HAVING cleared up at the Goyas and narrowly missed two Oscars, cult director Pedro Almodóvar is on a roll – already the most international of Spain's home-grown filmmakers, he is seeking to become even more global by launching his next two projects in English.
“What I'd really like to do is make a short film, of about 15 minutes, and not part of a series,” the acclaimed director said this week.
La Voz Humana ('The Human Voice') is based upon Jean Cocteau's 1928 story and, although Almodóvar has written the script in Spanish, he is planning to have it translated into English.
It will feature just one character – a woman talking to her lover for the last time on the telephone, her only companion being her dog.
British-Australian actress Tilda Swinton, 59 – a schoolmate of the late Lady Diana Spencer, a Cambridge graduate and great-great-granddaughter of Scottish botanist John Hutton Balfour – plays the lead rôle.
“She's exactly as I imagined her,” enthuses the director.
“Open, intelligent – we understood each other, and very closely.”
Tilda, whose German-New Zealander husband is the acclaimed Highland artist Sandro Kopp, has played the lead part in Sally Potter's film adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, and starred in The Beach, with Leonardo di Caprio, Vanilla Sky with Penélope Cruz and Tom Cruise, and three of the films in the Chronicles of Narnia series, among others.
The mum-of-two has won an Academy Award, two BAFTAs, a Critics' Choice Award, a European Film, an Independen,at Spirit, two Saturn, a whopping 20 Critic, and a Best Supporting Actress Oscar Award.
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