Acclaimed Oscar-winning filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has never made an English-language movie. Instead, the auteur has spun complex tales from his native Spain, where he has freely explored the interior lives of women in a way that does not seem to interest Hollywood. But in recent years, the All About My Mother filmmaker mulled over making his American cinema debut, even scouting locations in New York for Julieta—the film he ultimately made in Spanish, and is debuting at the Cannes Film Festival this week—and securing Meryl Streep to play its lead.
During an interview at the festival on Monday, Almodóvar revealed that he wanted Streep to star in his initial idea for Julieta. The filmmaker first met the actress about 13 years ago when they were on the awards circuit—him for Talk to Her, and her for The Hours—and were repeatedly brought together in the lead-up to the Oscars. When it came time to make Julieta, which is inspired by three of Alice Munro’s short stories, he thought Streep would be perfect and met her at the Peninsula Hotel in New York to pitch her on his ambitious idea to showcase her uncanny acting ability.
In the Julieta film he ended up making, Almodóvar cast two actresses to play the title character at different ages. Had he made the film with Streep, though, he would have had her play three versions of the same title character, a woman searching for her teenage daughter, who left home suddenly upon turning 18. So Streep would have played Julieta at about 20, 40, and 60 years old, with minimal makeup.
“I mean, once you have Meryl Streep, you have to take advantage of that fact,” Almodóvar told us. “She deserves to be a playing the three characters. With her, I wanted to make something Ingmar Bergman-like being Meryl. We know she can do every accent, and I think she can act every age too.”
“So it would be Streep, looking the same for each age of the character,” the filmmaker explained. “It takes an artistic license as a storyteller, where you could get the viewer of the movie to understand that this person is playing three different ages . . . Meryl Streep is an extraordinary instrument and I love to direct great actresses. They demand much more of you because with them you can do much more with a film than you can do usually.”
Almodóvar said she “agreed” to the concept, and they immediately interlocked during that meeting.
“It was very easy to talk to her and to understand each other,” he said. “If we were to work together, it would be very easy. We talked about [themes of the film] including being abandoned and going back to the same place you lived years ago just in case her daughter returns.”
Alas, the filmmaker says he backed out of the vision for his English-language debut because he “didn’t feel secure enough.” Instead, he adapted the concept to fit the language and Spanish culture. The final product, he says, is still “very much inspired by Munro but an original.” But what will it take to get Almodóvar to come to America and make an English-speaking film, especially when Hollywood has famously little use for middle-aged actresses.
“First of all I need to improve my English,” he explained. “I don’t know enough about your culture and need to have more experience in the day-by-day life of that culture. What I need is about three months there living like a regular person. That will give me the information I need.”
In the meantime, Almodóvar said that Hollywood is “losing out on treasure” by refusing to make movies about women in the prime of their lives.
“Hollywood is not writing enough roles for women, especially enough roles for women that age—at which women are at their splendor, which is from 40 to 70,” the filmmaker says. “They are overlooking something that is very interesting and a more interesting age of a woman. They are losing what is actually a very important part of life.”
“Actresses like Isabelle Huppert, Juliette Binoche, and Catherine Deneuve would not survive in Hollywood,” he said, referring to the few parts available for their demographic. “In France, they can make two or three movies a year. We don’t have such a big budget [in Europe] but the movies we create here are related more with life. I don’t have anything against Hollywood. But to make movies about human beings without superpowers, that is cheaper to make.”
