At The Academy: PAIN AND GLORY
Spain’s most famous living filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar has built a diverse and colorful career that earned him an Academy Award for Writing, Original Screenplay, for Talk to Her (2002), as well as winning his home country an Oscar for Foreign Language Film for All About My Mother (1999). With his new drama, Pain and Glory, he uses his own experiences as an artist for inspiration with the story of a director (Antonio Banderas) whose declining career forces him to reflect on those who put him on his current path. The Academy welcomed Almodóvar, Banderas and composer Alberto Iglesias to reveal the road to bringing this unflinching look at the creative process to life.
“It’s impossible to deny it, that the movie is inspired by myself,” Almodóvar admits, “and that I was the reference for Antonio’s character. And so, many, many sequences are based in my real experiences. But every time since the beginning, everything is mixed with fiction… For example, one sequence comes from reality. When the mother asks him if he remembers how she wanted to be dressed — my mother didn’t ask myself that question, she asked it to my sister. Because this kind of culture of death, which is very deep, very intense, and very colorful too in La Mancha [a region of Spain], this is a female tradition. So I made it mine, and also I was really moved when I was shooting the sequence but I was stealing the memories from my sister.”
This film marks the eighth collaboration between the writer-director and Banderas, though the parts aren’t always written with specific actors in mind. In fact, the only time he wrote a part expressly for Banderas was in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989), and only Volver (2006) was always intended for Penélope Cruz, who also appears in this film. “When I finish the script, the first thing is I try to think if someone in my family of actors fits well for the characters,” he notes. “So after the writing, immediately I thought about Antonio. I sent him the script, because also a condition was if he really wanted to be in this movie, and he really was, and he answered me by telephone. That was it!”
“I started creating this character nine years ago when we did The Skin I Live In (2011),” Banderas says of this marked change of pace with his director; that film was their first reunion in many years after Banderas’ long time in Hollywood. “I realized that he managed to take out of me a character that I didn’t even know I had inside. It was a big lesson for me, and when things like that happen, you have to be humble.” That process helped Banderas open up for this new role: “I want to listen. I want to open my eyes and my ears, I don’t want to use the tools that I have been using for many years. I want to start from the scratch.”
“Many things happened in the last two years, one of them is that I had a heart attack,” Banderas explains. “It changed slightly the way that I was perceiving reality, I guess. And he saw that, because he said that to me at some point during the rehearsal: ‘There is something that has changed in you and I want you to use it.’ I knew exactly where he was talking about. When you see the face of death very close to you, there are a lot of things that change in your life. And I saw my acting also going a completely different way, and I had this opportunity through this character to express myself differently to anything. The first thing that came to my mind was just to metaphorically kill Antonio Banderas, at least the image of the type of characters that I was doing until that point. And it was a perfect opportunity to just step in a completely new universe.”
As for Iglesias, their regular routine of going into a film without any kind of temp track produced unusual results. “This time I tried to convince Pedro that the film doesn’t need music,” the composer says, “because I watched the movie and for me it was complete. I didn’t know how to do something in that intimacy, how to be there and make the music so transparent and connected with the meaning. And that was my gut, the connection. Not to make an embellishment, to make beautiful music, but to connect with the meaning and with the soul of everything… We divided the filming in different elements, musical elements. One of them effectively is electronic and probably is the music that explores the dark side of Salvador. I don’t know why electronic in some moments can convey reality more than the beauty of strings... And for us it was very important to have this other material in the electronic portion, and translated as his interior.”
“He never tried to imitate me,” the director says of his star’s semi-autobiographical role. “But many people, at least in Spain, they told me there is a moment that I don’t see Antonio, and I see you. And this is supposed to be very flattering for him, but it’s strange because we talked about that. I said, ‘Well, if you think that you cannot do it in another way, you have my permission to imitate me’ — which is something that I don’t like in general. It’s the first time that I said that to an actor. And he had said to me, ‘No, I don’t think it will be necessary.’ ” In the end after seeing the final result, Banderas feels satisfied not just with this film but their entire body of work, concluding, “I could’ve done these eight movies in my life and nothing else, and I will be satisfied with my work as an actor.”
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