenes and rehearse them again, and so on, to the point of obsession. With improvisations, the scenes usually become longer but it’s the best way I know to find nuances and parallel situations that I would never discover if I stuck rigidly to the text. After stretching them out and blowing them apart, I rewrite them again, trying to synthesize what has been improvised. And then we rehearse again. Some of the actors, especially Carlos Areces, can’t bear you to cut a single one of their jokes, even if it has come up while the scene is looking for itself and is not yet consolidated. Everything that comes up and involves his character belongs to him. If it were up to him, the film would last three hours. (At times I shoot two versions of the same scene and I admit that at times I edit the “improvised” one.) Lola Dueñas is another one who immediately appropriates all the antics that