Locations
‘Talk to her’’s crew arrived at Lucena just a few hours after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York, on 11 September 2001. The shooting in the Nuestra Señora de Araceli chapel took place on day 12 with an entire crew totally shocked by the news, along with Pedro Almodóvar almost voiceless and terribly saddened by the second anniversary of his mother’s death, which was also on that day.
‘Talk to her’ was not the film selected by the Spanish Film Academy (AACCE) to represent Spain at the Oscars of that year (it preferred ‘Mondays in the Sun’). However, Almodóvar’s movie gained two nominations for the coveted Best Director and Best Original Screenplay awards, the latter of which he won; thus, it can be said that a part of that Oscar went to Córdoba and Andalucía.
The quietness that usually reigns in Huerta La Cansina was altered by the arrival of seven trailers and an 80-people crew for the shooting of ‘Julieta’, which went on for four days. However, the experience was so positive that the dining area of this rural accommodation was subsequently named Almodo-Bar. The film maker from La Mancha wrote on the guest book of the country house: “At La Cansina I have been very happy. [It is] a place I adore”.
The sequence from ‘Julieta’ in which Julieta arrives at the town to introduce her daughter to her parents was shot at Plaza de San Pedro in Sanlúcar la Mayor and for the sake of it, the production company visited each and every home to explain to the neighbours how it was going to be shot and asked them not to hang clothes on the balconies and not to come in or out. The inhabitants of Sanlúcar cooperated the whole time.
In ‘La ley del deseo’, there are several references to the work of the painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). One of them in one of its most mythical and, at the same time, most dramatic scenes: when Juan (Micky Molina) dies at the hands of Antonio (Antonio Banderas). The lighthouse appearing in the background, to which they went in the middle of the night, is the Trafalgar Lighthouse, in Barbate.
Andalusia has made its modest way in Pedro Almodóvar’s particular cinematographic world. Indeed, three films from three very different stages in the career of the film maker from La Mancha were partly shot in Andalusia. Some scenes of the personal, daring (for that time) and committed ‘Law of Desire’ (1987) were shot in the province of Cádiz. Part of the motion picture that won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, ‘Talk to Her’ (2002), takes place in the province of Córdoba, and the latest production of the multi-award-wining director, ‘Julieta’ (2016), found the Sevillian region of Los Alcores the ideal place to locate the lead’s family estate.
“Andalusia has a unique light and a fantastic weather, and its people are great, always willing to cooperate. They open their homes to you”
