Pedro Almodóvar is setting his first film outside Spain in Texas.
NEW YORK — Pedro Almodóvar is a master of cinema who has found international acclaim with 21 films he’s shot in his native Spain. Now he’s setting his sights on making his first film in North America.
Almodovar said the film is set in Texas and would be mostly in English, with some bilingual scenes shot in Mexico.
The director said he has the story mapped out in a first draft of the script, and though some work still needs to be done, he’s planning that it will be his next film.
“I can’t say the title yet, but I can say it is based on five stories by an American female author and that it happens partly in Texas and partly in Mexico,” he told the Associated Press. “It would be the first time that I get out of Spain,” Almodovar said.
Almodovar’s latest feature, “Pain and Glory,” will be released in Houston on Oct. 18.
The highly autobiographical drama stars Antonio Banderas as an aging film director who flirts with drugs and has to confront his own past while reflecting on his life and career. It has been hailed as one of his best movies in recent years and won Banderas the bestactor award at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
It is also Spain’s submission to the Oscars for best international feature film, the category formerly known as best foreignlanguage film. If it wins, it would be exactly 20 years after Almodovar’s “All About My Mother” received the award. (The filmmaker also won the best-original-screenplay Oscar in 2003 for “Talk To Her.”)
“This will force me to come a few times in the next months because (the distributor) Sony is making a big campaign — and this is something good — because they have a lot of faith in the movie. And also the first reactions it is getting are incredibly positive,” he said. But “this doesn’t mean anything other than there’s going to be a big campaign to be able to be among the five nominees. I will do everything possible, which will be to come, to cross the Pond as many times as they tell me, and the rest is a mystery.
“It’s a very long road and it’s not in my hands, but … I would love to be” back at the Oscars, he said.
“It makes me very happy to see Antonio among the first five (in many media pools), and I hope it continues this way,” Almodovar said. “Right now we can only speak about prospects, and the prospects are good. Reality will eventually place each of us wherever we belong.”