A crying Pedro Almodóvar hid in a bathroom over Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton's acting

“That’s what Pedro [Almodóvar]’s movies are about: how do you witness the human condition in all of its humor and fallibility and depth?” Julianne Moore said this afternoon during a New York Film Festival panel, attended by The A.V. Club, while discussing the filmmaker’s latest, The Room Next Door. Based on the novel What Are You Going Through by Sigrid Nunez, The Room Next Door is Almodóvar’s first English-language feature. In it, Moore stars as Ingrid, an author tasked with accompanying her old friend, Martha (Tilda Swinton), as the latter seeks to commit euthanasia. Martha is a former war correspondent living with late-stage cervical cancer, who wants to die with a little dignity during one last vacation upstate.

As Moore explained during the panel, the process of working on this film was particularly moving because “all these people gathered together to make something—to prove that we’re not alone, to prove that we lived.” Considering the nature of the material, production was obviously quite emotional. Almodóvar himself was even moved to tears while filming one pivotal scene between the two actors. “I didn’t tell [Moore and Swinton], but after shooting that… I had to go to the toilet to cry,” Almodóvar said during the panel, explaining that he removed himself because he didn’t want the actors to think, “This is ridiculous that our director is crying in front of us, it’s not serious.” 

“I was very moved by them,” he continued. “Sometimes actors just play themselves telling the story of a movie.”

Based on the reverence Swinton and Moore both clearly have for the director, chances are they would have more than understood his reaction. The two actors—who have as much chemistry onscreen as they do off—spent a good portion of the panel holding hands, demonstrating the director’s point that oftentimes, the personal really does bleed into the performance. “The film is about… not looking away, and it’s about fellowship, and it was important that those of us who made it were swimming in that water,” Swinton said. “So finding these colleagues was everything.”

The Room Next Door premieres in select theaters in New York and Los Angeles on December 20, followed by a limited release on Christmas day. It will have a wider release January 2025.