It’s been a year of firsts for Pedro Almodóvar. Spain’s greatest ever filmmaker, the man behind All About My Mother and the Oscar-winning Talk To Her, has finally made his first movie in English. That film, The Room Next Door, won him Venice’s Golden Lion, remarkably his first top prize at a major festival. Adapted from Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, it tells the story of Martha (Tilda Swinton), a New Yorker dying of cancer who implores her friend Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to be with her when she takes her own life. 

This is your first ever feature in English. Why now? Many times I refused to work in English with a project in Hollywood. But here, put simply, the characters’ lives are in New York, and they are American, and they talk English. I always thought to do it on my own terms. I mean, I made 22 movies before this one, and the way that my company produced my movies is very different. We make them in an artisan way, but it’s the opposite to the way of working in Hollywood.

Is this film a way for you to reckon with mortality and death? Yes, because I feel myself very immature in this sense, because I cannot understand it. Every day, there are multiple demonstrations of death everywhere. I mean, we are living in an awful world at this moment. But for me, as Julianne said at the beginning of the movie, I find it unnatural that something would be alive one moment and gone the next.

Can you talk about the subject of euthanasia. What fascinated you about that?  For me, it’s quite basic. I think it’s a fundamental right, and I don’t think that everybody, obviously, around the world, has access to this, as we do in Spain. And I think this is a debate that needs to be ongoing. So, I do think it’s ultimately a question about humanity, right? And even though politics needs to intervene in order to make this possible, I do think that people should be the owners of their own lives, even when it comes to having to decide that it’s time to end one’s life if that life has become unbearable due to pain, for example.

Is this one of your most painful films for viewers to watch? Yeah, I do hope that spectators are not suffering too much while they’re watching it. But in effect, the film is about pain, and how a particular character reacts towards her own pain, in this case cancer.

You’ve worked with Tilda Swinton before on the short film The Human Voice, but not Julianne Moore. Why did you choose her for this? First of all, because she’s a very good actress. And also she has a sense of humour although we don’t use it here; but she has it, and that is important, just to talk with her and to direct her. Also, I admire her a lot in many movies. Tilda is so flamboyant in a way, even if she’s so skinny like she is here. Tilda seems to belong to a different human species. Julianne, by contrast to Tilda, is very earthy, and she has to confront Tilda’s bravery, and so she’s not quite timid, but perhaps fearful. In the film, she’s terribly scared of death, does not want to accept that, and I felt that Julianne’s physical presence was a good counterpoint to Tilda’s presence.

You won the Golden Lion with this film. Did you find it a little bit ironic that after 23 movies, you had to make one in English to win a top festival prize? It is, in fact, a curious coincidence. And in fact, it also happened to Buñuel in 1968 with Belle de Jour, which was in French. And that’s really just how it is. But as I said in my acceptance speech, ultimately the spirit is still Spanish.

Do you still have the same interest in movies or books as you ever had? I used to go to the theatre to see movies at least once or twice a week. Now, there are not so many wonderful movies to see, or at least movies that I like. But I read voraciously. There is a part that disappears with age: the physical part. Of course, I don’t feel physically as strong as I did in the 80s; I mean, I could be out the whole night partying and after that I’d go shoot a movie. Now I decide to write and to keep on shooting. But there are still quite a lot of sources of pleasure in my life.
The Room Next Door is in cinemas now.