I make fiction films because I like representation. That’s why I don’t make documentaries, and I don’t think I’ll ever make documentaries. The colors… - Pedro Almodóvar

For me today, the most important filmmaker alive, for me personally is Pedro Almodóvar. Because he takes people on the fringes of society and they are bizarre. And If you read about them in the newspapers, you would think they were criminals. But in an Almodóvar film, you forgive them and you even learn to love them, which I think is closer to godliness, than making a film about good people running around.

I rely on it, it’s an addiction, the need to tell stories. If anything, my relationship with film has become more tense, more of a problem, because there is always that question: when will my time be up? Will this be the last film I make?...Perhaps this is the reason I haven’t developed any other facets of my life. Quite the opposite, I think I’ve cut back. So I’ve now reached the point where film is the only thing that makes me feel whole. Cinema is the only thing I have. It’s finished up being both the end and the means for me.

I've had a very good relationship with my mother, but there's a whole generation of Spanish women who have struggled: very strong fighting figures who carry their families. These women are now in their 80s and feel that life has been unfair to them; they don't know how to grow old and how to be happy old ladies.