Criterion just published a nice conversation between New York Film Festival director Kent Jones and Wes Anderson.
The topic is Pedro Almodóvar, who just got a few new releases in Criterion. I leave you some quotes by Wes Anderson in it. You can read it completely here, for example to find out what Almodovar film is Wes Anderson’s favorite.
But Almodo?var, I think he picks up the thread from Bun?uel. You certainly register that he comes from the same place. There’s a sensibility and a surrealism in Almodo?var, a different kind, there are things that link them. They both make movies where there’s great drama but that are always still funny. There’s a kind of sexual strangeness and peculiarity and violence that’s usually funny.
Noah [Baumbach] and I had a rape joke in The Life Aquatic [with Steve Zissou] that’s not in the movie. There’s a thing where— there’s the topless script girl, Anne-Marie Sakowitz, played by Robyn Cohen, and they’re tied up by pirates and blindfolded, and Bill Murray says, “How you holding up over there, Anne-Marie?” and she says, “Not that great, Steve.” It used to be, “Not that great, Steve. I’ve been raped.” That was the gag, and we cut it out, and I expect it wouldn’t’ve left them rolling in the aisles.
Remember how they did The Godfather for TV? They cut both films together and put it all in chronological order? I think the Almodo?var movies could be treated in that way. They could be intercut as a great saga.
But maybe unlike Chabrol, Almodo?var mainly writes about people for whom he has tremendous sympathy.