A Spanish connection
Antonio Banderas and Penelope Cruz talk to Sergio Burstein about their roles in Official Competition and why they laughed so much.
They are among the most internationally recognisable Spanish actors of recent times. So it’s a bit strange to realise that, apart from a couple of brief encounters and near-encounters in two high-spirited Pedro Almodo´ var films, Antonio Banderas and Pene´ lope Cruz had never been on a movie set together, let alone one in which they shared starring roles. That is, until Official Competition, a black comedy now in select New Zealand cinemas.
In this Argentine-Spanish co-production – directed by Argentines Mariano Cohn and Gasto´ n Duprat, and filmed on the outskirts of Madrid – Banderas plays Fe´ lix Rivero, an international movie star who places himself under the orders of Lola Cuevas (Cruz), an overweening independent director. Her unique working methods give rise to more than one tense and awkward moment with Rivero’s co-star of the filmwithin-the film, Iva´ n Torres, an actor of greater prestige than
Fe´ lix but far less fame. (He is played by Argentine O´ scar Martı´nez of The Distinguished Citizen and Wild Tales.)
Cruz and Banderas have had similar career trajectories. Besides turning up in several of Almodo´ var’s screwball-comedy melodramas, both made the leap into the Hollywood mainstream, Cruz with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and an Oscar-winning turn in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, among other roles, and Banderas with Philadelphia, Desperado, The Mask of Zorro and the Shrek saga.
They’ve also known each other for nearly three decades, Banderas said during a Zoom interview from New York, where he had flown in from Barcelona to attend the screening of Official Competition. They met in New York when he was playing the lover of Tom Hanks’ Aidsstricken lawyer during shooting of Philadelphia and Cruz was figuring out how to crack the English-language market.
Banderas said he enjoyed watching Cruz construct her prismatic character in Official Competition. He described it as ‘‘very different’’ from the real Cruz (check out her character’s witchy red hairdo).
‘‘Pene´ lope created from the inside out, probably using part of her imagination and part of the behaviours that she herself had seen in different directors, to which she then added this whole exterior aspect, with the red wig and the eccentric side that the character has,’’ Banderas said.
Speaking by phone from Madrid, Cruz said after teaming up with Banderas on Official Competition she felt they’d been
colleagues forever. ‘‘Pedro brought us together; it couldn’t have happened any other way,’’ Cruz said, referring to
Almodo´ var. ‘‘But we had only had one scene together in I’m So Excited! and in Pain and Glory we were separated.
‘‘In this case, communication was very easy, because we know each other very well,’’ she says. ‘‘The biggest difficulty was that you had to cut many times due to one of us laughing, including the directors and members of the production team, because this is one of those intelligent comedies that are not made frequently.’’
Beyond getting to work with Banderas, the role piqued Cruz’s interest because it allowed her to play a film-maker.
‘‘I know a lot about this world, because I’ve been in it since I was 13 or 14 years old, but this was a kind of weirdo that I was able to create as if it were my own Frankenstein, using
references that did not correspond only to women or people linked to cinema but also to other fields of art,’’ said Cruz, who has directed some short films and a documentary. ‘‘But of course, I can’t name them, because I don’t think they would be very happy to know this.’’
Banderas relished the challenge, and the ironic analogs, of portraying Fe´ lix, an internationally famous and prolific Spanish actor who has triumphed in Hollywood, despite his arrogant and impulsive temperament.
‘‘That was not a problem for me,’’ Banderas said of the role. ‘‘In fact, when we received the script, Pene´ lope and I proposed to directors Gasto´ n Duprat and Mariano Cohn that they come to my house in London to work on the script and thus be able to contribute details that were added to the film, basically about behaviours that we have seen in film rehearsals and that have to do with ego and vanity. We
laughed a lot remembering things we had seen and done.’’
In building her character, Cruz wanted to give Lola a distinctive look to suit her attention-seeking persona. ‘‘She is a very careful egomaniac, and quite insufferable,’’ she summarised. ‘‘However, when playing her, I couldn’t judge her but had to defend the reality of her.’’ Although she added that if she met someone like that in reality, ‘‘I would run away.’’
‘‘The way she looked was very important, because she’s kind of a scarecrow who’s making a ‘statement’ all the time, from the clothes she wears to the way she combs her hair to the way she walks. Deep down, I see her as a scared girl.’’
Contemplating his character, and that of Martı´nez, Banderas sees Fe´ lix and Iva´ n as ‘‘equally ridiculous’’, the former as a frivolous lover of ‘‘prizes, money and women’’ and the latter as a ‘‘purist in life’’ who ‘‘is also deeply narcissistic’’.
‘‘But I think the movie is talking about the ridiculousness of being human and the ability we have to easily become what we criticise,’’ he said.
Cruz underscored that sentiment. ‘‘The great thing about this script is that it hasn’t built cliche´ s, because when you think you have each character in a box, you realise it’s not that easy,’’ she said. ‘‘Lola says a lot of bulls... and she has a lot of delusions of grandeur, but she suddenly blurts out something very interesting. Everyone in the movie is many things, just as we are all many things in real life.’’
Banderas still considers himself to be essentially a theatre actor, but he’s willing to provide whatever the performance demands, whether in an obscure stage role, or for a global megaplex audience.
Similarly, Cruz indicated that her methods keep evolving. Sometimes, on film sets, she said, directors foster a strained, unpleasant atmosphere, in hopes of coaxing more electric performances. ‘‘The truth is that I myself, at 20 or 30 years old, thought that the more I suffered, the better the performance would come out,’’ Cruz said.
‘‘But, the older I get, the more I value what it is to interpret from the imagination, instead of forcing your own experiences and your own traumas at work.’’
That does not mean that she has not sometimes been intensely – and intentionally – exposed to emotional pain in her recent works, as happened in Parallel Mothers (2021), the Almodo´ var film that earned her an Oscar nomination. And that put her in one particularly vulnerable situation.
‘‘They lifted me up one day from the ground because I couldn’t get out of [the] fiction; I was totally in a loop, and Pedro helped me out by giving me a hug,’’ she recalled. ‘‘Those things also happen, because you can get to a place like that from your imagination, as Fe´ lix says in a very funny moment in this film. ... ‘Doing something like this also makes you feel a lot of empathy for stories that are not yours, for different realities that you may not have lived but that you can understand’.’’ –
Official Competition (M) is now screening in select New Zealand cinemas.