Pedro Almodóvar was ready to tackle euthanasia in his latest film

While Pedro Almodóvar was making “The Room Next Door,” a film very concerned with mortality and what comes after this life, the 75-year-old Spanish director began to notice that something otherworldly was arising. “We were shooting in this house in the woods,” he recalls, “and I felt very clearly that there were four of us – it was Tilda, Julianne, me and the dead. We lived together.”

Speaking over Zoom from Madrid, the stylish filmmaker is blasé at the memory of this spectral presence. “It wasn’t creepy,” Almodóvar says matter-of-factly. “It was only natural.”

This acceptance of the unknowable infuses “The Room Next Door,” Almodóvar’s first English-language feature, which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and is one of his most melancholic yet quietly hopeful works. Starring Tilda Swinton as Martha, a war reporter with terminal cancer, and Julianne Moore as Ingrid, a novelist who has lost touch with her old friend over the years, this New York-set drama is driven by an unusual proposal Martha makes with to his colleague. Unable to endure another round of chemo, Martha asks Ingrid to accompany her to a nice rental house upstate, where she plans to die by taking a euthanasia pill. At first Ingrid resists, afraid she lacks the emotional strength to be there for Martha, but once she agrees, they grow closer during their bittersweet vacation.

When Almodóvar read Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, on which his film is based, he was intrigued by this dying character’s request. “I thought it was a good seed to grow into something bigger,” he says. Almodóvar eventually shelved the book to invent his own story, though he retained a supporting character – a fatalist (played by John Turturro) who believes our species is doomed due to global warming. “It was important to tell the story of someone dying in a world that is also dying,” says Almodóvar. “When you live in this painful moment, you should find moments to celebrate life.”

He understands such pain, both existential and physical. In recent years, Almodóvar has struggled with chronic back problems, which spurred his 2019 Oscar-nominated, semi-autobiographical film “Pain and Glory,” about an elderly director (longtime collaborator Antonio Banderas) battling myriad ailments.

He immediately knew who would play the two main roles in “The Room Next Door.” “Before I started writing, I thought about Tilda because the relationship between us in ‘The Human Voice’ was wonderful,” he says, referring to the 2020 short he made with her. “She belongs to a new species that is not human – a superior species. Then I immediately thought (of) Julianne, an incredible actress. I wanted someone who was less ‘spectacular’ than Tilda. Julianne has a quality – she is a woman who can potentially go unnoticed. She can be a housewife, she can be a president. I wanted someone who you might not think much of at first – they don’t call themselves – but eventually like the movie progress, you begin to notice that she is very brave. Julianne can look very ordinary, or she can be very beautiful.”

Director Pedro Almodóvar on set with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton.

(Iglesias Mas / El Deseo / Sony)

Almodóvar positions Martha and Ingrid as different ways of looking at the inevitability of death. Martha is ready to die, no regrets, while Ingrid (whose new novel dissects her inability to face death) wonders how her friend can be so willing to go. “I was much closer to Ingrid than to Martha,” he says of his own world view. “I don’t accept death. I’m an atheist; I don’t have the support that religion gives you to believe in an afterlife. I also don’t believe in reincarnation. But the part where I identify with Tilda’s character is, When she talks about sexuality, she says: ‘When I can’t sleep, I just think about all the men I’ve slept with, even if it was just once.’ She says that sex is the best way to fight against fear, against death.

The right to die is controversial in America – euthanasia is legal in only 10 states and Washington, DC – but euthanasia and assisted suicide are allowed in Spain. Almodóvar’s film emphasizes the beauty of life, but he argues that the freedom to end one’s life is a human right.

“I believe very strongly that a person should be the owner of their own life,” he says, “just as they should be the owner of their own death – and really only the owner of death when all that life gives. you are insufferable pain. Obviously this idea goes against what most religions believe. But what I want people who are against euthanasia to believe is that when they deny someone the right to take their own life – especially if they are in a terminal situation – they condemn that person to live in pain.”

(Shayan Asgharnia/For The Times)

In one of his film’s most moving sequences, Martha and Ingrid spend an evening watching “The Dead,” celebrated director John Huston’s swan song, based on James Joyce’s eerie tale of the impermanence of everything. That film has great significance for Almodóvar. “I love the movie,” he says. “It’s one of the only examples where someone as great as John Huston that the last film was one of his best. Usually the last film, they’re not the best – but in this case it’s quite exceptional.”

As Almodóvar talks about “The Dead,” however, it becomes clear that his appreciation goes beyond filmmaking. Huston died in August 1987 at the age of 81. “The Dead” was released four months later.

“I remember when they were shooting,” I saw a photograph of Huston “in a wheelchair connected to an oxygen tank,” says Almodóvar. “He was sick and he was working and the face was a face of happiness, of doing what he really wants to do.” He has never forgotten that picture. “I remember that moment well – I thought I would like to end my life this way,” he says. “I didn’t mind being sick if I do what (I love). I can be sick – it’s not that difficult – but what’s difficult is to make a masterpiece at the same time. It was a model for me .”