Pedro Almodovar's Talk To Her is a story about the friendship between two men, about loneliness and the long convalescence of the wounds provoked by passion. It is also a film about in-communication between couples, and about communication. About cinema as a subject of conversation. About how monologues before a silent person can be an effective form of dialogue. About silence as "eloquence of the body", about film as an ideal vehicle in relationships between people, about how a film told in words can bring time to a standstill and install itself in the lives of the person telling it and the person listening.
 
Talk To Her is a film about the joy of narration and about words as a weapon against solitude, disease, death and madness. It is also a film about madness, about a type of madness so close to tenderness and common sense that it does not diverge from normality.

Q: From now on, we'll have to say that as well as being a good director of actresses you're also a good director of actors. The leading characters in Talk To Her are two men and the actors who play them are splendid.
A: I'm delighted it's you who's said that. Yes, Javier Cdmara and Dario Grandinetti are superb in very complicated roles. In any case, Talk To Her isn't my first film with male leads. Carne Trimula is a testicular story. Matador and La ley del deseo were also stories in which men deterrmined the action. In La ley... even the girl (Carmen Maura) was a man.

Q: Which do you find more enjoyable when it comes to working, actors or actresses?
A: When they're wonderful and can make me forget that I'm the director and the writer, I enjoy both equally and very much. Over the course of fourteen feature films I admit that I've found more good actresses than good actors, but it's also true that I've written more female roles than male or neuter roles. In another field, that of writing, and as a general rule, I believe that women inspire me to write comedies, and men, tragedies.

Q: Isn't it a bit risky to interrupt the general narrative with a very different piece, or is it a flashback involving the same characters? Aren't you afraid the spectator will be confused, or lose his concentration?
A: No, it isn't a flashback, it's a separate story... and yes, it's risky, very risky... Now that I've finished it, no, but while I was filming it I was terrified. I couldn't sleep until I had the two stories edited together.

Q: What's the reason for this "detour" from the central story?
A: It only seems like a detour, because the nurse's story doesn't actually stop during those seven minutes, rather it overlaps and merges with that of Shrinking Lover. In any case, the original reason (when I was working on the script) was so that I could use the silent film as a front.

Q: In any case, it isn't the first time that your characters explain themselves through another film. For example, in Tacones Lejanos…
A: Yes. Victoria Abril shouted a scene from Autumn Sonata at her mother, Marisa Paredes, in order to explain the love and hate that she felt for her, a love and hate so great they'd even driven her to kill. In Matador the protagonists hurry into a cinema (she's running away from him) where they are showing Duel In The Sun. On the screen they can see what their own end will be. In Carne Tremula, while Liberto Rabal and Francesca Neri are fighting, the television is showing Bufluel's Rehearsal For A Crime (aka The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz). Bufluel's film could well provide the title for this section of Carne... And its images anticipate two elements which will later appear in my film, a legless man (after this scene Javier Bardern's character ends up in a wheelchair, in The Criminal Life... it was a dummy which had its leg removed) and the fire which would trap Angela Molina's character when Liberto breaks off with her (in The Criminal Life... it was the oven in which Archibaldo de la Cruz was burning a dummy identical to the character played by Miroslava. By coincidence, years later, the actress really did die in a burning car). For me, the films I see become part of my own experiences, and I use them as such. There's no intention of paying homage to their directors or of imitating them. They're elements which are absorbed into the script and become part of it. "Telling films" is something that has to do with my biography. And I'm not talking about a film forum or the typical discussion about cinema (I hate those). I remember that when I was little I would tell films to my sisters, films that we'd seen together. I'd get carried away by the memory and while I was telling them I'd reinvent them. Really, I was making my own adaptation, and my sisters preferred my inaccurate, delirious versions to the original film. I remember that during those hours when time slowed down (sitting in the patio while they sewed, or gathered around the table with the brazier underneath), they would say: Pedro, tell us the film we saw yesterday…

Q: What was the inspiration for Talk To Her?
A: Several true incidents which happened in the last ten years, of which I'd taken note.
1. An American woman awakens from a coma after sixteen years. According to the doctors, her condition was irreversible. I was really struck when I saw a photo of the woman in El Pais, supported by two nurses and learning to walk again. Her awakening contradicted everything that science says about such cases.
2. In Rumania, the young night watchman in a morgue feels attracted by the corpse of a young girl. The loneliness of death added to the loneliness of the night resulted in "too much loneliness", the young watchman gives in to his desires and possesses the dead beauty. What happens afterwards is one of those miracles of human nature which I don't think the Pope would like very much. As a reaction to the amorous harassment, the dead girl comes to life. She'd been suffering from a kind of catalepsy and only seemed to be dead. (I wasn't the only person who took note of that incident. Two years ago, in France, they made a film based on it). Although the resuscitated girl's family was grateful to the rapist, they couldn't prevent him being put in jail. They brought him food parcels and got him a lawyer. The unusual situation led to a curious dilemma: in the eyes of the law the boy was just a rapist, but for the family, whose reaction was ruled by their emotions, the boy had brought their daughter back to life. It was a wonderful story from start to finish and all of it inspired me, including the "moral dilemma" which also appears in Talk To Her.
3. In New York, a girl who's been in a coma for nine years becomes pregnant (without awakening from the coma. I don't know what happened when she gave birth). A few days later, they discover that the culprit was an orderly in the clinic. The question is, how can a body which is clinically dead (death is determined by the brain) beget life?
4. I believe it was Cocteau who said that "beauty" can be painful. I suppose he was referring to the beauty of people. I think that situations which involve moments of unexpected, extraordinary beauty can bring tears to your eyes, tears which have more to do with pain than pleasure. Tears which fill the place in our eyes of those who are absent.
5. Ever since I saw The Devil Doll and The Incredible Shrinking Man I've dreamed about making a film with a tiny person where the legs of the furniture and the relief of the floor become the main set. In fact, I'd already written a treatment about a story like that.
All those incidents and the memory of a love affair, broken off when it was still alive, were my inspiration for the script of Talk To Her.

Q: In a self interview, a genre with which you're familiar, how does the loneliness affect you? What do you feel at the absence of an interlocutor... nostalgia... or contempt?
A: I don't feel contempt for anything, not even for things I hate. The reason I interview myself is for practical rather than endogamic reasons. I say what I want to say and in the fastest way possible. In any case, a self interview is a written piece and writing is always done in solitude.

Q: Have you ever realized that you were talking to yourself? I mean in your life, without whatever you say necessarily appearing in print.
A: Yes. A few months ago. I caught myself doing it on several days. I did it either in the morning, when I'd just got up, or at night. (I've been told that Bunuel also talked to himself in the morning, to cheek on how his deafness was progressing). I was doing it to cheek the sound and power of my voice. I lost my voice during the shoot and for a few weeks when I got up after the long nocturnal silence, I'd talk to myself in bed or in front of the mirror. "How's my voice today?", I'd ask myself. "Much better. If I don't force it, I may make it through to the evening." I've always believed in words, even when you've got no voice... or no one to talk to.

Q: Is that the message in Talk To Her?
Talk To Her tells a private, romantic, secret story, peppered with independent, spectacular units. I'm referring, as well as to the bull fights and the inclusion of Shrinking Lover, to the collaboration and presence of Caetano Veloso, who sings Cucurrucucu paloma live, to Pina Bausch, the choreographer of Cafe Muller and Masurca Fogo, the pieces with which the film begins and ends. I'm also grateful for the return to the stage in Cafe Muller of Malou, a member of the original Wuppertal TanAheater who now teaches youngsters and who, out of sheer generosity, immersed herself in the stage again and enthralled everyone.

It's the synthesis of a silent film, introduced half way through the narration of Talk To Her. The decision that it should be silent and in black and white is due to the fact that this is the last genre discovered by Alicia before her accident. An interest which Benigno inherits from her.

As the film didn't exist, I had to make it. I'd already written the story of a shrinking man, much more detailed than the one inserted into Talk To Her. Originally, it was a story of love and suspense. The man who is shrinking leaves Amparo, the beautiful scientist, and goes back home to a despotic mother whom he hasn't spoken to in years. It's an opportunity to be reconciled with her. When Alfredo measures only a few centimeters he moves into one of his toys and lives there surrounded by his boyhood fetishes (books, comics, etc.) Among the pages of one of his favorite books he discovers a letter from his dead father; although it's addressed to him, Alfredo never received it. In it, his dead father tells him about his mother's growing insanity and warns him that if anything should ever happen to him his mother will have been responsible. The mother senses that Alfredo has discovered that she killed his father. Alfredo is living inside his electric train and doesn't want to come out for fear of his mother. In a fit of rage, his mother chases him from carriage to carriage. Just then, Amparo appears (after discovering where the mother lives). She saves little Alfredo and takes him with her to the Hotel Youkali where she is staying.

For obvious reasons, I've only used the beginning and end of all that melodrama. I really enjoyed making both fragments. For years I've dreamed of the image of the lover walking around the body of his loved one, as if it were a landscape. And now I've got it.

In order to prepare myself for the language of silent cinema, I saw my favorite silent films again, Griffith, F. Lang, Murnau, T. Browning... Sunrise was essential. I wanted to be true to the narrative and form of the time. I found it more attractive to struggle for accuracy than to break the rules. Except for some inevitable license, all the shots were done with a tripod. I didn't use a single traveling shot, in the composition of a shot the upper part of the frame is usually empty, the actors walk into frame, the props are authentic, from the mid-20s, and the acting is strictly expressionist, with a lot of care taken to avoid the risks of overacting. I was lucky that both Paz Vega and Fele Martinez could place themselves effortlessly in that situation which is so close to parody without ever succumbing to it. Their performances, naive, tragic-comic and accurately expressionist, are due solely to their intuition and talent.

The music is also a key element. I didn't want the typical piano, which is how they show silent films at the Cinematheque. Alberto Iglesias suggested the idea of a quartet; I thought it ideal because if there's one kind of composition which Alberto has mastered it's the quartet. I have to confess I find the result very moving. In the best tradition of musical cinema, the melody mingles with the actors' movements, it gives a voice not just to the actors but also to the captions. The few texts which appear acquire a voice, rhythm and movement with the music. They're alive. But above all, the music situates the story in the realm of emotion, and brilliantly avoids the danger of obscenity and grotesqueness, both of which can hover around a story like Shrinking Lover.

When I finished writing Talk To Her and looked at Pina's face again, with her eyes closed, and at how she was dressed in a flimsy slip, her arms and hands outstretched, surrounded by obstacles (wooden tables and chairs), I had no doubt that it was the image which best represented the limbo in which my story's protagonists lived. Two women in a coma who, despite their apparent passivity, provoke the same solace, the same tension, passion, jealousy, desire and disillusion in men as if they were upright, eyes wide open and talking a mile a minute.

Around that time, I saw Masurca Fogo in Barcelona and was struck by its vitality and optimism, its bucolic air and those unexpected images of painful beauty which made me cry, like Marco, from pure pleasure. Not to mention the "sighing beginning", which I had to reduce for narrative reasons. I'm referring to the beginning of the piece: A woman (Ruth Amarante) appears on a diaphanous stage, her hair is hanging loose and she's wearing an ankle length flowered dress. She picks up a 70s style microphone and holds it up to her mouth. It looks as if she's going to sing or talk, but she doesn't do either. After filling her lungs with air in a suspense-filled silence, she lets out a long, deep sigh. This is followed by another sigh... and another.