The storylines in Pedro Almodóvar’s movies can be wild and unpredictable, but his movies share some common traits: They are beautifully composed with a vibrant and lush color palette; they explore human relations in the most intimate terms; and they often feature the same actors, most notably Penélope Cruz, who has paired with the director eight times, including the Oscar-winning “All About My Mother” and “Volver,” for which Cruz was nominated for an Oscar.

Cruz had a smaller role in 2019’s “Pain and Glory,” which starred Antonio Banderas, another longtime member of Almodóvar’s film family, but she is center stage in his new film “Parallel Mothers” (which also features regulars Rossy de Palma and Julietta Serrano). 

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The film tells the story of two women, Janis (Cruz) and Ana (newcomer Milena Smit) who meet and bond at the hospital just before they both give birth as single mothers. But their story—which examines how burying secrets can cause grievous harm—is also framed by Almodóvar’s most overt foray into political filmmaking: “Parallel Mothers” opens and closes with a subplot about the lasting trauma in Spain caused by the government’s unwillingness to reckon with its past – specifically in the form of mass graves of those killed during the years under dictator Francisco Franco. 

At the New York Film Festival earlier this year, Almodóvar sat down to discuss writing for and working with Cruz and why he felt the political storyline was essential to the film. Although he conducts interviews with a translator, the affable Almodóvar often switches from Spanish to English himself, sometimes mid-answer. This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

Q. Did you write this with Penélope Cruz in mind and did she know about it?

I talked to Penélope at the beginning, but I didn’t like the first draft. When something is wrong, I prefer to leave it. I always have more than one story I am working on.

A lot of years passed and sometimes she would ask, “What is happening with this idea? Are you writing it?”

Then when confinement started last year, I came back to the first draft. With the distance of time, it was very clear which part I had hated and what I had to change, which was the family of Ana. So during the three months when I was completely isolated at home, I concentrated on it and finished the script. In the middle of that, Penélope called me to talk about something else and when she asked what I was working on I told her, “I am again writing this movie.” And she was surprised.

Q. How does Penélope’s personality and talent shape the way you approach writing a character or does she adjust to what you write, especially in this movie when, as you’ve said, the character Janis is much more emotionally restrained than she is?

What concerned me was this fight Penélope would have between her own personality and way of acting and this character, who was hiding something so important. I know how Penélope lives and as an actress she needs to feel what she’s doing—but she has technique and she’s very experienced. So I preferred to trust she’s very good actress.

I explained to her that I was conscious of how this would be a problem for her, but that I trusted her. She gave me all the time I need to rehearse. But at the beginning of rehearsal both she and Milena were the opposite of what I wanted — they were both so moved by the story they were crying all the time. At the end of a sequence, they would embrace each other. They needed to work very hard to dry their tears. 

Q. In addition to Penélope, you’ve brought back longtime favorites like Rossy de Palma and Julieta Serrano. How important is it for you to have this sort of repertory troupe of women you can rely on?

It’s almost like having made an investment, an investment of time and energy, and this is a way of getting those returns. [Laughs] They all belong to my artistic family and it’s wonderful to share work with someone in your family—there are a lot of things, including promotion where you are together besides making the movie. I can work with an actor with whom I don’t have chemistry personally, but it’s always better if it’s an actor with whom you are good friends. 

Q. But you also seem thrilled to have discovered Milena Smit. 

I love to find someone new. She auditioned and the casting directors showed me and they were going to keep going but I said, “No, she is my first choice, the one that I want.”

I couldn’t expect someone who has the same technique as Penélope – she is too young, it’s only her second movie – but I could see she has something and I was struck by the truthfulness and authenticity in how she looked and behaved. The other thing you don’t know until you have a camera is that the camera adores her and any little gesture registers on the camera. A camera is almost a diabolical being – it can bring that out of some actors and some, not meaning that they’re bad actors, it just rejects. It’s a photogenic quality or something about their personality that just registers. And she has it.

It’s wonderful when you see something great happen on the camera and you are the first witness to that. It’s a kind of joy that is very difficult to explain but I had that feeling with Milena all the time. She’s the big revelation in the movie. 

Hopefully, we’ll work together again. 

Q. You’ve noted that Janis is a woman who can be inflexible when she makes decisions and that she pays a high price for that. Are you trying to show why you need to be open about the past and your mistakes?

When she tells Arturo she’s pregnant, she doesn’t give him any room to protest or decide if he wants to do something different. And by not asking for help, she takes on this huge responsibility to be a single mother alone.

Later, with Ana, before she comes forward with the truth, she is suffering through anxiety-ridden moments, suffering from a guilt complex that can eat away at you. 

Q. After the first draft, you cut out much of the political storyline yet it still frames the movie and parallels the personal themes of the main story. It’s much more overtly political than most of your films, Why was that important to you?

Talking about the mass graves was a big reason for me to make the movie, to talk about identity and how the families have suffered for 85 years. It is such a big issue.

Many people in Spain really feel this to be a human right that has to be resolved, the people are owed a debt by Spain. But Spain is a very divided country and there’s a right-wing still very much opposed to uncovering the past. 

People like myself on the left really do reproach the left-wing for not taking care of this sooner. It is true that democracy was very fragile during the transition after Franco but the left won three different majorities and they should have done something earlier. It was only in July they tried creating a new law, Democratic Memory Act; the excavations of mass graves that have been taken care of by private interests will now have to be done by the government. [The law has not yet been passed.] The right-wing is threatening that if they regain power they will revoke the law. 

Despite the fact that we used special effects for the skeletons, the moment we started digging, it felt like a documentary and like we were really were about to discover the corpses of people who had been buried there for 80 years. It was very moving.

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