HOWZAT

What is impossible to extract from Almodóvar is how close these stories are to the biographical truth. He has said elsewhere that the events in the film happened to friends he knew at school. “It’s not autobiographical in the sense that it tells stories about my life, but it is autobiographical in that the whole film represents me,” he says. “I have lived the film. I have lived in the 1960s and the 1980s, so I have taken myself as a documentary source for both periods and characters. But I’m not telling my life story.”

It’s easy to forget just how radical the young Almodóvar was. Spanish cinema simply wouldn’t be the same without his crazy spices. The hick from La Mancha didn’t just impose himself on the public; he branded his images on the imagination: a nun kebabing her cheeks with a knitting needle, transvestites with drills and sex galore. Almodóvar films were as exotic as anyone dared get in the late Seventies and early Eighties.

As with John Waters in America, Almodóvar was initially committed to a cinema of farcical shocks — female orgasms, an enormous pair of man-eating rubber thighs, and transsexual frolics — until method began to replace the splashy madness. His insatiable curiosity about sex, passion and how people relate began to distinguish his best work. As Woody Allen once pointed out, what made movies like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) so readily accessible was their striking similarity to classic American melodrama.

Yet Almodóvar has never itched to make a Hollywood film, despite an addiction to Hitchcock and Wilder. “The idea of making an American blockbuster means precisely nothing,” he says. “My ambition — and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me — is the pursuit of stories that say something about my life. And invariably these have been written in Spanish.”

Worryingly, cinema is no longer just an obsession or a refuge for Almodóvar. Film is eating him. He readily admits it. “Cinema has become my true life and I don’t mean a parallel world. I mean my life itself. I sometimes have the impression that the daily reality is simply there to provide material for my next film. Twenty years ago I wasn’t conscious of how much I tapped from experience. Now I draw on it like a vampire.

” It sounds desperately unhealthy.

“It’s intense,” he says, “not unhealthy. I enjoy the predatory aspect of cinema. And it is a choice. Some people choose to enter a convent and live in seclusion. I don’t have faith in God. I don’t feel it. I never had it. I wish I did.

“I waited as a child for God to manifest Himself but He failed. I feel orphaned in the sense that I don’t have a God that I can lean on in times of tribulation.

“I see cinema as something which makes sense of my existence. I believe that it has saved me from a great many dangers.”

I cannot honestly imagine what these might be, but I suspect cinema will keep on rescuing Almodóvar from a great many more.

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