Original-Cin interview: Pain and Glory's Antonio Banderas talks heart attack, and playing a 'self-fiction' of his friend Almodovar
By Jim Slotek
In his first scene as Salvador, the frail, aging filmmaker Antonio Banderas plays in Pedro Almodóvar’s semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory, we see him seated in hydrotherapy, in a swim suit. We also see a nasty surgical scar on his chest.
This detail sprang to mind in an interview with Banderas when he talked about the reason he could physically play a character so fragile.
Read our review of Pain and Glory
It turned out, as filming commenced, Banderas had recently suffered a heart attack.
The 59-year-old Antonio Banderas seated at a round-table interview, on a warm day at the Toronto International Film Festival, wears his shirt unbuttoned from the top to reveal an intact chest. The 2017 myocardial infarction, it turns out, was treated with stents.
“I think in a way it determined how I’m behaving in my personal life and art,” he says of the event. “You see death so close to you, it changes something in you. All the important things really rise to the surface. All those things you thought were important, they just vanish, they’re not important anymore.
“So, Pedro saw that, he saw a change in me, and he says, ‘I don’t know how to describe this, but there’s something different (about you) and I want you to use that in this character.
“’All this reflection and pain and solitude you are bringing is good for the character.’ And I knew exactly what he was talking about, so I knew to use it.”
Their lines of communication weren’t always so clear. The provocative Spanish filmmaker Almodovar discovered the leading-man-to-be Banderas back in the ‘80s in the Spanish National Theatre in Madrid, and started casting him in his breakthrough films like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
But when he moved to L.A., the Hollywood Antonio (Evita, The Mask of Zorro, Spy Kids) and his former mentor kept up their friendship, but didn’t work together for 22 years, when they made the lurid medical horror film The Skin I Live In.
“I did a rehearsal for Pedro where I showed him all the things I’d learned in 22 years in Hollywood. I said, ‘Look Pedro, I can do this, I can do that, I have new tools, I can do things with my voice.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, that’s nice.’
“So after a week he said to me, ‘You know all those things you’re bringing from Hollywood? I can’t use them at all.’ He made a question that upset me at the moment. He said, ‘Where are you?’
“And I confronted him. So, we went into that movie with a certain tension, always respecting our friendship.”
“But when I saw that movie here in Toronto (where it also debuted at TIFF), I discovered that, you know, my friend got out of me a character that I didn’t even know I had inside. It made me humble and I listened and I opened my eyes.
“And then he called me to do (Pain and Glory). And I said, ‘I am just a plain soldier. Everything I have been using for years, I will move to a new territory. And the heart attack helped me to do so,” he says with a laugh.
The Salvador we meet is a legend who is paralyzed creatively, and beset by health woes, including spinal fusion pain, mysterious coughing fits and difficulty swallowing. A reunion with a long-estranged, drug-addicted leading man (Asier Etxeandia) introduces him to heroin and a measure of solace.
In between, we relive Salvador’s life, from a childhood lived in a cave with his mother (Penelope Cruz) and family, to a doomed love affair with a young man unwilling to live in his shadow, to his awkwardness dealing with celebrity.
Given that their friendship goes back 40 years, I ask Banderas if there’s anything he discovered about Almodovar that he didn’t know. “It is biographical. I think Pedro did what he calls, ‘self-fiction.’
“In a way, the movie is more Pedro than Pedro, because there are many things there that he never expressed. He owed those things to many people in his life - his mother, actors, the character of Alberto, the actor, (the movie) is a Frankenstein composed of many of us.”
The personal details, he couldn’t confirm. Their friendship, he says, “has boundaries. I never tried to discuss personal issues. I have been always very respectful to the sides of Pedro he didn’t want to share with me. But we share movies, which are spiritual experiences of a kind, in our friendship.”
In that 22 years of non-collaboration, Banderas says would often visit him and his now ex-wife Melanie Griffith (they divorced in 2015, but he says they remain close). The trips to L.A., Banderas says, were usually for the express purpose of saying no.
“He was offered money from Hollywood sometimes to go and do things and he never bended to anything. So that loyalty to himself is enormous, and I wanted to express that in the movie.”
So, what about the Hollywood Antonio? He has pointedly and, he says, belatedly taken advice he received early to learn how to say no. Still, he will say yes to the odd studio film, like Steven Soderbergh’s recent insurance fraud drama The Laundromat with Gary Oldman and Meryl Streep.
So are there two Antonios, the art-film actor and the robust action star in films like The Expendables 3. “Art in general and cinema in particular serve many different purposes,” he says. “You can entertain people, or you can take them by the hand to the complications of the human spirit. It depends on the material you have.
“I cannot create a character in Zorro which is as complicated as this character is. I think I am more than two (Antonios). I think I am many. That is the purpose of the actor, to be many.”
As for his state of mind as he approaches 60, he says, “I don’t regret anything in my life. I travel with all my shit. I travel with all my miseries and all my pains and all my glories. And I am here, satisfied with where I am. Probably if I’d done something differently, I’d be in a worse position. So, I am fine with my life.”
He pauses, then adds, “I am not playing the castanets, but I feel content.”