Production
After making Labyrinth of Passion Almodóvar was approached by Hervé Hachuel, a multimillionaire who wanted to start a production company to make films starring his then girlfriend Cristina Sánchez Pascual. He set up Tesauro Production and asked Almodóvar to write a film with her in mind. The idea behind the commission became the concept for the style of the film. Almodóvar explains: I came up with the story of a girl who drives both men and women wild, a girl who sings, drinks, takes drugs, occasionally goes through periods of abstinence and has the extraordinary experiences one would never have were one live a hundred years...while writing I had in mind Marlene Dietrich’s work with Josef von Sternberg, especially Blonde Venus (1932), where she plays a house wife who becomes a singer, spy and prostitute, who travels the world living a life of never ending adventure. This was the film Almodóvar intended to make, but Cristina Sánchez Pascual had limited acting skills, because of this, Almodóvar rewrote the film giving a more prominent role to the nuns of the convent where the singer hides.
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Famous quotes containing the word production:
“I really know nothing more criminal, more mean, and more ridiculous than lying. It is the production either of malice, cowardice, or vanity; and generally misses of its aim in every one of these views; for lies are always detected, sooner or later.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)