Pedro Almodóvar, Master of Mystifying Films, Wrote a Book He Can’t Classify

Nicholas Casey

Pedro Almodóvar is widely considered Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first a “fabulist,” in his telling. His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in “Talk to Her.” The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in “The Skin I Live In.”

Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodóvar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set. As it turned out, he had been writing many other things, too short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola García over the course of the director’s many moves to different apartments in Madrid. In 2022, at the urging of Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodóvar had a look at what had been saved over the years.

“It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn’t know,” said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodóvar had seemingly written decades later. The collection, “The Last Dream,” was published in English by HarperVia.

Just what this collection is exactly is as much of a mystery as the folders were. Was this a memoir? (One piece was a journal entry written a couple of years back.) Was it fiction or sketches of ideas that could be fiction unfinished stories the director never turned into a film? (There is a tale about Count Dracula joining a monastery in Spain.) Much like with his films, Almodóvar feels little need to clarify his output into any defined genre.

“I’ve been asked to write my biography more than once, and I’ve always refused,” Almodóvar writes in the introduction. “This book represents something of a paradox. It might be best described as a fragmentary autobiography, incomplete and a little cryptic.”

But perhaps the biggest enigma of “The Last Dream” is why Almodóvar would choose to publish anything at all. Many famous artists burn their juvenilia rather than let it see the light of day. Almodóvar took the opposite approach, publishing the collection virtually unedited. Why, after years of keeping these tales private, had the fabulist chosen to release them into the world?

At 74, Almodóvar has the rare presence of a man with few regrets about life. He was born under the rule of Gen. Francisco Franco, but he came of age after the dictator was dead and films about sex and drugs could be made in Spain. In 1986, he and his brother Agustín founded their own production company, El Deseo, giving the director the kind of artistic control over his films few have ever enjoyed. “People now study my films in university departments,” he said in an interview at his office this summer, with a tone that sounded both proud and surprised.

But as he started to talk about the book, Almodóvar’s mood changed. He wanted to talk about the past. He started to talk about his death. “I have a problem with death now, with mortality,” he said. “I don’t think ‘I’ve just lived another day,’ but instead, ‘I’ve got one less day to live.’” In past interviews, Almodóvar has broken up his filmmaking into phases, which in some ways have corresponded with the stages of his life. The first films bore the signs of his youth and Spain’s own young, unshackled democracy with the humor and kitsch that marked his first big success, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.” Next came a phase where more mature melodramas reigned, often in set in rural Spanish towns like those of the director’s youth, such as “The Flower of My Secret,” where a writer abandons her city for her native town. Almodóvar’s third phase was dominated by stories of physical and mental pain that came with the end of middle age. “The Skin I Live In” and “Pain and Glory” fit into this category.

“The Last Dream,” despite Almodóvar’s claim that it is autobiographical, will strike few readers as a memoir. But in story after story, the collection looks back, wrestling with these three other phases of Almodóvar’s life. And each piece offers another clue about Almodóvar’s body of work.

Take the first story in the collection, “The Visit.” Almodóvar begins with a 25-year-old woman arriving at a Catholic school dressed in a sexy get-up, like “Marlene Dietrich in ‘The Devil Is a Woman.’” The woman demands to see the rector, forcing her way past the priests at the door until she’s reached his office. There she levels her accusation: Her brother, recently deceased, documented the rector’s sexual abuse at the school in a series of short stories. She has brought the stories with her.

Any follower of Almodóvar will immediately recognize the plot of his thriller “Bad Education” — the story sat in the blue folder for years before Almodóvar made it into a film in 2004. But there’s also another metafictional twist to it all: In the film, “The Visit” is also the name of the short story the main character is holding that outlines the abuse. Is the story we read now the manuscript we saw onscreen 20 years ago?

“The Visit” is also, Almodóvar said, a reminder of the deep anger he had as a young man for his own schooling by priests, something Almodóvar said he saw more closely only when he found the text again many years later. “I see now in myself there was someone absolutely furious at the education that the Salesian priests had given him,” he said. “But I also saw my style changed completely with the country, as we moved toward democracy, and with the drugs it was using and the life it was living.”

Almodóvar said he sees this shift in a character who appears halfway through the collection, Patty Diphusa, a narcissistic porn star who details her rivalry with another erotic actress. (Diphusa, whose name is a play on a Spanish word meaning “flabbergasted,” has appeared in Almodóvar’s writing for magazines since the 1980s as a kind of alter ego.) While detailing her sexual conquests and drug use, Diphusa also signals she’s after something like Almodóvar’s goal of writing a biography of sorts. “I want to write a story so the first thing I ask myself is what I am going to write, what subject is worthy of my efforts,” she says. “And, I have to say, I have a great idea: I’ll write about myself.”

Who is Almodóvar now? “In this new century I’ve become more somber, more austere, more melancholic, less certain, more insecure, and more afraid,” he writes. During the interview, he even seemed to say that despite his continual production of films, there was a part of him that was slowing down. “There are certain skills that gradually disappear over time,” he said. “I remember, throughout the month I’d come up with, I don’t know, 10 stories that I could write to make into a movie, and right now that has disappeared.”

Then he looked like he wanted to take his statement back. “Fortunately, literature and cinema are two professions that have longevity,” he said. “It’s not like being a tennis player who, at 35, has already finished his career.”

“The Room Next Door,” which premiered this month at the Venice Film Festival, takes on Almodóvar’s “problem with death” maybe more explicitly than any of his previous work. It’s also his first film in English. In the script, a former war correspondent plans her suicide after she refuses treatment for a terminal disease. She’s joined by a writer friend who fears everything to do with death but agrees to accompany her through her final days.

“This latest film I’ve made talks about dying, but it’s also about trying to live with mortality,” Almodóvar said. (The movie, which stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, received a 20-minute standing ovation in Venice and won the Golden Lion for best film.)

Death again is the subject of his book’s title story, “The Last Dream,” a memorial to his mother, Francisca Caballero, who died in 1999. It was Caballero, Almodóvar said, who first introduced him to the “fabulist” style of storytelling in their village, where she read letters for her neighbors who couldn’t read. Quite often, she would embellish the writing with fictions that Almodóvar said were frequently better than the truth.

In Almodóvar’s story, Caballeros is in a hospital at the end of her life as her family sits around her, then falls suddenly into a deep sleep. When she awakes, she asks whether there had been a storm, and shortly afterward she dies. “Friday was a sunny day, and some sunshine was streaming through the window,” Almodóvar writes. “What storm was my mother referring to in her last dream?”

From his mother’s death, Almodóvar turned back to his own mortality. “It’s a matter of biology, but when it comes to death I don’t think I’ve really evolved,” he told me. “Mentally to accept it, just to accept that it’s part of your nature, I’m just not there yet.” Yet as he returned to his story about Count Dracula in the tale, the immortal vampire learns to cheat death by drinking blood from a crucifix it was clear that part of the director had accepted he was nearing the end of his career. He had always wanted to make the story into a film, he said, but knew the story would probably not be told in any other form.

Almodóvar’s last piece in the collection the most recent pulled from the blue folders is an essay called “A Bad Novel” in which he addresses his calling as a writer.

“Early on, when I was young, my dream was to become a writer, to write a great novel. Over time, reality proved that what I wrote inevitably became a movie,” he writes. “I realized that my writings were not literary stories, but rough drafts of screenplays.” Life, Almodóvar said, was often about changing course toward what you were good at, and he had been lucky in this regard. Cinema is where Almodóvar will be remembered, not literature; “The Last Dream” works mainly as a key to understanding his films.

Almodóvar wondered, though, when he read the title essay again, years after his mother’s death, whether writing the “great novel” was something he could have done too. Reading the pages, he said he’d seen the seeds of something in himself he hadn’t pursued. “It’s not that this story makes me a great writer, I’m not,” he said. “But in those four or five pages, I mean, if I were capable of writing that way all the time, without my mother dying because that only happens once there might have been a novel in me.”