Nobody, least of all the director himself, is going to look back on the work of Pedro Almodóvar and think, man, it’s too bad he didn’t make more movies in Hollywood. Since the 1970s, Almodóvar has crafted his unique brand of cinema and served as an important entry point into Spanish cinema for many generations of moviegoers. In fact, he’s reached the point in his career where any new film doubles as a retrospective, which is how Almodóvar came to discuss the one Hollywood feature he might’ve directed with Vulture critic Bilge Ebiri.
READ MORE: Watch the First Trailer for Pedro Almodóvar’s Very Personal “Pain & Glory”
After a long conversation about his current release (“Pain & Glory“), his previous work, and his relationship with performers, Ebiri and Almodóvar discussed the director’s hesitance to work in America. In conversations with Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader, Almodóvar claimed to have gotten a sense of the compromises he would need to make to work within the studio system. This made it clear to the director that he was not meant to be a Hollywood filmmaker. “There are way too many voices that have opinions in the process,” the director said, “and I don’t think I could work that way.”
If there is one American project that got away, it was “Brokeback Mountain.” “The only one that I was tempted to actually take was ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ which the screenwriter Larry McMurtry offered to me to direct,” Almodóvar explained. “I knew the story by E. Annie Proulx, and I was fascinated by the project.” Despite this, Almodóvar dragged his heels on accepting the projecting, considering the offer for “two or three months” before the studio decided to give the project to Ang Lee.
READ MORE: Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘Pain and Glory’ Is a Beautiful Celebration of Filmmaking
The director went on to praise the final version, noting that he loved the two performances and that it was “much better” that Lee directed the film. But if he had taken on the project, Almodóvar noted that he would’ve pushed the physical boundaries of the movie considerably farther. “My vision of that short tale was much more physical than it was in the movie,” he told Ebiri. “That’s what it’s about in the story — there’s something very animalistic about their love, they’re searching for warmth in each other, and it has that twist to it. I was sure that I couldn’t do it as physical as I wanted to.”
Any working filmmaker with Almodóvar’s body of work is going to have a few misses – a few meetings that didn’t result in a contract or a few conversations that never quite came to fruition – but it’s interesting to hear a director of this caliber both express appreciation for a film and discuss how it might’ve fit better into his own oeuvre. There’s no doubt that Almodóvar would’ve made a very different version of “Brokeback Mountain” than the one we saw onscreen. Sometimes, though, it’s just fun to wonder.