Pedro Almodóvar is one of Spain’s most celebrated filmmakers, known for his bold visual language and emotionally charged storytelling. He rose to prominence in the 1980s during Madrid’s post-dictatorship cultural movement, gaining international recognition with films such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, All About My Mother and Talk to Her. His work is defined by a vivid use of colour, carefully composed interiors and complex, often female-led narratives. Over the course of his career, he has received numerous accolades, including Academy Awards, BAFTAs and major prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. Beyond cinema, Almodóvar maintains a strong connection to design and visual culture, frequently collaborating with artists and set designers to create the distinctive, highly curated worlds that characterise his films.
“Pedro doesn’t see colour the way others do. Where he sees grey, I see blue,” says Antxón Gómez, his long-time production designer, highlighting his admiration for Pedro Almodóvar’s singular way of observing and interpreting the world. Gómez is the architect behind many of his distinctive visual universes, from the stylised airplane in Los amantes pasajeros to the surreal, dreamlike sequences linked to Hable con ella.
For this shoot for AD Spain, however, roles are reversed. Gómez steps behind the lens, observing, while Almodóvar follows direction, positioning himself within a semicircle of black stones reminiscent of the volcanic landscape of Lanzarote, where scenes from his latest film, Bitter Christmas, set for release on 20 March, were filmed.
A summer in Segovia
The set is framed by one of his signature tones, a muted, ashy blue that recalls a leaden sky, heavy with the sense that something is about to unfold. “He comes from Technicolor,” explains Carlota Casado, his set decorator, who is also present on the shoot. “As a child in the 1960s, he learned that emotions resonate through saturated primary colours. That’s part of his magic.”
Casado has worked alongside Pedro Almodóvar since 2009, when she joined the set of Los abrazos rotos. “I had just turned 18 and was studying journalism,” she recalls. “That summer, while everyone else was on holiday, I found myself on a set in Barajas. I ended up in the art department, which I didn’t even know existed at the time.” At the end of each day, she would linger quietly, watching Almodóvar at work. “I still remember our first conversation. We were filming in Segovia, in Los Ángeles de San Rafael, and he asked me where the bathroom was. I was so nervous I couldn’t even answer.”
The girl with the fabrics
Carlota Casado quickly earned the nickname “the fabric girl.” “I was always approaching him with stacks of fabric catalogues,” she recalls. “He’s obsessed with colour, just like I am.” She remembers one anecdote that perfectly captures Pedro Almodóvar’s exacting standards. “During the filming of Los amantes pasajeros, he selected a specific shade to upholster the airplane seats, but it had been discontinued. We showed him several nearly identical alternatives, hoping he wouldn’t notice, so we wouldn’t have to tell him there was no stock.”
He noticed immediately. “He looked at me and said, ‘It’s none of the ones I chose.’ And he was right.” Determined to find the original, Casado tracked down the Italian manufacturer, who ultimately reproduced the fabric for the film. The story reflects not only his precision, but also the value designers place on being part of his cinematic world. “Even Miuccia Prada recreated her 1997 collection for Julieta, because that’s when the film is set, even though we shot it in 2015,” Casado adds.
Using an Alessi juicer as a crown
Meanwhile, Pedro Almodóvar plays in front of the camera with a selection of objects drawn from his own filmography, including the Pantone mugs seen in The Next Room and the Juicy Salif juicer, designed by Philippe Starck for Alessi, which appeared in The Skin I Live In. “I have this one at home,” he jokes. “You can use it as a massager or even wear it like a strange crown.”
Behind him hangs a painting he brought to the shoot, a replica of Studio Window IV (Hot Winter Sun) by Asher Liftin. “It’s incredibly photogenic,” he remarks, pausing to admire it. “He recently bought the original in the US, and we resized it for Raúl’s house,” explains Antxón Gómez, referring to the character played by Leonardo Sbaraglia in Bitter Christmas. “It depicts a window rendered in a pointillist technique, and in the film we placed it against a grey concrete wall, almost as if it were opening onto an impossible space.”
The works that remain and those that got away
Carlota Casado studies the composition and reflects on when her working relationship with Pedro Almodóvar became more personal. “We grew closer during Dolor y gloria, because I was constantly going to his home. It felt like stepping into his life,” she recalls. “I would go to measure a sofa, borrow a cushion, move a piece of furniture.”
His apartment, she explains, is finished in albero, a tone he particularly loves and often returns to in his films. “It’s an emotional colour, very Spanish, like the sand of bullrings.” As she speaks, she looks at the painting, almost instinctively placing it within the filmmaker’s private collection, which she knows in detail. “I know the dimensions of all his artworks,” she adds, “because we often have to recreate them, as we did here with Asher Liftin.”
For Dolor y gloria, some pieces had to be reproduced from memory. “There were works we couldn’t locate, like Santa Casilda by Sigfrido Martín Begué, or one he had always wanted but never acquired, El racimo de uvas by Maruja Mallo,” she says.
Gio Ponti is always a good choice
At one point, Pedro Almodóvar lifts a Superleggera chair by Gio Ponti, prompting a smile from Antxón Gómez. “Look at him, he’s holding it just like the boy in the 1957 campaign, when the chair was first introduced,” he says. Almodóvar owns several of them, and they also feature in his latest film. “He never says no to Gio Ponti,” Gómez adds.
To understand how Gómez came to master Almodóvar’s visual language, it helps to look back some 30 years. By then, he was already a recognised figure in the industry. In the 1970s, he spent a month in prison in Valladolid for possessing communist fanzines, before moving to Donosti and later settling in Barcelona. After completing his studies in advertising, he opened ZigZag, Barcelona’s first design-led bar, which earned a FAD Award in 1980. He later went on to create the Otto Zutz nightclub, a landmark venue that remains active today.
In 1982, Antxón Gómez made his film debut alongside Manuel Iborra in Tres por cuatro. A decade later, Bigas Luna invited him to work on a Freixenet commercial starring Sharon Stone and Antonio Banderas, for which he recreated the interiors of the Queen Mary.
Three years later, he received a call from El Deseo to join Carne trémula, marking the beginning of his collaboration with Pedro Almodóvar. “I came from the world of design, and that’s what I brought with me,” he explains. While Almodóvar had already incorporated iconic pieces into his films, from Wassily chairs to the Gira lamp by Mariano Ferrer in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, or the Carlton bookcase by Ettore Sottsass in Tacones lejanos, it was at that moment that design became more consciously embedded in his cinematic language. “The first thing I showed him was the apartment of Francesca Neri’s character, the daughter of a diplomat,” Gómez recalls. “He walked in, looked around and simply said, ‘Not bad.’”
Tailor-made pieces and a shared language
They quickly realised they shared the same visual language, moving through interiors furnished with pieces by Jaume Tresserra and lighting by Leuchten. At times, however, the demands of the script required entirely bespoke creations. “With Carne trémula, we began working with a workshop in Crevillente, in Alicante, that produced custom carpets for us,” Gómez explains. “One of them featured a colourful spiral, the one Javier Bardem falls onto after the shooting scene. The same artisans later created the oversized piece for The Skin I Live In, as well as two carpets that appear in Bitter Christmas.”
Beyond objects, Gómez also played a key role in sourcing locations that would shape the atmosphere of Pedro Almodóvar’s films. He helped find the modernist apartments in Barcelona for Todo sobre mi madre, the more traditional, stately homes in Hable con ella, and the trencadís-covered facades in Valencia for La mala educación. When such spaces could not be found, often because they existed only in Almodóvar’s imagination, they were built from scratch. Hydraulic tile floors, ornate mouldings and custom-made furniture upholstered in Dedar fabrics were combined with carefully selected design pieces, from special editions of sofas by Carlo Scarpa for Cassina to classic designs by Florence Knoll.
Using colour as dialogue
Tables by Gae Aulenti, her iconic Pipistrello lamps, Tolomeo desk lights, Sargadelos tableware and Smeg appliances all form part of a visual vocabulary that recurs throughout Pedro Almodóvar’s films. These objects often reappear from one project to another, yet always transformed, whether through colour, scale or narrative significance, much like his characters.
“In All About My Mother, we fragmented colour through Nolla mosaic floors and walls covered in vintage wallpapers from my own collection,” Gómez explains. “For Bitter Christmas, he asked me for some of those papers again, but I told him it no longer made sense. His characters now move better against monochromatic backgrounds.” It returns, inevitably, to colour. To that distinctive blue he perceives as grey, a tone that carries subliminal tension, suggesting that something is always on the verge of unfolding.
Article originally published in issue 214 of AD Spain.
