The director and actor have finally achieved ‘a far-fetched dream’ by working together on his first film in English, The Human Voice. They talk about their mutual admiration, filming in lockdown – and how falling in love can destroy your sense of humour
For more than 30 years, the film-maker Pedro Almodóvar has had a voice in his head – The Human Voice, that is. In Jean Cocteau’s monologue, first performed in 1930, a woman goes to pieces during a telephone conversation with her soon-to-be-ex lover. The audience hears only one side of the exchange, lending her the upper hand in the drama at the precise moment she has been robbed of everything else.
Almodóvar has now adapted Cocteau’s piece into a typically plush half-hour short starring Tilda Swinton as the injured party, though this isn’t his first brush with the material. A performance of the play is glimpsed in his seamy 1987 masterpiece The Law of Desire, while it was also the inspiration for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, the 1988 screwball comedy that gave him his first international hit.
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