Oscar-winning actress Julianne Moore has said female friendship is “rarely” depicted on the big screen as she criticised women being depicted as at odds with each other in the film industry.
The American star appears alongside British Oscar-winning actress Tilda Swinton in The Room Next Door, which is being screened at the BFI London Film Festival, and she attended a gala event to promote the film on Saturday.
The drama, which marks Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language feature, is about two friends who reconnect as one of them goes through terminal cancer, and is based on the book What Are You Going Through by American writer Sigrid Nunez.
Julianne Moore at the BFI London Film Festival gala screening of The Room Next Door at the Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre in London (Lucy North/PA)
It won the Golden Lion, which is awarded for best film, at the Venice Film Festival over the summer.
Moore told the PA news agency: “We don’t learn anything about friendship that we don’t already know, particularly as women.
“I think what’s so wonderful about this film is we so very rarely see movies about friendships where people are offering their support towards one another, like this, where women are offering their support.
“So often in film we see women presented as antagonists, and that has (not) been my experience in life. I’ve had some of the most profound relationships of my life with my female friends.”
Almodovar talked about how the movie explores the debate around assisted suicide.
Pedro Almodovar attends the BFI London Film Festival gala screening of The Room Next Door (Lucy North/PA)
He told PA that he knows from Spain, which was the first southern European country to have a medically assisted suicide law, that it is a “very important” issue as in some people’s lives “there is only pain”.
Almodovar added: “The individual needs to have the right to say, ‘Well, I can go away’.”
He also called Swinton, who he worked with on The Human Voice, “completely special, and like (she is) belonging to a different species”, and said “there was a big chemistry between us”.
Almodovar said: “When they (Tilda and Julianne) meet each other, they didn’t know each other, they became close friends since the very first meeting.
Tilda Swinton (Jeff Moore/PA)
“So it was for me, it was very moving to work with them. They are very different at the same time, but at the same time they have incredible chemistry.”
The Room Next Door arrives in cinemas more widely on October 25.