Strange Way of Life

After twenty-five years Silva rides a horse across the desert to visit his friend Sheriff Jake. They celebrate the meeting, but the next morning Jake tells him that reason for his trip is not to go down the memory lane of their friendship.[1]

• Ethan Hawke as Jake
• Pedro Pascal as Silva
• Manu Rios
• José Condessa
• Jason Fernández
• Sara Sálamo
• Erenice Lohan as Clara
• Pedro Casablanc
• George Steane

Principal photography took place in Southern Spain in August 2022, in the Tabernas Desert section of Almeria. A Strange Way of Life is the title of an old Portuguese fado song by Amália Rodrigues.[2] The filming took place with Pedro Almodóvar’s own production company El Deseo in conjunction with Saint Laurent, whose head designer Anthony Vaccarello was also an associate producer and the film’s costume designer.[3]

Speaking on the Dua Lipa podcast the director was quoted as saying “it’s a queer Western, in the sense that there are two men and they love each other. 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.”[4]

The film is set to premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival.[5]