The acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar has called for euthanasia to be legalised worldwide.
Almodóvar was speaking ahead of the world premiere of his first English language feature, The Room Next Door, which stars Tilda Swinton as a journalist with cancer who decides to end her own life and asks an old friend, played by Julianne Moore, to help.
“This movie is in favour of euthanasia,” said Almodóvar, 74, at a press conference at the Venice film festival. “It is something we admire about the character of Tilda, she decides that getting rid of cancer can only be done by making the decision she actually makes.
‘If I get there before, cancer will not win over me,’ she says. And so she finds a way to reach her objective with the help of her friend, but they have to behave as if they were criminals.”
Spain legalised euthanasia in 2021 and is one of only 11 countries in which any form of assisted dying is legal. In the UK, assisted suicide is punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment, while euthanasia is regarded as either manslaughter or murder. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment.
“There should be the possibility to have euthanasia all over the world,” said Almodóvar. “It should be regulated and a doctor should be allowed to help his patient.”
The director added that his film could also be viewed as a memento mori for those who choose to close their eyes to the climate emergency.
“We have to stop this denying of the danger,” said Almodóvar, “that the planet is in danger. Climate change is not something neglectable [sic]; we have to pay greater attention.”
However, the director said he tried “to be optimistic” as it is “the best way to resist”.
Swinton, who previously worked with Almodóvar on 40-minute lockdown short The Human Voice said she was unafraid of her own mortality.
“I’m personally not frightened of death and I have never been,” she said. “I know that we stop … I know it’s coming, I feel it coming and see it coming. I support my friends when they transition, let’s say.
“I think the whole journey towards accepting death can be long for some people, for some reason and with certain experiences in my life, it came quite early.
“One of the things this film is a portrait of is self-determination, someone who decides to take her life and her living and her dying into her own hands.
“It’s about a triumph, I think, this film,” she continued, adding that she also has “faith in the inevitability of evolution, wherever it takes us”. In the film, Moore’s character becomes a proxy for Swinton’s character’s late mother, and the mother-daughter relationship, said Swinton, was a “journey, an adventure that’s always going to sustain us”.
Moore said she had long been drawn to the vitality of Almodóvar’s work. “There’s such a tremendous life force in Pedro’s movies,” she said, “and that’s what we all respond to. It’s almost like, when you’re watching these movies, you could hear everybody’s heartbeat.”
She applauded as “so unusual” Almodovar’s eagerness to treat the friendship between two older women with weight and dignity. Before working with the director, she said, she had assumed that there was something “innately Spanish” about his work – rather than an aesthetic particular to the man himself.
This was corrected after she first set foot in his apartment and “saw all of his movies come alive right there! ‘Oh my God, it’s all here!’ It just vibrated with life and humanity.”
Swinton said she had first seen Almodóvar’s breakout film, Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), in the company of Derek Jarman, with whom she was living and working at the time.
“We all immediately went: ‘There’s a cousin in Madrid and we are waving at you!’”
Yet while “London culture was trying to marginalise us,” continued Swinton, Jarman and his collective were impressed by the fact Almodóvar “was never marginal”.
“Pedro was always right in the centre. He was always the face of a huge cultural movement. We admired it and fed off it.”
Swinton recalled gingerly approaching the director at a party and suggesting they work together. “I’ll learn Spanish for you,” she remembered telling him. “I’ll play a mute for you – I don’t care.
“To step into his frame when you have the privilege to know the vernacular of that space so well is one of the major privileges of my life.”
The Room Next Door is Almodovar’s 25th film and the followup to Parallel Mothers (2021), which also premiered at Venice and won the festival’s best actress award for Penélope Cruz, Almodóvar’s most frequent on-screen collaborator.
The film premieres on Monday evening and will also play at the New York film festival in October, with an awards season-friendly release date expected later this year.
