Pain and Glory filming locations: Salvador's flat is a copy of Almodóvar's own, down to the books on the shelves
Almodóvar built his own living room on a soundstage and then filled it with his own furniture and paintings. Here's where Pain and Glory was really shot, from that flat to the cave houses of Paterna.
The apartment in this film is not a set dressed to look lived-in. It is a reconstruction of a real one, and about half the contents were carried in from the director's actual home.
Dolor y gloria was shot over 44 days between 16 July and 15 September 2018, across Madrid and the province of Valencia. Antonio Banderas plays Salvador Mallo, an ageing film director in physical decline and creative stall, and the film moves between his present-day flat and a childhood spent in a whitewashed cave house. Both of those places have specific real-world addresses, and neither relationship to Almodóvar is quite what it first appears.
The flat
Salvador's apartment was built as a set, designed by Antxón Gómez, Almodóvar's production designer since the early 1990s. It replicates the director's own Madrid home: the layout, the colour blocking, the picture hang.
"More than 50% of the furniture is mine," Almodóvar said in 2019, confirming that the paintings on Salvador's walls were his own as well.
The consequence is that the film's most quoted visual — Banderas in a red kitchen, surrounded by very good twentieth-century design — is closer to a documentary shot than a production designer's invention.
The things in it
The flat is furnished as a collection rather than a scheme, which is the giveaway that somebody real assembled it over decades:
- Eclisse lamp — Vico Magistretti, 1967, a Compasso d'Oro winner and the most photographed object in the film.
- Pipistrello lamp — Gae Aulenti's 1965 design, on the desk.
- Utrecht armchairs — Gerrit Rietveld, recognisable at a glance and deeply uncomfortable to look at in a Spanish living room.
- La Basilica table — Mario Bellini.
- A Fornasetti cabinet — with butterfly detailing.
- Enzo Mari's pear poster — hung in the kitchen, doing a lot of work in the colour scheme.
- Hermès tea service, ceramics, and shelves of books that are the director's own rather than a props buyer's.
Paterna, and the caves
The childhood sequences, with Penélope Cruz as Salvador's mother Jacinta, were shot in Paterna, in the province of Valencia, where the cave dwellings cut into the hillside are entirely real and still standing. The scenes of the family whitewashing an underground house and installing a skylight were made in and around them.
Almodóvar has been firm that this is where the autobiography stops: he never lived in one. He grew up in Calzada de Calatrava in Ciudad Real and later in Extremadura, and the caves are borrowed geography.
"In the movie sometimes I stole memories of my sisters, my brother, of some friends, or the other people that I was living with," he told interviewers in 2019.
Madrid
The present-day material is Madrid, the city Almodóvar has been filming for forty years, and the film treats it as interior rather than skyline — clinics, a theatre, a flat, a gallery. There is no establishing-shot tourism in it.
The film took €6.5 million in Spain, making it the year's highest-grossing Spanish production, and $37.4 million worldwide. Banderas won Best Actor at Cannes and was nominated for the Academy Award, playing a version of the man whose sofa he was sitting on.
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