LEGENDARY Spanish film director Pedro Almodovar will direct his first full-length English-language film starring British actress Tilda Swinton and American actress Julianne Moore.
The Room Next Door will star Swinton and Moore in respective roles as a war reporter with a tense relationship with her daughter, and an autofiction writer who finds herself between the two womens’ mutual resentment.
No release date has been announced and filming will begin in Madrid and New York City this spring, Variety has reported.
The film will also star American actor John Turturro in an unspecified role, known for his lead in the Coen brothers cult classic “Barton Fink.”
Almodovar’s production company, El Deseo, announced the film in a social media statement on Thursday.
The Spanish icon, known for his long filmography, began his career during the cultural renaissance that followed the fall of the Franco regime in the 1980s.
He broke into the international film scene with 1988’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Subsequent films like 1999’s All About My Mother and 2002’s Talk to Her have earned the director further accolades, including an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for the latter.
His career has been marked by consistent collaborations with Spanish film stars Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, as well as a trademark style known for melodramatic plots, dry humour, overt sexuality and lively colour palettes.
Though The Room Next Door will be Almodovar’s first feature-length English-language film, the director has previous experience working in English with his short films The Human Voice, and Strange Way of Life.
The Human Voice, released in 2020, stars Swinton as a woman waiting listlessly for her ex-lover to retrieve a forgotten suitcase.
Almodovar’s most recent feature-length film, 2021’s BAFTA-nominated Parallel Mothers, stars Penelope Cruz and tells the story of two mothers who meet in a hospital ward, one of whom is involved in the search for the bodies of those murdered by Franco during the Spanish Civil War.
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