Alfred Hitchcock had his own section. Homages to Hitchcock appear often in the movies of Almodóvar, who shares a fondness for the bravura shot. In “Kika,” for example, one senses the kinship in the way the moon dissolves into a washing-machine window, or a moving train’s side panels begin to look like unspooling film. For Almodóvar, Hitchcock is the indispensable director. “Whenever I bump into one of his films on TV, it’s incredible how I can’t stop watching,” he said. “The color in my movies is very Caribbean, and it has a Baroque quality—the same as Hitchcock’s.”

Some of Almodóvar’s twenty feature films occupied a modest bottom shelf. If he watches any of them again, he can’t help but notice flaws—a poor shot, a line spoken by an actor that misses the effect Almodóvar was after—but he tries to let them go. “I don’t see them as faults but as part of the adventure,” he said. I asked him which of his films he liked best. “ ‘Talk to Her’ is the one that has the fewest moments I don’t like,” he said.

Later, we discussed the 2004 film “Bad Education,” which centers on two friends in a Catholic school, one of whom has been sexually abused by a priest. Almodóvar had been criticized, sometimes rightly, for treating rape as yet another plot device, but this film made clear that he understood the horror of it. The actor Gael García Bernal is said to have had a strained relationship with Almodóvar on the set. Almodóvar spoke of the shoot haltingly, mentioning that one of the actors had been driven to physical and mental exhaustion by the character he’d written; there were plenty of times when Almodóvar was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to finish the movie. He stated this with tact, but without excess sympathy: he clearly finds the inability to get actors to satisfy his demands one of the hardest parts of being a director. Referring to Antonio Banderas’s role as a mad plastic surgeon in “The Skin I Live In,” he said that the movie was a metaphor. “I spoke in a very direct way through the character,” he explained. “He’s a psychopath, close to what it is to be a director.” He noted that Truffaut once defined a director as someone who is driving a train without brakes and trying to keep it on the tracks.

To keep his train on the tracks, Almodóvar plans out the entire shoot and then instructs his actors with great precision. “I don’t want to suggest that it’s the only way to do it,” he says. “But I’m a partisan of writing ironclad screenplays, going over them many times, solving all the problems on paper. If there’s something that doesn’t work in the screenplay, it’s going to be impossible to solve it in the filming.”

He rehearses his actors extensively, playing their roles in front of them to show them how lines should be read. “You have to be careful not to imitate him,” Rossy de Palma, who has a memorable supporting role in “Julieta,” says. “You want to do it exactly the same way, but you have to make it yours.” Almodóvar goes to remarkable lengths to offer guidance. In 1985, he was filming the final scene in “Matador,” with Assumpta Serna. He was not sure whether Nacho Martínez, playing the wounded matador who was about to make love to her, should graze her crotch directly with his mouth or do so with a rosebud between his teeth. Almodóvar tried it out himself. “I realized it was better to put some distance between the actor’s tongue and the girl’s sex,” he said, during an appearance on a Spanish talk show. “I do it all,” he added.

Actors are often both thrilled and terrified by his technique. When I told Banderas that Almodóvar said he directed him as if Banderas were a child, he did not disagree. He also told me, “I try to become almost a white canvas, so he can paint on it.” Almodóvar often shoots multiple takes of each scene, sometimes without giving feedback; unlike most directors, he edits as he goes. Actors, for their part, often can’t tell when a shot has succeeded. Banderas called the experience “a very creative Hell.” He added, “When you finish the process, you are exhausted and very insecure. But when you see the result it is spectacular.”

Almodóvar dislikes self-conscious actorly technique—anything that interferes with his direction. “Sometimes it’s so out of the box and so unusual, the things that he may ask you to do,” Banderas says. “Some American actors couldn’t cope. They come with a lot of B.S., and they work their characters from the inside out—Stanislavski and other techniques. Pedro doesn’t give a shit about that. If you’re open and you follow instructions, it goes well, but if you oppose that, or if you try to impose your own ideas over his, you’re going to have a very hard confrontation.” Almodóvar confirms this, adding, “I can be very authoritarian.”

His methods ultimately alienated Carmen Maura. In the late eighties, they feuded—it became a front-page story in Spain. In 1990, Almodóvar appeared at the Goya Awards with a piece of the Berlin Wall and announced from the stage that if that wall could fall down surely the one between Maura and him could as well. In 2006, she appeared in her first Almodóvar movie in eighteen years, “Volver,” playing a mother who makes a ghostly return to her daughters’ lives. But in 2012 Maura told El País that she was happier working with less rigid directors. “His shoots are tense,” she said. “And that doesn’t appeal to me.” Agustín Almodóvar tweeted a response: “Don’t worry. We won’t call you.”

Almodóvar analyzes his own films with an amiable facility and a disconcerting distance, as if someone else had made them. He told me that he sees his movies as falling into three groups. First came the decade of playful, often kitschy films, “full of humor and nonsense.” This was followed by a decade of moody melodrama that blended the psychological thrills of Hitchcock with the perfumed swoon of Douglas Sirk. Almodóvar begins this period with “Kika,” the glossily filmed story of a makeup artist whose rape becomes the subject of a tabloid show.

According to Almodóvar, it was only in this second phase that he began to appreciate his rural background. He points especially to the 1995 movie “Flower of My Secret,” in which a romance writer who is disappointed in love abandons her luxurious life in Barcelona. She returns with her mother to their native town, where they join the village’s older women outside to sew and gossip. (The women share a story that Pedro heard often as a child, about a neighbor who killed herself by jumping into a well.) In his career’s third phase, he said, “pain is more present” and emotions are less cut with irony. “Talk to Her,” “Bad Education,” and “The Skin I Live In” all reflect this darker mode.

After leaving the DVD-oteca, we headed into his home office. He keeps his writing projects in a neat stack on his desk, along with clippings that he finds interesting. In the pile was a printout of an e-mail from Jeanne Moreau, which he had yet to answer. He showed me the elegant notebooks that he buys at Fabriano, in Rome. Inside one of them were decade-old drawings from the making of “Volver,” one of which depicted the moment when Penélope Cruz, the film’s star, leans over the body of her dead husband in the kitchen. He had recently printed out an article from El País about the psychological damage done to intersexuals who are surgically assigned a gender at birth. It was a fecund notion for Almodóvar, whose early insistence on the complexity of sexual orientation now seems prescient. He told me, “Binary gender is condemned to disappear.”

This did not stop him from playing with the question of whether there was such a thing as a gay sensibility in film. “The furious aesthetic of my films has to do with a liberation that is connected to sexuality,” he said. But, he noted, gay people don’t always make gay art. He offered Truman Capote by way of example: “In ‘In Cold Blood’ there’s no trace of the person who is Truman Capote. But Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ is a predecessor of all the drag queens of the nineties. She’s a transvestite. You probably have to be gay to see it.” He went on, “And the role of George Peppard? He’s a hustler, and his clients aren’t women—they’re guys! You get this. You smell it.” Of his own films, he puts “I’m So Excited” and “Women on the Verge,” which has no gay characters, into the “gay director” category. He excludes “Law of Desire,” which features a gay love triangle, because jealousy is universal. “Julieta” is a straight movie, he said, and so is “Volver.” “That’s my heterosexual side,” he explained.