Pain & glory
Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas reteam for a personal meta-movie.
A film director stuck in a rut, with physical ailments and a past he’s still wrestling with… Pain And Glory represents a career high for a reflective Pedro Almodóvar. Total Film meets the Spanish filmmaker – and his star Antonio Banderas – to talk about his most personal project yet.
dressed in a bright yellow shirt, the silver-haired Pedro Almodóvar is also sporting two watches, one on each wrist. One is “for glamour – and to tell the time” he laughs. And the other? “This is for health reasons. They count the steps that I do every day.” It’s worth mentioning simply because Spain’s most famous film director turns 70 this year, and such issues are uppermost in his mind. Moreover, they form the backbone of his masterful new film, Pain And Glory, which has just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
This 21st film of Almodóvar’s 40-year career is unquestionably his most autobiographical – which is saying something from the director of 1999’s All About My Mother.
A self-portrait of an artist, it stars his long-time collaborator
Antonio Banderas as ageing and ailing gay film director Salvador Mallo (the name contains all the letters needed to spell ‘Almodóvar’). “This is about him,” says Banderas, in no uncertain terms. “It’s about Pedro Almodóvar.”
For years now, the Madrid-based Almodóvar has suffered from chronic back pain, tinnitus and sensitivity to light – ailments that have hampered his life. Finally, he poured this into Mallo, expressed elegantly early on in Pain And Glory in an animated sequence that recounts the fragile director’s health problems. But the film is far more than this; Mallo has countless dramas to contend with – repressed feelings towards his mother, past lovers and former colleagues.
When we join him, he’s creatively stymied; but then the Spanish Cinemathèque proposes a screening for the newly
restored print of his 30-year old film ‘Sabor’ (Spanish for ‘taste’, the poster being a very Almodóvarian image of a pair of red lips looking like the surface of a strawberry). It affords him the opportunity to contact the film’s star, Alberto Crespo (Asier Etxeandia), an actor he fell out with. “It’s reconciliation with his past,” says Banderas, “to come to terms with himself.”
Almodóvar describes it as “among the quickest scripts I’ve written”, up there with Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown, the Oscar-nominated 1988 film that introduced him to global audiences. He had three separate mini-stories on file: one about back pain, another about a director meeting a former actor with violent results, and then ‘First Desire’, written 20 years earlier and centred on a child. Gradually, he pieced them together as one. “They really came together in a very organic and natural way,” he reveals.
Immediately, he knew who he wanted to play Salvador. “It was always Antonio,” he says. Yet that was easier said than done. “I was conscious that what I wanted from him was something completely different from what we did in the past, or even the movies he did in America. But he understood that immediately – when he read the script, he realised what’s needed for the character is something very different from what we did in the ’80s. I have to say for me it’s a very original performance from Antonio.”
Sitting yards from Almodóvar, in the rooftop bar of Cannes’ Marriott Hotel, is Banderas, dressed in beige trousers and a v-neck top. Just a few days away from his Best Actor win at the film festival, already the critical buzz is that not only has Almodóvar produced his best film since Talk To Her and Volver, but that Banderas could be on for the first Oscar nomination of his career. How does that make him feel? “I don’t know,” he sighs. “Expectation is the mother of all frustration!”
all he really cares about is pleasing Almodóvar. “In a way, I started creating this character [nearly] nine years ago without knowing even that this script was going to exist,” he says, referring to his role as a surgeon in Almodóvar’s 2011 film
The Skin I Live In. Back then, it was Banderas’ first role for the director since his pre-Hollywood days, when he became a star thanks to a five-film run with Almodóvar that began with 1982’s Labyrinth Of Passion.
Returning to Almodóvar 22 years after 1989’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, Banderas was desperate to show his old friend what he had learnt in the intervening years. “He basically said, ‘I’m not interested in the things that you learned there at all. Where are you?’ That was the question: Where is Antonio?” As Banderas recalls, he “confronted” the director. “We were not fighting, because we are friends, but it was a rough shoot.” He desperately wanted to work with Almodóvar again. What’s more, by the time he received the script for Pain
And Glory, Banderas had suffered a heart attack in 2017, an incident that opened him up emotionally.
“When I got to Pedro,” he says, “he saw me and he said, ‘Antonio, don’t repress that. Show it. Use it for the character – it’s good. This sadness you are bringing… it’s a little bit different from what you were before.’” The actor knew exactly what he needed to do. “The exercise for me, with this movie, [was] to kill Antonio Banderas.”
Although the film may be described as auto-fiction, Almodóvar estimates “20 per cent of what you see is a direct
projection of my personal memories”. The flashback sequences to his childhood – which see his other frequent collaborator Penélope Cruz play his mother – are only hazily drawn from his own experiences. 2004’s Bad Education, which saw Fele Martínez play a young film director, reportedly runs closer to his upbringing.
Nor did he ever smoke heroin, as Salvador does when he meets the drug-addled Alberto. But he remembers his post-Franco youth in Spain, when drugs became the norm. “I was surrounded by people doing heroin but I was never attracted to that,” he states. “Perhaps because since the beginning, I thought that it was not the type of drug for me, for my character, and also because I saw very soon the effects of heroin among my friends.”
Back in the ’80s, he recalls, you could see drug dealers on the streets. “It was very present in our lives.” Now it’s different. Almodóvar talked to doctors about the current opioid epidemic, particularly in the United States. “I asked them about their reactions, about everything,” he says. He and Banderas even sat with a heroin addict for the purposes of research. “He was smoking, and Antonio and I are looking at each other, making notes about the physical reaction.”
For others, the research process was different, difficult even. “Normally when I work with Pedro, we spend more time rehearsing, talking, about many details,” reflects Cruz, who has starred in six features for Almodóvar across more than two decades. “And here I didn’t even dare to ask questions, and I was so surprised by my own reaction. He never said, ‘That’s how it is and you cannot ask more questions.’ But that’s what happened.”
Fortunately, Cruz had “the privilege” of spending time with Almodóvar’s mother, Francisca, before she died in 1999,
which helped her tap into her director. “She was crying,” remembers the actress, “and she was saying she was scared when her son started making films and he was going to stop working for a telephone company. And she was so worried! I realised a lot of things about his childhood, about his youth, and all these women with whom he grew… and the love, the respect that he had for these women.”
Almodóvar admits it was “very moving” having Cruz play the matriarch – a cleaning lady who suffers the humiliation of being forced to move into a shabby home carved out of a cave – despite the role being very different to the mother Cruz played in Volver. “Both of them, they were survivors, fighters, but they belong to very different periods in Spain,” he says. “In Volver, she was a very contemporary woman, very sexy. And in this one, it’s a Spanish mother of the early ’60s – a bad period for Spanish families.”
So intimate is Pain And Glory, it let Banderas see his director in a new light. “When I read the script, I was surprised, because there were things that I didn’t know.” In particular the scenes with the mother (like Cruz, Banderas knew Francisca, and even worked with her on Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!). “Those are the things he wanted to say that he never said... The movie is filled with that,” he adds. “It was painful but it was necessary. I think this movie is not a movie that Pedro wanted; this was a movie that Pedro needed.”
As cathartic as the film is, it’s never indulgent. “In my personal life as a film director, there’s been a lot of glory,” Almodóvar notes. “There’s probably been more glory than pain. I have done the films that I’ve wanted. I am the complete master of all my films. It’s very important when you make mistakes to be able to identify your mistakes – to know that you haven’t made them because of others, but because of yourself, and to recognise yourself in it.”
Comparisons have already been made to Federico Fellini’s 8½, in which Marcello Mastroianni plays a troubled film director (and it’s no shock to see a poster for the film hanging in one of the colourful apartments in Pain And Glory). What can be said is that this is Almodóvar at his most reflective; long gone are the days when he made the flamboyant movies of his youth. “It’s true that my characters are sombre, more lonely. Sometimes melancholic. Like in this movie.”
Above all, the Spaniard has created a film about our need for closure, as Salvador comes to terms with his relations to those around him. Of course, movies are easier to script than reality. “In my personal life, I’m not brave enough to close everything,” smiles Almodóvar. “I still have some open subjects!” With that, he glances at his watch: our time is up.
PAIN AND GLORY OPENS ON 23 AUGUST.
the exercise for me with this movie was to kill Antonio Banderas
ANTONIO BANDERAS