Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has had premieres all over the world, so maybe he’s used to the rock star treatment. But even he admits things got a little out of control at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. When we hopped on a Zoom recently, I mentioned to him that I was one of the festivalgoers who braved the rain and a crazed crowd in May trying to get into the first screening of his film. It was a rainy afternoon in Cannes, and I’d never seen so many people turned away from a screening due to capacity issues.
“It was really chaos,” says Almodóvar. “Sometimes in Cannes, these things happen, and it is a pity. I mean, I like the idea that people wanted to see my movie, but it was very badly organized.”
His movie is Strange Way of Life, a half-hour short film starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal as two cowboys and former lovers whose paths cross after a few years apart. Made in partnership with Yves Saint Laurent, the film is a stylish Western, full of wanting and desire between two men.
It’s also Almodóvar’s second film in English, following his 2020 short The Human Voice, and serves as a jumping-off point for what’s to come: an English language feature that he’s just about ready to shoot. But first, Strange Way of Life, which shows strong promise to be an awards contender in the live-action-short category, will hit theaters in New York and LA on October 4 and expand nationwide on October 6.
Ahead of its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on September 9, where Almodóvar will also be honored with the Jeff Skoll Award in Impact Media, the two-time Oscar winner reveals how he crafts eroticism, why he cast Hawke and Pascal as his leads, and what they had to learn about riding a horse in Spain.
Vanity Fair: How did the idea to tell a queer Western first come to you?
Pedro Almodóvar: At the beginning, when I started writing it, the idea was only the situation when they wake up the morning after. And then I wrote a long dialogue, and I kept it in my computer. I didn’t know that it was a future movie, because, sometimes, I write small pieces, set pieces, and sometimes these small pieces find their place in one of my movies. For example, in Pain and Glory, I mean, I wrote the script very quickly, because there are three set pieces that I have written years before.
How did you decide to cast Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal?
It was very easy just to cast the two protagonists. Since the very beginning, I thought about Ethan Hawke, I knew him in Madrid, when he was in the play The Cherry Orchard. We were talking after in the theater, and we became friends for one night, this kind of feeling that you have when you talk with someone at an event. Also, I knew Pedro. I knew him in New York when he was doing theater, King Lear.
So I called them directly and sent them the script. And immediately, they answered me that they loved it, both of them, and they really wanted to work with me and come to Madrid. I had to wait six months because Ethan was doing a movie and Pedro was starting The Last of Us.
How did you know that they would be the right pairing to lead the film?
I thought that Ethan and Pedro matched the two characters that I had written very well. They’re physically very different. One is also Anglo. The other one is Latin. They come from very different cultures. One is very cold, hermetic. The other one is exactly the opposite of that, even though, of course, he turns out to be part of an unpredictable character as we move forward. And then, physically, I also found them to be quite perfect for the roles. And so, in the end, I’m very happy about my selection because you never know how that’s going to go. You think you’re going to cast the right people, but you’re not always sure.
They’re very experienced, but did they have to learn any new skills to play these cowboys?
Ethan, he told me that he has made seven Westerns, and Pedro Pascal knew how to ride a horse. But you always have surprises. An interesting thing that we discovered when they were here, even though they were so proficient at riding horses already, is that, in Spain, you mount the horse from the opposite side than you do in the US. I was amazed because I cannot believe that. I thought that it was universal. So they had to learn how to mount the horse from the correct Spanish side because they were Spanish horses. But they succeeded, and they did very well.
Rebecca Ford
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