Just the two of us
Antonio Banderas and Pedro Almodóvar talk about the Pain & Glory of working together
The Antonio that came to me was different than the act or I used to work with in the pa st.
If there’s one thing on which Antonio Banderas and Pedro Almodóvar agree, it’s this: Hollywood changes people.
The actor and the director worked together on five films in their native Spain in the 1980s, after which Banderas went to America and Almodóvar stayed home
The director made a series of art-house hits that included All About My Mother, Bad Education and Volver. The actor made a name for himself in Desperado, The Mask of Zorro and as the voice of Puss in Boots in the Shrek movies. And then they reunited, more than 20 years later, for The Skin I Live In, in 2011.
“The Antonio that came to me was different than the actor I used to work with,” says Almodóvar, in Toronto for the premiere of Pain & Glory.
“He was more experienced. He had directed two movies. So he came with a lot of ideas. And it doesn’t mean that I don’t like the ideas of others. But for the first time we had arguments, thinking about the sequences we were shooting. It was tough. I could see that he was not convinced of what he was doing. He did it my way because I was the director, but he always thought in a different way.”
Banderas recalls this as well. “I was so proud of my 22 years in America,” he says. “I was so secure in front of the camera. ‘Pedro, look at what I can do with my voice! Look at this! Look at this!’ And after a week rehearsing, Pedro said to me: ‘ You know what, Antonio? I cannot use those things you brought from America. They may be very useful there, but where are you?’”
Clearly the two found common ground, because here we are eight years later and Banderas is playing a director much like Almodóvar himself.
“It’s not very usual to be directed by the character that you are playing,” he says with a chuckle. “Pedro surrounded me with many of his things, including his hair, his costumes and an exact replica of his apartment. And he said one day to me, if you want to use some of my mannerisms do it.”
Banderas declined; he didn’t want to do an impression of his friend. But the character is much like Almodóvar himself.
“There is a lot of myself in the character,” the director agrees. “And the script and the movie couldn’t exist without my memory. But you cannot take it literarily.” Cryptically, he adds: “I’m familiar with all the paths that the character has traversed in the film, but I’ve not necessarily traversed them in the same direction.”
One thing that is true to life is a scene in which the main character’s mother, played as a young woman by Penélope Cruz, and in later life by Julieta Serrano, makes demands about how she should one day be buried.
“It didn’t happen to me,” says Almodóvar. “But it happened exactly to my sister.” He notes that the region of Spain he calls home has “a culture of death that only is transmitted from mother to daughter.”
At the festival, Almodóvar is three weeks away from his 70th birthday, prompting the question of whether he is thinking about his own mortality.
“I cannot conceive my life without making movies,” he says. He recalls once seeing a picture of John Huston directing his last movie, 1987’s The Dead, sitting in a wheelchair and hooked up to oxygen tubes. Huston died before the film was released.
“I thought, I wouldn’t mind ending up like that,” he says. “It scares me if there is a moment when I cannot physically do a movie, or I don’t have any new idea. I’m very frightened of that moment.”
But he’s not there yet. “Being conscious of being frightened — now I think I’m writing more than ever because of that fear. I want to be prepared to have new projects. And actually I have two at least that I want to do after the promotion of this movie.” No word on whether Banderas will have a role to play, but clearly they’re both open to the idea.