Filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar was first approached years ago to direct Brokeback Mountain, but declined it.The film went on to win an Oscar for its director Ang Lee. The acclaimed Spanish director has now revealed that his latest Western short film Strange Way of Life is his “answer to Brokeback Mountain” with plans to shoot in Spain’s Almeria region this coming August.
The film will star Ethan Hawke who plays a sheriff called Jake, and Pedro Pascal as gunslinger Silva. Both characters live on opposite sides of the desert and when viewers watch them come together on-screen, it will have been the first time they’ve seen each other in a quarter of a century.

Pedro Almodóvar
Almodóvar told Indiewire, “There will be a showdown between them, but really the story is very intimate. Upon being asked whether the storyline would be romantic, the director responded with, “You can guess. I mean, masculinity is one of the subjects of the movie.”
Brokeback Mountain Was Too Animalistic For Almodóvar
Almodóvar was approached to take on the Brokeback Mountain project initially but described his reservations towards directing. “I think Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain director) made a wonderful movie, but I never believed that they would give me complete freedom and independence to make what I wanted.” He passed on the film over a decade ago and added, “Nobody told me that- they said, ‘You can do whatever you want,’ but I knew that there was a limitation.”
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“That’s a strong discovery. But until that moment, it is animalistic, and for me it was impossible to have that in the movie because it was a Hollywood movie. You could not have these two guys fucking all the time,” Almodóvar asserts.
Speaking to Vulture in 2019, the director mused that “Perhaps I will one day make a movie in English, but it will be with European money, then I can be as free as I am now.”
Actor Pascal confirmed his involvement in the Strange Way of Life project to Instagram in April by sharing a video of the director speaking about the project in Spanish while tagging Hawk in the post.
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