Pedro Almodóvar: 'Unfortunately it's true, Spain is now a more boring place'

Film-maker Pedro Almodóvar is famous for his depictions of the frantic and colourful amorality of his homeland. But his new movie is a little different, he tells Mike Higgins

Pedro Almodóvar is wearing a Ted Baker shirt and talking football: "It was like the national soccer team had won the World Cup." Pedro Almodóvar as Jack the Lad? It's a nice thought, but no – the Spanish film-maker is trying to give a sense of the hysteria back home that greeted his Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 1999, for All About My Mother.

"It was almost extra-nationalist – I really felt like I had to win that award because the entire country was expecting it," he tells me, through an interpreter. "They decided many months before that the Oscar was for Spain. And I thought, if they don't give it to me, I don't know if I can return to my country." He did return, of course, triumphant, after a year spent promoting his most successful film, both critically and commercially. For a while he was kept busy by the adulation, offers from Hollywood and his work with a new generation of Spanish-speaking film-makers (he was a producer to Guillermo del Toro on The Devil's Backbone). But one question nagged away at the most celebrated Spanish film-director since Buñuel: what next?

"I decided to make a very Spanish, very secret, very intimate film. I did the opposite that my audience expected of me." Perhaps – but what we expect from Almodóvar has changed over the last decade. Until the mid-Nineties, he delivered freewheeling, amoral dramas and comedies, ranging from Matador to Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. Then, with 1995's The Flower of My Secret, naughty Pedro seemed to grow up and calm down. His trademark bouffant remained, but as Almodóvar put on a little around the middle, so his output became weightier, too. The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh and All About My Mother, agreed everyone, heralded a newly mature approach. The trans-sexuals, the junkies, the prostitutes were there, as ever, but Almodóvar wasn't conducting them quite so provocatively.

Talk To Her, at first glance, has a cast of characters you could take to your granny's: Marco is a travel journalist; his new girlfriend, Lydia, is a female bull-fighter; Alicia is a ballerina lying in a coma; Benigno is Alicia's male nurse. The two men become fast friends when, after a disastrous bull-fight, Lydia also ends up as a comatose patient at the clinic where Benigno works. The film then reveals that Benigno cares for his beautiful charge a little too ardently, and he becomes the creepiest challenge to audience sympathy that Almodóvar has yet created.

Probably because two of its four central characters spend the best part of the film out for the count in hospital beds, Talk To Her is Almodóvar's quietest film for a long time. It's also, in narrative terms, far less complex than his previous two films. All of which enables him to concentrate more intensely on his main theme here: the contradictory and extreme nature of love. For Marco, Lydia is beyond reach in her persistent vegetative state; for Benigno, consciousness, or the lack of it, is no bar to his "relationship" with Alicia. "When Benigno is talking to Alicia, we don't know if any of those words are being registered anywhere in her mind," says Almodóvar. "But it does allow Benigno to develop, and allow Marco to see that as well.

"In spite of both the women being in a coma, it actually makes communication easier between those couples. As long as one person loves, there is a relationship. If someone makes the effort to communicate, there is a communication – even if it's in the form of a monologue and it comes back to him, like a boomerang." As the charming Almodóvar explains this to you in person, it's easy to forget that he's making a case for a mentally disturbed sex criminal.

The film does much the same, and the more that we learn about Benigno, the more daring do Talk To Her's apologies become for him. At the point where Benigno rapes the comatose Alicia, the film takes a mischievious side-step, presenting us with a cod black-and-white silent film called Shrinking Lover, that Benigno has just seen and is describing to Alicia. Almodóvar grins: "'Rape?' I don't like to talk about rape in this movie, even though it's a crime. Benigno is a very special case, and the film is original in the way it talks about him. Any psychologist would probably say that he's a psychopath – and I was attracted to the idea of treating humanely a character like that."

Perversely, it's while watching Shrinking Lover that you're most likely to take a shine to Benigno – Javier Camara teases out both the cunning and the naivety in this dodgiest of characters, but not even he would have been able to keep us on-side during a sexual assault. The entire sequence is a coup de théâtre. "I'm very proud of Shrinking Lover," says Almodóvar. "In hiding [the rape], I show a parallel story that has the information – in a way. But at the same time it is very amusing. It hides – but it tells you what is happening and also how he's feeling."

It's a sophisticated, playful attitude to familiar dangerous subjects – is this evidence of the "mature" Almodóvar? "If anything, I'm being more direct, more openly sentimental and emotional," he says. "I feel more mature, perhaps more than I want." It's pretty clear from his recent films, for instance, that the 50-year-old thinks that his homeland is a duller place than it once was – in Talk To Her, the jail in which Benigno is eventually imprisoned is indistinguishable from the clinic in which he works. "Unfortunately," Almodóvar says, "it's true that Spain is more boring than it was 25 years ago."

Almodóvar has plenty to keep him excited, however. He has an American project simmering; but the next film of his we'll see is the partly autobiographical Bad Education, "a portrait of the horrible education that myself and other people of my generation received in Spain in religious schools." So far, so mature – any signs of the old Almodóvar? "I did make some notes of a story, which I'd eventually like to tell – about Siamese twins, who are joined at the hips..."

'Talk to Her' is released on Friday