ANTONIO BANDERAS: 'HOLLYWOOD IS A FACTORY' by Annabel Brady-Brown / Big Issue Australia / courtesy of www.INSP.ngo
He said, ‘You’ve got a very romantic face, you should do cinema,’” recalls Antonio Banderas with a smile. With those 10 words tossed over a bar in Madrid, the celebrated filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar lured Banderas – then a 19-year-old stage actor who “had no idea what movies were about” – into a new world. Nearly four decades later, their journey comes full circle. "Pain and Glory" – a quiet miracle of a film about mortality, forgiveness and gratitude – sees Banderas give a revelatory performance as the aging, ailing Salvador Mallo, an alter ego for Almodóvar himself. Their first collaboration was "Labyrinth of Passion" (1982), in which Banderas played a head-in-the-clouds, queer Islamic extremist, sniffing out an elusive lover. The director and his muse made four more youthful, exuberant films together, before Hollywood beckoned, and high-octane blockbusters like "Desperado" (1995) and "The Mask of Zorro" (1998) transformed Banderas into a dashing A-list heart-throb. “I experienced a kind of industry we didn’t have in Spain,” he reflects, when we speak at the Cannes Film Festival. “I made movies there that would’ve been impossible to make in Spain. "Zorro" would be impossible; "Evita!" Massive movies where you have 2000 people working on set. It was an adventure.” When Banderas mentions his Hollywood years, a self-deprecating tone sneaks in: “I was like, ‘Oh my God! Look at the trailer, I never had a trailer!’” But some of the glitter has definitely faded. “Hollywood is a factory,” he sighs, likening big studio movies to a glass of Coca-Cola: “It’s good, it’s fresh and it tickles you. But in Europe, the people who make movies make good ones. It’s just different.”
His role as Puss in Boots in the Shrek franchise parodied the image of Banderas as the Hispanic vigilante – but his nuanced portrayal in "Pain and Glory" marks a radical break. “I had to kill a part of myself to make this movie,” he says. This process began many years earlier, he explains, during the fraught shoot of Almodóvar’s plastic surgery horror "The Skin I Live In" (2011). “I came back, and with 22 years of experience, but Pedro couldn’t use that at all. [He told me]: ‘It may make you feel safe in front of the camera, but that thing you do is not what I am looking for. I need actors that are fresh and new, no matter if they have 40 years in this profession.’ At the time, instead of actually listening to those wise words, I confronted him.” After watching the final cut of the film, it “opened up a reflection about, basically, humility,” says Banderas. “I started trying to work in a different way. When [Pedro] called me for this movie, I thought, This is my opportunity to go to that place where I think he wants me. I got rid of all the tools I was using – the tricks, if you want – anything that conformed to what people thought of me as an actor. The result is a character I don’t think anybody was expecting from me. It’s another me – which makes sense, too, because I’m a year from being 60.” Banderas plays Salvador as a hesitant, melancholy soul. Unable to work because of a coterie of ailments, the filmmaker has fallen into a depressive spell, ensconced in his gallery-like apartment. The film opens with Salvador submerged in a swimming pool, and the camera lingers on a scar that runs down his spine, the result of surgery that still causes him great pain. Banderas – who suffered a shocking heart attack in 2017 – could lean into his own experience for the character. “There’s a scar there – but it’s not a physical scar. During rehearsals Pedro said to me, ‘There is something in you different since your heart
