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 attack, and I want you to show it. The tendency, I know, is to hide these things from an audience because you want to be very healthy and active.’ You know, Zorro!” Banderas laughs. “But Pedro said, ‘I don’t want you to hide that.’” He says that he knew exactly what the director was talking about.

“The night I had a heart attack I was sleeping at the hospital, and this older nurse was taking care of me. She said, ‘Antonio, why do you think people say I love you with all of my heart and not, I love you with all of my brain or I love you with my liver? They say that because the heart is a warehouse for feelings. And my friend, you are going to be very sad for the next three or four months.’ I said, ‘Depression?’ ‘No, depression is a medical condition,’ she said. ‘Sad.’ “And it’s true. I am not a crier – my whole entire life I’ve been a ‘tough guy,’ you know? And then I was crying over everything, from reading a poem or watching a movie. I thought, ‘Oh my God, why am I so emotional?’ And Pedro saw it. Because he’s smart, and because he knows me very well after so many years. He said, ‘I want that in your character.’”

Almodóvar’s cinema has long teased at autobiography, but "Pain and Glory" is his most openly self-reflective work. Fantastically blurring fiction and real memories, and pitching back and forth in time, the film plumbs relationships with old lovers, his late mother (played by Almodóvar favorites Penélope Cruz and Julieta Serrano) and his actors.

When one of Salvador’s early films is restored, he reconnects with its estranged lead, Alberto (Asier Etxeandia) – a composite of many figures from Almodóvar’s life. “I know there are lines in that character that are mine!” says Banderas.

“In a way, the movie is about reconciliation, about looking back and coming to terms. Some of these events, I knew, yes. Is everything you see real? No. But it is more real than not real, in a way. It is Almodóvar probably saying the things he wanted to say but never said, the things he wanted to do but never did.

“That’s why the movie goes from the personal to the universal, and touches people’s hearts,” he continues. “Because we all travel through life with a backpack filled with pain and glory, with miseries and greatness. That is so human.”

Mischievous, sexy, lyrical and deeply affecting, "Pain and Glory" feels like a homecoming for both director and star. Fittingly, these days Banderas is spending more time in Spain, and returning to his first love, the stage. “I was born in the theatre, the theatre was my art. It still is now,” he says.

“I just did something really stupid. I just found the most romantic way to ruin myself: I bought a theatre in Malaga,” he laughs. “I am spending so much money that I’m going to have to do some stupid movies.”

"Pain and Glory" is now streaming for purchase or rental on Amazon Prime Video, VUDU, YouTube, and more starting at $3.99.