Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar says he has been phoning his friends during lockdown ‘to check on the state of their sexual appetites’

‘My libido has abandoned me since the isolation started. I suppose that sadness and worry have displaced erotic fantasies,’ wrote the Oscar-winning director

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar has written an essay about his life in coronavirus quarantine in which he discusses the lockdown’s effects on sexual desire.

“My libido has abandoned me since the isolation started. I suppose that sadness and worry have displaced erotic fantasies,” said the monolithic director, whose film Pain and Glory was nominated for two Oscars earlier this year.

Almodóvar wrote that, after reading an article about sexual behaviour during the pandemic, he “called a number of friends, male and female, in order to check on the state of their sexual appetites”.

“Apart from one who was desperate and told me he’d arranged online to meet with different people in supermarkets for a f*** in the toilets, in general the pandemic and its resulting isolation has reduced the erotic needs of the majority of people I phoned.”

Almodóvar’s films, which include All About My Mother, Talk to Her and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, are renowned for their exuberant, candid and sometimes controversial depictions of sexuality.

In the essay, which was published by IndieWire and translated by Mar Diestro-Dópido, the filmmaker also recommends a list of films he has been watching during the pandemic, and comments on the situation in his native Spain.

“We say goodbye to an Easter Week of empty streets, and await a huge number of festivities, probably with deserted streets too,” he writes. ”I can’t get used to it.”