A book by Alice Munro, Runaway, appeared in the hands of Elena Anaya in a scene from Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I live In (2011). That same book, and specifically three of its stories, have inspired the script of Julieta, the latest film from the Spanish filmmaker. The seed for Julieta lies in Munro’s stories: Chance, Soon and Silence, whose rights Almodóvar bought straight after reading them in 2009. In fact, the original title for the film was Silence, but he decided to change it in November of last year to avoid any confusion with Martin Scorsese’s next film of the same title.

Almodóvar bought the rights to Runaway in 2009 and since then he had been working on the adaptation, moving the action from Vancouver to New York. But the script ended up in a drawer, until a couple of years ago, when he decided to revisited the story, this time taking place in his own country. “As the Spanish version progressed I was going away from Alice Munro, I had to fly with my own wings ", says the filmmaker, winner of two Golden Globes, for All about my mother (2000) and Talk to her (2003), in the film’s press notes.

Like Alice Munro's bestseller, the film talks about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises. In it a  mother writes an unaddressed letter to her only daughter, a frank and direct letter, a dry regurgitation of memories and feelings of guilt, failure, abandonment and compassionate lies.

Pedro Almodóvar, spent years developing a character, that is now being split between two actresses – Adriana Ugarte and Emma Suárez – who respectively play the young (the past) and the old (the present) versions of the same voice. Although the protagonist of the three stories is the same Juliet, Almodóvar decided to unify the plot in a structure that jumps and spans three decades, from the 80s to the present day.

The director confronted the filming of Julieta after a long break caused by a back surgery. Recovery from the procedure lasted several months, which forced him to rest for more than one year, creating an existential debate to the Spanish filmmaker. “I had to choose between living or not living. I feel alive when I’m filming, in fact I believe in the healing qualities of filming, so the decision was easy. I was right," explained Almodóvar in the film’s presentation to the press. “Cinema is my life in everyway, when I am not involved in a movie I feel empty and that’s the reason why I am constantly looking for new stories,” continues.

The story of Julieta describes, in a few strokes, a mother-daughter relationship at its worse, whether in a disease or madness.  For Almodóvar, daughters taking care of their mothers or women taking care of other women are a common thing in real life, something that is very present in his films since Volver (2006), considered one of his best movies and one that marked a change of course for the filmmaker. In Volver, the director delved into his roots, a tribute to everything that has surrounded his life, his childhood and, above all, his mother. With Julieta he returns to the universe of women exploring the feminine world in a more present and deeper way.