No Hollywood dreamer, Pedro Almodóvar returned to his childhood village to film Volver, a tale of tough women.

TORONTO—He has become one of the world’s most admired filmmakers in just 20 years, winning awards and critical acclaim in both Europe and the United States, but don’t expect Pedro Almodóvar to follow the path of leading international filmmakers like Holland’s Paul Verhoeven, Australia’s Peter Weir, or Taiwan’s Ang Lee. In an interview room at a hotel used by the Toronto International Film Festival, he says that he will not be working with Hollywood studios any time soon.

“It seems to me that the production system of Hollywood is the opposite of the system that I have been working in for most of my career,” he says. “I am very independent in making my movies. Also, I have never had the dream of making a big movie. That is something I have tried to avoid. It is not my cup of tea. My ambition is to be completely bold in the stories that I tell, but I am the owner of the game. I invent it. I write the story, and it is not a question of being the author and ”˜having power’, but a movie needs one creator. Even if you make mistakes, they are coherent mistakes. When I talk to directors in Hollywood, they tell me that there are so many people giving their opinions, powerful people, and the director is not the first of these. He is one of 15 people making a decision about one movie. I don’t see myself working in that kind of situation, so let’s just say that I don’t see myself working in Hollywood. Perhaps I could make a movie in English one day, but not in the Hollywood system.”

Almodóvar’s latest film is Volver, which opens Friday (November 24) in Vancouver. It stars Penélope Cruz as Raimunda, a woman whose parents apparently died in a fire a few years earlier. Her husband barely works and drinks too much while her daughter carries one secret and is unaware of another. Meanwhile, most of the villagers assume that Raimunda’s aunt is crazy because she claims she sees the ghost of her sister, Raimunda’s dead mother. The aunt, too, carries a secret, one that could forever alter the lives of two families in the small village.

The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or as best film at this year’s Cannes film festival and won the best screenplay award and the best actress prize, which was awarded to all six members of the female ensemble cast. Almodóvar says that the latter award was particularly appropriate for the film, that the film reflects the fact that he himself was raised by strong women.

“When I was writing the movie I thought about when I was a child,” he says. “Even though there is no male child in this movie, it was based on the memories I have of my little village when I was surrounded by all these women. It is one of the only moments in my career that I have looked back. It was a door I closed a long time ago, but I felt it would work for this movie because my filmmaking was influenced by these very strong women who had strong survival qualities and were willing to face obstacles. I write fiction, but the basis of several of my stories is women who have inspired me. I made this movie because I wanted to make a movie about these women I had grown up around.”

Almodóvar opened the door to more memories of his youth when he was shooting the movie, which was filmed in La Mancha, the same area of Spain in which he grew up. He says that he had few expectations when he returned to the village in which he was raised but admits that the sense of nostalgia was very strong.

“I was surprised because I didn’t imagine that it [his memory of growing up] could be so strong. To go back there was like going back to my mother. Like a memory or a landscape. I was thinking of my mother as a place where I could stay and feel okay. It was very moving. It gave me an inner peace that I had never felt before. Peace is the last feeling you have when you are shooting, but being in the same places I was when I was a child impacted me a lot and I didn’t expect it. It was very healing to me.”

Almodóvar’s films have won dozens of awards and nominations, including a best-screenplay Oscar for 2002’s Talk to Her, a rarity for foreign-language films. He also won a nomination for best director for that film, while All About My Mother took home the 1999 Academy Award for best foreign-language film, an award for which Almodóvar’s 1988 Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown was also nominated.

Volver, an early favourite for the upcoming Academy Awards, is Spain’s 2006 nominee for the best foreign-language film Oscar. In fact, filmmakers like Almodóvar and Alejandro Amenábar, who won the foreign-language Oscar in 2004 for The Sea Inside, have helped to make Spain’s films popular worldwide.

However, Almodóvar says that although he is a Spaniard, he makes movies for himself and not for his native country. And he says that while the films may help people to understand more about his homeland, their popularity has more to do with the universal appeal of small stories than it does with any personal intentions.

“I am Spanish and I personally identify with the culture,” he says. “What I try is to be faithful to myself and to the culture I was born into, but I don’t want to have the responsibility to represent my country. I represent myself. But I am Spanish and I do recall when the democracy started 30 years ago, and I am proud of being Spanish and telling stories about my country. There is a part of Spain that I do not represent and I don’t want to represent. I just want to be as good as I can be as a person, as a filmmaker, and as a citizen of Spain. There are various aspects of who I am, and they all come together in my work.

“I know that the people who work in the film industries in smaller centres like Spain and Europe in general are concerned about reaching outside their countries to become international because you want to have as many spectators as possible. When I was making the movie, I was thinking about my home and where I am from and the neighbourhood and the language that we spoke, because the Spanish that we spoke in our town was very different from that of the south or Madrid or other parts of the country. It is a very specific language. So I became smaller than”¦other movies. I thought it might be too local, but the popularity of the film shows that if you think about yourself and your own history and you are private and smaller, the better you can be understood outside. So I think the best thing is not to think about reaching international audiences. You just tell your story. If you actually try to be an international director, then that could turn out for the worse.”