(Madrid) The famous Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar has decided to abandon the production of Handbook for housekeepers starring Australian actress Cate Blanchett, which was to be the first English-language feature film of her career, her brother confirmed on Wednesday.
Posted at 9:31 a.m.
“Pedro Almodovar abandons the project Handbook for housekeepers which will continue with Cate Blanchett”, published on Twitter Agustin Almodovar, who runs the production company El Deseo with his brother.
The abandonment of this project by Almodovar was revealed earlier this week by the specialized website Deadline Hollywood, according to which the Spanish filmmaker “came to the conclusion that he was not ready to tackle such a project monumental in English”.
Without giving more details on the reasons for this decision, this media indicated that the search for a new director was “in progress”.
PHOTO GUGLIELMO MANGIAPANE, REUTERS
Cate Blanchett
“It was a very painful decision for me,” Almodovar told Deadline. “I had dreamed of working with Cate for so long”, but “unfortunately, I no longer feel capable of fully directing this film” which is an adaptation of the short story book by American Lucía Berlin, Handbook for housekeepers.
Cate Blanchett, 53, a two-time Oscar winner who won the second acting prize of her career in Venice on Saturday night for her role as a power-drunk conductor in Tar by Todd Field, produced what was to be Almodovar’s first English language feature through his company Dirty Films.
“I have known Pedro for 20 years and we have been talking about the possibility of working on a project for a long time”, she confided at the start of the year, on the sidelines of the Goya gala of the Spanish Academy of Cinema.
The 72-year-old Spanish filmmaker, who won two Oscars for his films all about my mother and Speak with hermade her first film in English in 2020, a 30-minute short film (The human voice) with British actress Tilda Swinton.
He has also just finished filming another short film in English, Strange Way of Life with Ethan Hawke, his first western.