"Streets are longer at night than by day."

A spot of glamour today: Pedro Almodóvar’s press conference for Volver at the Casa de América, featuring plenty of bouncy, well-shampooed hair. There’s a marketing trick nowadays which means press conferences are given for films that haven't even started shooting yet (this one does on 18th July). Sometimes, as when the director is a complete unknown - not the case today - this is just embarrassing. The aim, presumably, is to flood the media (PdS Blog, for example) with your name and kill the last shred of any spontaneous interaction between movie and viewer – I’m pretty sure I’ll have “seen” Volver, in the sense that I’ll know pretty much everything there is to know about it, before I see it. In this case, not even all the actors in the film have been decided yet. Foreign journos had been flown in, but there wasn't much in the way of news. PA, flanked by Penélope Cruz and Carmen Maura (with whom he famously fell out 17 years ago, and the Spanish media are desperately trying to get mileage out of the fact that they’re working again) gave good value, talking for one and a half hours about the new film, which sounds part nostalgia trip, part study of death, part homage to his mother and part homage to the Castilian village of his birth (his rural provenance becomes increasingly apparent in his features the older he gets). Carefully he did not give too much away about the film, but I suspect that he’s such a chatterbox he actually has given everything away and is just telling us he hasn’t. When asked what the film was about, he said it was hard to say, because he hasn’t made it yet. He winsomely confessed that he usually adjusts his comments about the subject-matter of his films to conform, after the fact, to the film he’s made. In other words, he doesn't know what he's done till he's done it. This may be true of much wonderful art, but, if it's true (it provoked Round of Applause No. 1), then it might explain why his films feel (to me at least) to have a hollow center. They can feel disparate and unfocussed. Round of Applause No. 2 came, predictably, when he mentioned today’s ruling to legalize gay marriage in Spain.

Anyway, some PA gems from the conference. This kind of stuff means the guy has the Spanish press wrapped round his little finger.

Q: “Could you tell us about the role in men in your new film?” A: “To be brief, there aren’t any.”
“Society is always one step ahead of politics.”
“I have to make films in order to survive.”
“I don’t want to be a symbol. Being a symbol ties you down.”
“I don’t like being called a “gay director”. It’s like calling George Bush a “heterosexual president”.” (Round of Applause No.3.)