‘The Room Next Door’ Star Julianne Moore On Working With Tilda Swinton And Pedro Almodóvar

This was a year of firsts for Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar, making his first English-language feature after 25 years of teasing and, with it, bagging the main prize at a major international film festival — Venice’s Golden Lion — for the first time in a career spanning nearly half a century. The film in question is The Room Next Door, also a milestone of sorts since it marks the first time its spectacular leading ladies, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, have worked together on screen.

Based, or perhaps one should say extracted, from Ingrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, the film stars Julianne Moore as Ingrid Parker, a novelist who is unexpectedly reunited with her old friend Martha Hunt (Tilda Swinton). A former war reporter, Martha is now fighting a losing battle with cancer. Tired of getting false hope from ineffective experimental treatments, Martha enlists Ingrid’s help in a plan to end her life peacefully.

Here, Moore looks back at her experience of working with Swinton and Spain’s pop-culture poet laureate…

DEADLINE: When did you first become aware of Pedro Almodóvar?

JULIANNE MOORE: It was in the ’80s. I think I saw Matador first, actually, and really loved it, but I think what really brought him into focus for me was Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, because it was such an extraordinary film for me — so alive, and so original, and so arresting. It was just incredible. His directorial voice was so incredibly strong and fresh, and I think the whole world felt that way when they saw that movie.

DEADLINE: He’d been talking about doing an English-language film for a long time. Did you ever think that you would be part of it?

MOORE: No. I think we’d all given up hope, because, of course, over the years there were always these rumblings, particularly in the U.S., that Pedro was about to do a movie in English. Like, “Oh, is it going to happen? He’s going to do this; he’s going to do that.” We’d all perk up, and we’d all think like, “Oh, gosh, let me throw my hat in the ring for this. Maybe I could work with him.” And then he would decide, no, no, no, he didn’t want to work in English, he was going to make another movie in Spanish.

That kept happening over a number of years, until I really did truly believe personally that he wasn’t going to do it, that it was not something that was interesting to him, or that it was something he was keeping at bay for some reason. I had given up hope. I would see Pedro around, and we always talked and laughed, but I never, ever, ever imagined he would contact me out of the blue to play a part in an English-language feature film.

DEADLINE: How did it come about? What was the timeline?

MOORE: It was about … God, when was it? We started rehearsing it around this time last year, actually, and then finished filming it in May. I suppose he sent me the script for it about six months before. It probably just before the strike that he sent me the script, and then we weren’t able to do any rehearsing. It was out of the blue. He was just like, “I’m making a movie in English with Tilda Swinton, and we would like you to join us.” Then we weren’t able to do anything — because he likes to rehearse for a long time — until the strike was resolved. Then right after that, we started rehearsing.

DEADLINE: You’d never worked with Tilda before. I find that quite amazing.

MOORE: I know, right?

DEADLINE: Were you always going to play Ingrid?

MOORE: It was always Ingrid. Pedro had worked with Tilda before, and I think when he found Sigrid Nunez’ book and read it he immediately thought of Tilda for Martha. I heard, subsequent to this, that when Pedro said, “Who do you think should play Ingrid?” they both emailed each other with my name at the same time. The emails crossed, which made me feel so gratified and so flattered that they both thought of me for the part.

DEADLINE: Did you read the novel, or was that not necessary?

MOORE: I did, yeah. There are lots of differences, actually. There are lots of different stories in it, and so this one section of it is just a small part of the whole book. I think, as he was reading it, Pedro realized that that was a story that interested him, and he thought he could expound on it and make it its own thing.

DEADLINE: How did you prepare for a role like this? Tilda’s part has a little bit of meat to it, in that she’s a war reporter. There’s research to do there, but can you research being a novelist when you’re an artist yourself, in your own way?

MOORE: I spoke to Sigrid. She lives in New York like me, and she was actually very available, and I read all of Sigrid’s books and talked to her about her process of writing and her process of observation. I’m not a writer, but I do think the creative process is often about observation and research. Ingrid is someone who listens and she’s someone who watches, and she’s someone who metabolizes ideas, emotions and thoughts through her writing.

DEADLINE: Did it scare you in any way? Because within the fiction of the story, Ingrid is scared of death and yet she’s dealing with death. Did it strike a chord with you?

MOORE: Pedro talks about this. Listen, I think it’s a rare person who has real equanimity about death. We have a tendency to look away. It’s a hard thing to look at. We don’t know when it’s going to happen, but we know that it will happen, and it could happen sooner, or later. Who knows? I think our way of dealing with it is often to just be like, “I’m not going to think about it now,” because it seems like it’s going to be in the future.

Of course, the older we get, the more experiences we have with it. That’s just how life is, and so you’re forced to deal with it. I think that Ingrid’s at that point in her life where she does feel it around her, I mean, she definitely has. I think that’s probably what’s inciting her fear. She’s at a place where death is something that’s real, and she’s forcing herself to talk about it. She’s forcing herself to write about it, and then she finds herself in a situation where she has to live with it.

In a sense, it’s what we all have to do. We’re going to have to deal with it one way or another. Ingrid, in a sense, is a little bit like the audience too, going, “Do I want to look at this? Do I want to sit by and watch someone [who is dying]?” What’s wonderful about her is that, even in her fear and her uncertainty, her humanity allows her to override that. I think Ingrid’s the best of us, in a sense. That’s what we hope we’ll be able to do, that in the face of things that are scary and devastating, we hope that our humanity will allow us to sit with someone, to witness them, to accompany them and to care for them.

DEADLINE: Where did you shoot the movie?

MOORE: We shot it in Madrid. It was pretty much 100% Madrid.

DEADLINE: And how was that, given that the story is firmly set in New York?

MOORE: Well, it’s not New York. It’s Pedro’s dream of New York. And when you realize that, you begin to realize, too, that the movies of his that you’ve seen that have been shot in Madrid are not [taking place] in Madrid either — it’s Pedro’s dream of Madrid. Everything in this film — and all of his films — is larger than life. They’re cinematic. They have a fairytale quality. They have a dreamy quality to them. He’ll say that too. His language is elevated. His language is poetic. He doesn’t even always listen to the words; he listens to the musicality of a phrase. He listens to that. It’s like there’s so much sensorially that goes into his writing and his production. But the base is this really potent emotionality. That’s what anchors it. I think that’s what makes this movie so beautiful.

DEADLINE: Did you discover the role while you were filming, or did you have a bit of time beforehand to get into it with Tilda?

MOORE: We definitely had time to rehearse. That’s very, very important to Pedro. A lot of the time rehearsing is spent while he’s building the script and listening, trying to figure out his ideas and stuff. We did it initially in his apartment in Madrid. We’d be there for a couple of weeks. Sometimes during those weeks, we not only rehearsed, but we’d also start working on fittings. We started having costume fittings, because he’s building the movie physically at the same time as he’s building the language of the script.

A lot of it was that, was getting to know Tilda, getting to know Pedro, familiarizing ourselves with the script, having costume fittings, getting to know everyone at El Deseo and the production team, all of that. It was a slow process. He wants to feel certain, because, once we started shooting, we moved very, very quickly.

DEADLINE: Do you have any say in the costumes on an Almodóvar movie?

MOORE: We do. Yeah. We worked very closely with Bina Daigeler, who was our really unbelievably talented costume designer. In the fitting, that’s what you do. You try on the pants, you try on the top, you do this, you do that. You start to get a sense of who this person is, of what would be appropriate for what they do or who they are. Then Pedro would come in too, and he would say, “No, I like the other jacket.” He’s specific about the characters, about the shapes and the colors that they wear too.

It’s not like you come into a costume fitting and you say, “I think I should wear X, Y and Z.” You try things on, and you’re like, “This sweater feels good,” or “I like this shirt,” or, “What about boots with this,” or, “Let’s put this together.” It’s more a process of trying things on and moving things around, like building a closet for a character. But, of course, you need to do that in conjunction. Tilda and I were so much a partnership, so much a team, that we also had to make sure that those costumes were going to work together, that they were going to work in terms of their colors and their textures and the season and whatever, so we were always doing that as well.

DEADLINE: The same for makeup? Pedro seems to be very specific about lipstick.

MOORE: He is. We test that as well. He does camera tests for makeup, and there were lots of iterations with my character. There was one point, and this was funny, when everyone decided that I should try having my hair being really, really curly and that I would have lots of dark eye shadow on. I actually have some photos of that, because I was like, “What’s going on? What are we doing?” [Laughs.] We basically landed where we landed. Pedro cares about women being beautiful, and that’s something I really appreciate too.

Also, bear in mind that these characters are dressing clearly for each other. There are no men around them. Ingrid sees [her ex] Damian [John Turturro] every once in a while, but it’s like [Martha and Ingrid] are dressing up for each other. They’re looking good for each other and for themselves. The makeup look we arrived at eventually was one that felt elevated and in keeping with who Ingrid was, but we did lots of different tests before he landed on it.

DEADLINE: How does it compare with working with Todd Haynes?

MOORE: They’re both extraordinary filmmakers. People talk about how directors are different, and I say, “For me, everybody’s different. Human beings are different, but what great directors have in common is a strong point of view.” It’s about how they tell the story and through what lens they tell the story. It’s very easy to work with them both, because they’re masterful storytellers who know exactly how they’re going to make each film, how they’re going to tell each story.

DEADLINE: Did Pedro give any hints as to whether he will return to English-language filmmaking?

MOORE: I’m sure he will. I’m sure he will. I think he loved it, and I think it’s been really fun for him. How wonderful is it for him to be able — after having this vast and wonderful career in Spanish — to then transition into something new? I bet he will.