Pedro Almodovar’s scripts are tightly written but once he’s behind the camera, the legendary Spanish director gives himself liberty to do change things up. Two crucial scenes in his new film Pain and Glory were added during filming, moments that underscore the bittersweet relationship between Salvador, an aging filmmaker, and his dying mother.

“Something unexpected happens on the set or I think of something I haven’t before,” says Almodovar, who speaks through his translator Carla Marcantonio but often launches into English himself. He is thoughtful and passionate in both languages.

“When you’re writing, everything is in your mind, it is an abstraction. But when you are shooting, it’s real.”

Pain and Glory, which played at the New York Film Festival this weekend and opens in theaters Friday, finds Salvador Mallo, a successful director, with his body breaking down and his spirit wounded over the loss of his mother. He reconciles and fights with a former leading man and experiments with heroin, but mostly he sits, lost and injured, wading through memories, seeking meaning, redemption and inspiration.

Many articles have focused on the film’s autobiographical elements — Mallo’s back pain, the dynamic with his mother, even the clothes and furniture — but Almodovar says those coincidences are trivial. “I’m not concerned with whether audiences think it is me. I just want them to be moved, to find some kind of connection that’s meaningful to them.”

The film is quintessential Almodovar in its aesthetic beauty and vibrant color palette, but it’s filled with aching, physical and metaphorical, and while there’s often humor and a lightness, the tone is more subdued than his earlier films, which were renowned for their exuberant telenovela melodrama.

“It is more contained, sober and austere,” Almodovar says. “I’m really pursuing at this point in my career.”

Almodovar called upon his film family, including Penelope Cruz (All About My Mother, Volver) who plays Salvador’s mother during his childhood and Julieta Serrano, who plays her later on. To capture Salvador, he cast Antonio Banderas (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) for the eighth time. Banderas is a huge star and an old friend, yet Almodovar “hesitated a little” before casting him.

“I needed the ‘Anti-Antonio Banderas,’” he says, meaning someone whose charisma and vitality has been sapped away by his suffering. Salvador struggles getting out of taxis but also has lost the desire to make movies. “I needed to have a conversation with Antonio but he anticipated it and told me this was something completely new for him and he would give himself over to me almost completely naked.”

Banderas thanks his 2017 heart attack for readying him for the role. “When you see death talking to you so close, your head goes in a different direction,” says Banderas, who is now in such good health he bounds into a room; he’s even preparing to star in A Chorus Line in his new theater in Spain. “It taught me much about vulnerability, rethinking yourself in relationship to your past, reconciliation. Pedro said to use all that.”

Banderas sought subtle touches — silent looks and economy of emotion — because he says Almodovar told him, “I want you to be conscious of the problem with your back but I don’t want to feel it too much, I want to see the effects of the drugs but not too much, I want you to play me but I don’t want to see it too much.”

The bond between these two men was essential during those last minute additions. Reconciling his memories of his relationship with his mother is essential for Salvador to regain his footing. The new scenes were painful conversations between Salvador and his mother shortly before she died. In one she tells Salvador he was not a good son.

Salvador, who, like Almodovar grew up gay in a provincial village, tells his mother he knows he was not the son she wanted him to be. Banderas believes it’s a conversation the director wishes he could have had with his mother. Just before filming, the actor says, Almodovar typically reads each character’s lines and reminds them of some detail he is seeking.

This time, he read Serrano’s line and reminded her of something she had done during rehearsal. “Then he took my part,” Banderas recalls, “and he couldn’t say the words.”

Banderas re-creates the moment, acting out Almodovar’s reaction: he struggles to speak, pauses to choke back his emotions, then sighs, unable to get out Salvador’s admission to his mother.

“I stood up and I hugged him then,” Banderas says. “I said, ‘Go. All you have to do is say action — I got all the emotional information I need. I can see it in your eyes.’ And I was charged with the emotion in that scene. The emotion was on the surface, in the skin. It was accidental but it was beautiful.”

If you go

PAIN AND GLORY

R, 113 minutes

Playing at Madison Art Cinemas