Antonio Banderas won Best Actor award at Festival de Cannes for his role in Pedro Almodóvar's movie "Dolor y Gloria". He's been friends with the Spanish filmmaker for more than 40 years. This is how it changed his life.
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00:00Hi, I'm Antonio Banderas for Brut.
00:04Working with Almodóvar is a luxury, really.
00:09We met back in the 80s.
00:12I did theatre in the Teatro María Guerrero de Madrid,
00:15in the National Dramatic Centre,
00:17with the daughter of the air of Calderón de la Barca.
00:19We were sitting in a coffee shop outside, before the show,
00:22and he arrived with a red briefcase.
00:25He sat in the group, there were some who knew him.
00:29It was very funny, I don't remember what he said,
00:31but I remember laughing with him.
00:33He was very fast, very ingenious.
00:35And when he left, he looked at me and said,
00:37you have a very romantic face,
00:39and you should do film at some point.
00:41And well, I asked who he was when he left.
00:44They told me, his name is Pedro Almodóvar,
00:46he has made one film, but he will not make more films.
00:48Having made eight films with him,
00:52can justify a whole career, really.
00:55That is, if I had only made the eight films
00:58with Pedro Almodóvar,
01:00that would be enough for me
01:02to have decided to be an actor in my life.
01:13It has been complicated, because it is a very personal film.
01:16It is already complicated when you are going to make a film
01:19about a character that exists or has existed.
01:23If the character is alive, it is even more complicated.
01:26But if he is directing the film,
01:29things become strange, among other things.
01:34But it has not been very beautiful,
01:37because it has been a confession, deep down,
01:41of very personal things that he needed to communicate
01:44in the best way he knows how to do it,
01:47which is making films.
01:53I did not want to imitate Pedro Almodóvar.
01:56It seemed to me that he had become a pill.
01:59I preferred to attack the character,
02:02I tell you, from the inside out.
02:04And that has required a job that passed,
02:07irrevocably,
02:10to kill Antonio Banderas.
02:13I found it very funny, in this film that we have made,
02:16that the character tells me,
02:18Antonio, you have to think, to interpret him,
02:21that he is always very drunk, very high,
02:24on drugs, heroin, cocaine.
02:27You have to work on that a lot, but it is not noticeable.
02:30And then he told me, he is always sore,
02:33his head hurts, he has migraines, his back hurts,
02:36he walks in one way, but it is not noticeable.
02:39And he told me at the end,
02:41you have to make me, Pedro Almodóvar,
02:45but that it is not noticeable.
02:48I owe him a lot because I started to work
02:51as an actor in the cinema,
02:54with him for the first time, in 1981.
02:57Not only at that time Almodóvar was a person
03:00who broke all the rules of the cinematographic game
03:03that existed in Spain and probably in the world,
03:06he broke all the rules of the cinematographic narration,
03:09but he was also a person
03:12who dared to break a series of social, moral rules
03:15that existed in post-francoist Spain.
03:18Therefore, it was not only a cinematographic learning,
03:21but really a life learning.
03:24And if there is a mentor in my professional life,
03:27that would be Pedro Almodóvar.
03:42© BF-WATCH TV 2021