Strange Way of Life, a short film starring Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke as gunslingers who become lovers, will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival in May. The news comes straight from director Pedro Almodóvar, who announced on Dua Lipa’s At Your Service podcast (via Variety) that the short will be debuting at the prestigious festival. Almodóvar also shared some new details about the film, which runs a half-hour long, describing Strange Way of Life as a “queer Western, in the sense that there are two men and they love each other.”
The director added, “It’s about masculinity in a deep sense, because the Western is a male genre. What I can tell you about the film is that it has a lot of the elements of the Western — it has the gunslinger, it has the ranch, it has the sheriff — but what it has that most Westerns don’t have is the kind of dialogue that I don’t think a Western film has ever captured between two men. And now I think I’m telling you a little bit too much.”
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Strange Way of Life follows a man named Silva riding through the desert on horseback to meet fellow gunslinger Sheriff Jake at a place called Bitter Creek. The reunion comes 25 years after the two previously worked together as hired guns, but soon after the two reunite, Sheriff Jake tells Silva that “the real reason for his visit isn’t memories of their old friendship.”
In September, Hawke posted an image from the set alongside Pascal to announce that filming had wrapped. He said that it was a “dream to work with Pedro Almodóvar and his wonderful team.”
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Pedro Almodóvar Turned Down the Chance to Direct Brokeback Mountain
Focus Features
With a romantic storyline involving two cowboys, it’s easy to draw comparisons between Strange Way of Life and Brokeback Mountain. Released in 2005 to great acclaim by director Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain starred Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as two cowboys in the American West who maintain a secret relationship for decades that eventually ends in tragedy. Previously, Almodóvar said he turned down an offer to direct Brokeback Mountain, and nearly two decades later, he made Strange Way of Life while looking at the short as his “answer” to the Oscar-winning film.
“I think Ang Lee made a wonderful movie, but I never believed that they would give me complete freedom and independence to make what I wanted,” Almodóvar said of why he didn’t take on Brokeback Mountain, per IndieWire. “Nobody told me that — they said, ‘You can do whatever you want,’ but I knew that there was a limitation.”
Almodóvar also said that the relationship between the two leads is “animalistic,” meaning that he wouldn’t want to tone down the sexual content in a way that he’d imagine a Hollywood production would mandate. The filmmaker couldn’t see himself working within those restrictions, though with Strange Way of Life, he was eventually able to do his own kind of movie with a similar theme that didn’t come with studio heads telling him what he could and could not do with the film.
“It could be like my answer to Brokeback Mountain,” he said. “So one of them travels through the desert to find the other. There will be a showdown between them, but really the story is very intimate. You can guess (that it will be romantic). I mean, masculinity is one of the subjects of the movie.”
