Artist on artist: Leïla Slimani on the ‘influential’ Pedro Almodóvar
The internationally bestselling author shares her fandom for an auteur whose films have become her lifelong ‘companion’
Leïla Slimani is a writer, journalist and diplomat who became the first Moroccan woman to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, for her 2016 novel Chanson douce (Lullaby).
Slimani’s other books include Adèle, the non-fiction Sex and Lies, and a trilogy of novels based on her family’s roots in revolutionary Morocco; In the Country of Others, Watch Us Dance and I’ll Take the Fire – the latter of which she joined Sana Goyal to discuss here at the Southbank Centre in June 2026.
The spirit of revolution, of defying social conventions and determining identity evident in Slimani’s trilogy, are also common motifs in the films of Pedro Almodóvar. A Spanish director who began his career during La Movida Madrileña – an early 1980s cultural renaissance that followed the end of Francoist Spain – Almodóvar’s early films characterised the sense of sexual and political freedom of the period.
Having established himself as leading director in Spain, in 1988 Almodovar gained international prominence when his seventh feature film Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) won best screenplay at the Venice film festival, and was shortlisted for an Academy Award.
Notable for their melodrama, their irreverent humour, complex narratives and popular culture references, Almodovar’s films – of which he has directed 24 to date – have gained him critical acclaim and an appreciative audience of fans far beyond Spain, a membership which very much includes Slimani, as she explains.
I was 11 years old when I first encountered Pedro Almodóvar. I was still living in Morocco with my parents, and in the summer we would go to the north, near the Mediterranean. It’s a former Spanish colony so very much influenced by Spanish culture, and my parents bought an illegal copy of Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown). I watched the movie with my mother, my grandmother, my sisters and my aunts, only women, and we were completely fascinated by the film’s characters, because it was us – it was my mother and my grandmother, the same conversation, being very loud, being hysterical and at the same time being beautiful.
I fell immediately in love with Almodóvar because for the first time, I could see on the screen what was really happening in my life. It was not simply a female heroine being glamorous and beautiful and shy and crying. It was something else and something very close to me. I had found someone who understood us, someone who could show our beauty, our craziness, our struggle and our solidarity.
There is something political, and something very liberating in the way he films the female. And I think that had a great impact on me and on how I wanted to portray women in my books – that they don’t have to always be beautiful; they don’t have to always be nice and generous and want to please people; that they can be selfish and violent and want to kill someone; that they can have a certain kind of perversion also. And I love this idea because for me equality is also about that, about having the same flaws, the same fragility; we are not angels. I think it’s very dangerous to want to picture women only as angels.
From the moment I first saw one of his films he became a companion to me. Whenever I heard that there was a new Almodóvar film, I would go and see it. It is like having a conversation with someone you like very much, and waiting for him to say the new things he has to say. I knew from the beginning that he was building something very coherent, and something that would go deeper and deeper.
Each of Almodóvar’s films correspond with a certain moment in my life. And I have very vivid memories of the first time I watched each movie. For example, Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her); I went to see this movie with my boyfriend when I was maybe 19 or 20 years old. And I was so excited, it was the new Almodóvar! I went to the cinema in Paris and we watched the movie, and at the end my boyfriend said to me, ‘okay, I have to talk to you’ – like the title – and he dumped me, right then at the end of the film. He said ‘I don’t want to be with you anymore’. So it’s sad, but ironic, although I can laugh about it now.
‘In Almodóvar I found someone who understood us, someone who could show our beauty, our craziness, our struggle and our solidarity’
When I first watched Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother) I felt like Almodóvar knew me. It was such a sad and melancholic film and I saw it when my father had just died, and I felt like he knew, and he was talking directly to me. I think that’s what’s most special about the artists that you love, this feeling that they are talking to you, that perhaps you’re the only one watching this movie, that you’re the only one understanding it. I have that with Almodóvar. When I’m in the cinema, I feel as if I’m the only one there and there are no other audience members with me. It’s just a conversation between he and I.
In the films of Almodóvar there is no morality, he’s never judging. He deals with very subversive and difficult topics – necrophilia, murder, perversion – and at the same time, while yes, you can feel uncomfortable, it’s never about morality. It’s about something else. And he manages to create a certain irony, a certain distance that helps you understand a character, even if you never agree with that character. For instance, there is a scene in Hable Con Ella (Talk to Her), where a man feels great desire for a woman in a coma. He’s obsessed with this woman, he is a very weird and very uncomfortable character, but at the same time you try to understand him. And I think literature or cinema should always be about this, this idea that for a moment you’re going to suspend your judgment and try to do something else, try to understand and explore a darker side of humanity.
I think that Almodóvar and I are obsessed with the same themes. Desire, the body, family, the relationship between generations, especially the figure of the mother, homosexuality. What Almodóvar did for queer people and queer culture in Spain was very important, and it gave me a lot of strength as an activist for homosexual rights in Morocco.
He showed me another way to defend a cause is to show the beauty and joy that lies within it. And that idea was very important to me. How, through his films, he defends homosexuality, by not showing it as something that always needs to be serious, as a suffering or a ‘problem’, but instead depicting it as something joyful, beautiful, colourful; a whole culture with its own music, its own vision, its own imagination. I love this.
I’m not usually a fan. I’m not someone who will ask for a picture or an autograph, but for Almodóvar I would. For him I could be that person who waits among hundreds of others just to try to touch him or to have a picture with him. And I am a fan because he’s not just an intellectual and a director that I love and worship, he represents something. Particularly for someone like me, coming from a Muslim country where it’s so difficult to talk about certain things, he represents freedom, he represents stillness, the idea that you can talk about everything and not care about how people are going to judge you. But he also represents the fact that you can trust the people you love to understand your work, even if it’s very subversive. And I love this mix of being fearless and subversive, but at the same time being very sentimental. So yes, I’m a fan. I would love to touch him, and I would worship even just a sock of Almodóvar’s.
Since becoming a writer, I’ve had another vision of Almodóvar’s work. A more analytical vision. I began to watch his films with a desire to answer to them, or to be in a dialogue with them. A great aspect of being an artist yourself is the possibility to begin a dialogue with the artists you love, both those who are dead and those who are still alive. I think that’s why I became a writer, because I love writers so much that I wanted to be part of the big conversation they are having with each other. And it’s the same for Almodóvar, my complicity with him is different now, it’s not just a fan and a director, it’s also a writer with another writer.
I think the reason I feel so close to Almodóvar is because he has a very literary way of filming. He has a great interest in literature and has always said that he wanted to be a novelist, but couldn’t, so he became a director. In all of his films the characters are readers, there’s always a scene with a character reading a book, or a prominent bookshelf. And cinema and literature are very close; you can film as a narrator, or as a novelist, and be just as deep in exploring a character in cinema as you can in literature.
As I get older my fandom of Almodóvar evolves, and I understand things that I perhaps didn’t understand at the beginning. Such as that certain melancholy that exists in his movies, especially in Dolor y Glori (Pain and Glory), in which Antonio Banderas plays a very famous and successful movie director, alone in his apartment – he has money, he has success, but he feels very lonely. I think Almodóvar is increasingly writing about being a creator, about what it means to be an artist and to spend your whole life creating and being obsessed by the next book or the next movie? I sometimes think he’s writing films about things I will experience in ten years time. He’s ahead of me and I’m following him as if he has an intuition about my life that I’m not aware of yet. I feel like he’s writing my future.
‘I think literature or cinema should always follow the premise that for a moment you’re going to suspend your judgment and try to do something else, try to understand and explore a darker side of humanity’
Almodóvar has influenced me in many ways, particularly in that you do not have to choose a genre. His movies can be, at the same time, a thriller, a melodrama, a little bit telenovela, a lot of things all at once and I love this freedom that he allows himself. In literature very often people want to put you in a box – this is a thriller, this is a big family saga, etc. – and I hate these boxes. I’ve always tried not to put my books in these boxes. I love the idea that one chapter can be more melodramatic, and another one can be more about suspense, or it can be darker, and that comes from Almodóvar’s influence.
I’ve been inspired by his polyphonic vision of writing. That you can take a situation and look at it through different points of view, so at the end you’re left with the feeling that there is no real truth, that it’s impossible to say this situation is completely black or white, instead everything is grey. And I like this idea of greyness, that means at the end the reader feels uncomfortable and has more questions than answers.
I like that when you watch Almodóvar’s films, he makes you work. There are a lot of ellipses and so you can’t be lazy, you can’t be passive. There are certain enigmas that you have to solve and that’s a part of the pleasure I have watching his movies. And I try to replicate that as a novelist, because I like the idea that the reader has to work; they have to use their imagination, their critical sense, their culture and their references – they have to get involved in the reading. That’s very important to me, and it’s something Almodóvar taught me; that you have to trust your reader and you have to consider that they are intelligent. You don’t need to take them by the hand and explain everything.
I think Almodóvar should be more recognised as a writer. He’s a very good writer; he’s written articles, chronicles and a little book. And he’s also a very good analyst, both of his own work and work of other Cineastes. He’s also an excellent producer and he’s very generous – he’s helped a lot of new figures and new voices to make their place in cinema, and he never talks or brags about it.
I think my favourite of Almodóvar’s films is Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother). And that’s a difficult choice, because I love so many of them, but I consider this a perfect movie. Every scene is essential. Necessary. And there are so many details and the story is so weird and so impossible – to the extent where I can’t imagine how he could’ve gone to a producer and pitched it – but still you believe in everything, and so many of the characters are unforgettable. I recently watched it with my 15-year-old son, and he was amazed by it, and was in tears, which was a relief. Because I did think ‘I don’t know if I can love my son if he doesn’t like Almodóvar’, but now he does love Almodóvar and I’m happy I can continue to have a good relationship with my son.
There is something very close in terms of our culture; even though he comes from southern Spain and I come from Morocco we have the same cinematic references. My father was born in Fez in 1941 in an apartment above a cinema, from where he could watch movies from the bathroom. So this little Arab boy became obsessed with the golden age of Hollywood, with Lauren Bacall, with Kim Novak and Marilyn Monroe, and he passed on all these references to me. And for Almodóvar, it’s much the same, he often makes references to Hitchcock, to Cukor, to Mankiewicz, and I’m sure for him, as for me, stars like Novak, Gena Rowlands or Bette Midler were important in his childhood. I think that’s the magic of art, that you can come from very different places, and in this case from two worlds very far from Hollywood, and yet have the same references and the same imagination.
I would love to have been there at the beginning of his career, during La Movida Madrileña in Madrid. Because he’s filming in the moment that Madrid is being reborn after Franco’s dictatorship. It’s very punk, very rock, there are lots of gay people, the bars, the music, the craziness. And at this time he was making films without money, with nothing really. He was just filming during the night with his friends, making music and having a lot of fun, and I think also having a lot of sex and drugs. It’s a very special moment in the history of Spain and a moment that had so much influence on my generation and though it didn’t last, I would have loved to have been part of it.
‘I recently watched Todo Sobre Mi Madre (All About My Mother) with my 15-year-old son, and he was amazed by it, and was in tears, which was a relief, because I did think ‘I don’t know if I can love my son if he doesn’t like Almodóvar’’
When I think of Almodóvar the first thing I think of is not something intellectual, it’s colour. A lot of his cinema is very colourful, and he uses colour in the way a painter does, to say something. Each colour for him has a certain significance. I also love the way he dresses – he’s always wearing colour, and it’s not that common for men, especially men of his generation. So the first thing I would see would be color, a patchwork of colours.
I would like to know if Almodóvar is conscious of how much he helped. Particularly the way he helped people from countries like mine, from the Arab world, where everything he films seems impossible to show, but at the same time belongs to our day to day lives. Because although he is very Spanish, or maybe because he is very Spanish, he, and his work, becomes very universal. I would love to tell him this.
I would like to say thank you to Almodóvar. Thank you for filming my grandmother, without knowing it; thank you for filming my mother. Thank you for showing these women who had very invisible lives. In my family men would always make fun of women, and they would undermine them. So, I want to thank Almodóvar, for showing that we are not frivolous, or stupid, but that we are interesting and funny. I think it’s really important to show that women have a sense of humor, that they can make people laugh. It was rare, especially in the 1980s, to show funny women, but in my family the women were very, very funny, so I was so happy to find someone who could show that to the world.
Leïla Slimani was speaking to Glen Wilson
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