Pedro Almodóvar’s Answer to ‘Brokeback Mountain’

The gunslinger in inexperienced locks eyes with the sheriff.

“Don’t look at me like that,” says the sheriff, squinting.

“How do you want me to look at you?” replies the gunslinger, flirting.

It wouldn’t be a western with out a fraught standoff, however when Pedro Almodóvar is behind the digicam, the glances are much more loaded than the pistols. In “Strange Way of Life,” a brand new brief movie that may premiere on the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal star as a lawman and a cowboy who reunite 25 years after having a passionate affair. But will their previous magic be rekindled, or are each males concealing ulterior motives for the assembly?

In some ways, the undertaking is a swerve for Almodóvar: The 73-year-old auteur, sometimes recognized for Spanish-language films about trendy girls dwelling in stunning flats, has solid two English-speaking actors in a brief that’s set within the dusty Wild West. But Almodóvar, who was courted 20 years in the past to direct the homosexual western “Brokeback Mountain” and turned it down, sees his new undertaking on a continuum with that 2005 movie, which was in the end directed by Ang Lee, who went on to win greatest director.

“In ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Jake Gyllenhaal’s character says to Heath Ledger’s character that they should go away and work on a ranch,” Almodóvar stated on a video name. “Heath says, ‘What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?’ In many ways, I feel my film gives answer to that.”

Almodóvar wrote just a few pages of the centerpiece scene three years in the past, then put it out of his thoughts. “Sometimes I just write for the pleasure of writing,” he stated. “I didn’t have any purpose for it.” But inspiration struck when Anthony Vaccarello, the artistic director of the style label Saint Laurent, talked about that he had simply produced a brief movie for Gaspar Noé. Almodóvar remembered the sequence with the 2 pistoleros, added a scene-setting prologue and a guns-out aftermath, and provided Vaccarrello the screenplay for the 31-minute “Strange Way of Life.”

“Of course, it could have become a feature-length film,” he stated. “But I do think it was the perfect duration for the story I want to tell.” And after making the brief movie “The Human Voice” in 2020 with Tilda Swinton, Almodóvar hoped to proceed casting English-speaking stars. “I never wanted to do it in Spanish,” Almodóvar stated. “Even though we have our own western type, the spaghetti western, I wanted to make it a classic western.”

Almodóvar quickly reached out to Pascal, whose star was starting to rise with the collection “The Mandalorian” and “The Last of Us.” The 48-year-old actor was wanting to signal on; he had watched his first Almodóvar movie, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), along with his household as a younger teenager.

“I remember it feeling like going to a new amusement park,” Pascal stated in an e mail. “An entire world of color and play and a kind of naughty rebelión was introduced to my experience.”

His co-star was simply as gung-ho. “I felt really honored to be an American actor that was getting to work with him,” Hawke stated by telephone. “A lot of times when you’re making mainstream American movies, there’s this third entity in the room, which is you want the movie to sell — you just feel it from people behind the monitor. And what’s so wonderful about working with Almodóvar is that you feel there is nobody you need to make happy but Pedro Almodóvar.”

The brief went into manufacturing final summer season in Almería, Spain, on the out of doors units the place Sergio Leone as soon as shot his traditional 1964-66 trilogy of spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood. “The passing of time, 50 years of it, had given authenticity to the place,” Almodóvar stated. And along with producing the undertaking, Vaccarello doubled as its costume designer, a vital put up on an Almodóvar movie.

“There’s some administrators I’ve labored with who’re great administrators, however they’re simply not that thinking about costume — it’s simply, ‘Yeah, whatever you want to wear is fine,” Hawke said. “Whereas Almodóvar would spend weeks deciding what shade of green the wall is behind you or what color gray your jacket is and what fabric it’s made out of.”

Though Almodóvar’s movies are additionally notable for what occurs when these garments come off, “Strange Way of Life” is surprisingly discreet, fading to black when Hawke and Pascal transfer in for an embrace.

“The sexual tension in my film happens around the gazes, so from the very beginning, I decided I wasn’t going to show the entirety of the sexual scene,” Almodóvar stated. “They’re way more naked in the conversation they have after.”

It’s that dialog that made Almodóvar need to shoot the movie within the first place: After making “Pain and Glory” (2019), which starred Antonio Banderas as a thinly veiled model of his director, Almodóvar has discovered himself more and more drawn to tales about middle-aged homosexual males wanting again at their lives.

“I do think this is partly a reflection of my own age, that I’ve decided to tell stories about older men,” Almodóvar stated. “If I had written these stories when I was 25 years old, I probably would have written a story about two 25-year-old cowboys.”

The shoot wasn’t simple, Hawke admitted: The manufacturing needed to battle a report warmth wave over 15 days within the desert, “and it’s very difficult to think about nuanced ideas when all your body wants to do is go to sleep or find some air conditioning,” he stated. But because the undertaking drew to a detailed, he was in a position to step again and take all of it in.

“All of a sudden I wrapped and realized that I was in the desert in Spain on an old Sergio Leone set, and Almodóvar was hugging me, thanking me, and I just thought about how much I love the movies and what a unique challenge this was and how much I keep wanting to hunt these kinds of experiences out,” Hawke stated. “I felt somehow better for having done it, and I don’t know how to say it other than that.”