Almodovar, Cruz give men their due in 'Embraces'

"They could not be more different," said Cruz, who earned her first Oscar nomination for "Volver" and also worked with Almodovar in "All About My Mother" and "Live Flesh."

"With Pedro, we always rehearsed for a long time before. Woody doesn't like to rehearse. Maybe on the day we're shooting he will do one rehearsal just to see the positions of the camera, but he really likes everybody to improvise."

While "Broken Embraces" gives equal time to men, Almodovar said women remain the stronger sex in his stories. The Spanish filmmaker said that, until about age 8, he grew up almost exclusively in the company of his mother and other women, a generation tempered by hard postwar conditions in the 1950s.

"The male characters which come to mind when I make the films are terrible, horrible characters," Almodovar said. "That's how it is. I'm just a medium through whom my stories are written, and if the male characters (are) this kind that come to me, that's how it will be."

One of the male characters perpetrates a dastardly artistic crime — despoiling Mateo's film by editing together a version from the worst takes then premiering it to a disastrous critical reception.

Almodovar had blunt words about what would happen if such an act ever were committed against him.

"If that happened to me with one of my films, I think I would kill the producer or person who destroyed the material that I had shot," Almodovar said. "For me, a film has to be fully respected as it was imagined and designed by the author."