Pedro's film BLOG here

It's got all the pre-production photos etc, plus Pedro talks about the film:

http://www.pedroalmodovar.es/PAB_EN_03_T.asp

Here he clarifies an IMDB error:

First of all, I’d like to clarify an error that appeared in the IMDB web site about “Broken Embraces”, my next film. It is NOT my adaptation of Thierry Jonquet’s novel, “Mygale”. This adaptation does exist and it’s called “La piel que habito”. I’m thinking of filming it after “Broken Embraces”, but I still want to put the final touches to the script.
I’ve been nurturing this project for years, I’ve handled it and distilled it so much that it has become a very free adaptation of Jonquet’s novel. To be specific: “Broken Embraces” is an original script and it is not inspired by any novel. Its inspiration comes from darkness.

DARKNESS AND FICTION

For years I’ve suffered from headaches. I come from a family, on my father’s side, that is victim to that kind of suffering. Mine have different names and surnames (headaches, chronic tension headaches, sometimes I’m also attacked by the terrible Migraine. It’s strange that no one has yet made a film about Migraine, a mysterious and terrible illness, with a name that sounds like a plague of spiders).

Last year, after the exhaustive promotion of “Volver”, when at last I could devote some time to looking after myself and to writing, I was struck down for months by an attack of uninterrupted, persistent headaches and migraines.
I put myself in the hands of neurologists, I underwent various treatments, but that isn’t what I wanted to talk about. What I wanted to say is that I spent a lot of time in my bedroom, in the dark.
The headaches are accompanied by a severe photophobia (I still have it, that’s why, in photos taken on the red carpet, I often appear wearing dark glasses. It isn’t a question of glamour but of photophobia).

Isn’t it absurd that a film director, who lives surrounded by light screens and enormous spotlights and in whose work light is essential should suffer from photophobia? A tremendous paradox. But my whole life, ever since I can remember, has been a continuous chain of paradoxes.

I couldn’t read or watch DVDs or type on the computer. I could only imagine. I could think, but I didn’t want to. It was those moments of darkness that gave rise to “Broken Embraces”. At first the story had other titles: “The prisoner of O’Donnell Street”, “Double Identity”, “Sub-version”…
At that time I was living on O’Donnell Street (a prisoner). But no one should think of “Broken Embraces” as a kind of autobiography. The only thing that my life and the script of “Los abrazos rotos“ have in common is the darkness in which one of the characters lives (at one moment in the film), but his is due to other reasons. In the film there is no analgesic, no neurologist and no acupuncturist. No one has a headache. There are other problems. And a lot of fiction, a real feast of it. This is probably the most novel-like story I have written to date.