Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar established his international reputation with ‘raucous farces’ such as What Have I Done to Deserve This? And Women On the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, writes Robert Chalmers in the Observer Magazine on 5 June 1994. His new film, Kika, features a porn star, a lesbian maid, a serial killer and a rape scene played as ‘knockabout comedy’, begging the question: has the clown prince of Europe lost his sense of humour, both in his life and in his art?

Holding court in his Madrid headquarters, the 42-year-old is ‘listless, withdrawn and miserable’. Reviews for Kika in Spain and France are poor. He has a bad toothache. The state of his nation is also causing him pain. ‘The economic position is bad,’ offers Almodóvar. ‘The social situation is bad. People are more afraid. I think the 90s have taken us all by surprise.’ The early 80s were different. Back then, ‘Spain was the most liberated country in the world.’

The director’s ‘vulgar frivolity’, says Chalmers, had free rein. Now, says Almódovar, censorship abounds, with ‘Anglo-Saxons’ key offenders.

Former associates from La Movida, the post-Franco countercultural movement, say fame is the auteur’s undoing. Painter Guillermo Pérez Villalta blames the 1980s: they ‘screwed up a lot of things. It was one of the most horrendous periods. ‘Almodóvar, who was a wonderful person, has become almost unbearable. Fame devours you.’

For Almodóvar, self-doubt does not ail him. This evidently makes Chalmers uneasy. Calling on the director’s knowledge of fin de siècle figures such as Oscar Wilde and Audrey Beardsley, he asks the Spanish enfant terrible if he might yet ‘undergo an 11th-hour conversion and leave his friends a testament that ended with the instruction: Destroy all the bad pictures?’

The answer is: no. ‘I reaffirm everything I have done… If I had my life again, I would live it in the same way.’ The director pauses ‘for one final provocation’, says Chalmers, before adding: ‘The same, but more.’