Pedro Almodovar is not lost in translation

Working in English and directing Hollywood stars can be difficult for European directors. But the Spanish director's The Room Next Door is an exception

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NEW YORK - When Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door won the Golden Lion for best film at 2024's Venice Film Festival, it was the first time that the Spanish director had garnered the top prize at one of Europe's major film festivals.

What made this victory even more impressive and unusual was that The Room Next Door—a drama about female friendship starring American actress Julianne Moore and British actress Tilda Swinton—was Almodóvar's first full-length film in English.

For a leading auteur of contemporary cinema, and one whose work is so intertwined with the textures of his native tongue, Almodóvar's late-career shift to English-language filmmaking feels daring.

If the film's reception at Venice is any indication, it appears that the gamble has paid off and he has succeeded where many others have failed.

Almodóvar, 75, is only the latest in a long line of European directors to make the leap to English-language filmmaking. The history of such transitions is uneven, and ranges from the Golden Age of Hollywood classics of Austrian-born Billy Wilder to infamous missteps by Sweden's Ingmar Bergman and France's François Truffaut.

Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczó said that working in English and directing Hollywood stars present European directors with a unique set of hurdles.

“It was a huge challenge to understand the cultural differences and not to create something which is symbolically, say, sinking into the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, recalling in a recent telephone interview the making of his English-language debut, Pieces Of A Woman (2020).

“There are so many movies like that,” added Mundruczó, who finished shooting At The Sea, his new film starring American actress Amy Adams, in Boston in August.