The director's surreal celluloid universe couldn't be farther from Calzada de Calatrava, the sleepy hamlet in La Mancha where he grew up singing in the choir at a Catholic school run by priests of the Salesian order. As a boy, despite ecclesiastical objections, he watched spicy Doris Day comedies, Rock Hudson melodramas, and anything by Tennessee Williams. But it was the women of his rural hometown whose lives eventually became a blueprint for his career-long preoccupation with femininity. He remembers watching his mother and her neighbors, sitting at their spindles telling stories (a scene he re-created in 1996's Flower of My Secret). "They spent all day talking," he recalls. "As it became darker, they'd move into the sunlight—always looking for that last ray of light. That right there was the birth of my fiction."

The birth of Almodovar the filmmaker came years later when, despite protests from his parents, he moved to Madrid at 16. He took a job as an administrator at the state-owned telephone company in the capital and spent nights and weekends writing spoofs of commercials and parodies for underground magazines. In 1975, when he was 26, Franco died and Spain's repressive, provincial society gave way to an anything-goes rebellion. "That's when we really started to have fun. We started doing drugs, writing lots of songs, and living a new life," confesses Almodovar, who was one of the first directors to document the ensuing sexual mayhem in such films as Pepi, Luci, Bom, his first feature, and later Labyrinth of Passion. "We were rebelling against all that had happened to us up to that point."

In 1988, he crossed the pond with Women on the Verge. He was armed with a Felix (the European Oscar) for the film, and had only recently relinquished his position at the telephone company. "Our mother always said, 'Ay Pedro, whatever you do, don't leave your job. It's security,'" says Augustin Almodovar, Pedro's younger brother and the executive producer of all his films since 1987's Desire. "So he would ask the company for sabbaticals just to make her happy."

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this celebrated director's career is that he's never worked with a Hollywood studio. The devotee of American films has long awaited an opportunity, but it was only recently that he found the right project: The Paperboy, for United Artists, based on the 1995 novel by Pete Dexter. Whether the project will ever make it to the screen is anybody's guess (an Americanized version of Women on the Vergefor Jane Fonda was ultimately aborted), but it's never too early to brace for the scrutiny of the American press. Here promoting All About My Mother, he's already been hounded with is-he-or-isn't-he questions. "It's as if in this country you have to say 'Hi, my name is Pedro, this is my age, and this is my sexual orientation,'" he bristles. "In Europe they assume I am gay. I've never talked about it, I've never denied it."

And here's another adjustment he'll need to make: Hollywood budgets. All About My Mother, one of his most extravagant movies, cost just $4 million. Jokes Almodovar: "I don't know what I'd do with $30 million and 800 people working for me." We're not sure either, but the MPAA is dying to find out.