VENICE • The world has had spaghetti Westerns – and now it must brace itself for a paella Western.
Legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodovar said on Thursday that he is working on a Western, in a surprising career turn for the master of female-friendly melodrama, who made his name with Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988).
The Oscar winner told reporters at the Venice film festival that he has written the cowboy flick, but that it was "a different kind of Western, which will be very colourful… very theatrical".
Spaghetti Westerns made by Italian directors such as the late Sergio Leone became a phenomenon in the 1960s, with many shot in Spain's dry south-eastern Almeria region.
Almodovar premiered his latest film, The Human Voice, at Venice on Thursday, with British actress Tilda Swinton in the lead as a desperate, vengeful woman waiting for her estranged lover to call her.
Filmed last month, the 30-minute film is Almodovar's first to be shot in English and is loosely adapted from French playwright Jean Cocteau's classic play of the same name.
The director, 70, admitted that the play and its theme of the jilted lover waiting on a "call that will never come" was close to his heart.
"It happened to me," he told a press conference, adding that characters hanging on a telephone call was a thread that ran through much of his work.
Almodovar, once famous for his visual and emotional flamboyance, also claimed he has started moving in a more austere direction since his 2016 film Julieta. "I am working towards a leaner narrative with fRead More – Source
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