Almodovar: A film “doesn’t have to win a prize for it to take off”

Pedro Almodovar returned Saturday to Cannes as producer of “Wild Tales” by Argentina’s Damian Szifron, a film competing for a Palme d’Or that the Spaniard doesn’t believe it will win, but also believes that a movie “doesn’t have to win a prize for it to take off.”

Three years after presenting “The Skin I Live In” at the festival, Almodovar and his brother Agustin showed up as the producers of “Wild Tales,” a film full of wellknown faces like Ricardo Darin, Leonardo Sbaraglia and Dario Grandinetti, and which was received at Cannes with laughter and applause.

This is a dark, violent comedy, which was exactly what attracted the Spanish moviemaker.

“I was seduced precisely by what the title suggests, the wild side,” he said in a brief statement to the press after the film’s official screening.

He was specifically talking about the episode starring Darin the film is made up of six independent stories who explodes with rage when a towtruck drags his car away for being badly parked.

“Everybody would naturally do something like Darin against the bureaucracy we live under,” Almodovar said.

He also described as “liberating” what Darin does, not because citizens “have to go around blowing up offices, but because this is a movie, this is fiction, and violence is one of the great cinematographic themes.”

However, the Spanish director does not believe this dark comedy will pick up a prize in the official Cannes category in which it is competing.

“But I believe that afterwards it will take off in the rest of the markets I think people are going to like it a lot,” he said.