'I said to Pedro several times when we were shooting, ‘Hey, we have to do a comedy! It’s good for you, come on.' Photograph: Nick BallonThree decades ago, an impoverished young actor named Antonio Banderas was sitting with friends outside Madrid's National theatre when a curious figure happened by. The new arrival sported a backcombed goth bouffant and brandished a bright red briefcase that could only contain documents of national importance. He ordered a drink, cracked some jokes then turned abruptly towards Banderas. "You have a very romantic face," he said. "You should do movies. Bye-bye!" And with that he was off, swinging his briefcase through the crowds on the Calle del Principe.
The Skin I Live InProduction year: 2011Directors: Pedro AlmodovarCast: Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa ParedesMore on this filmNonplussed, Banderas turned to his friends. "Oh, that's Pedro Almodovar," they told him. "He made a movie once. But he won't make any more."
Banderas and Almodovar went on to make five films together. These were wild, bawdy and exuberant; joyous yelps from the underground that caught the ears of the world. They installed the director as the most feted Spanish film-maker of his generation, and they also provided a springboard for the actor, who abandoned the old gang, lit out for America and remade himself as a Hollywood star. And this was all thanks to Almodovar, Banderas says, and all down to that chance encounter.
It's high summer, roasting hot, when I meet Banderas at Almodovar's production office on a quiet Madrid side street. Banderas has his herbal tea and his cigarettes. His conversation is a rush of accented English, peppered with italics, face-pulling and extravagant waves of the hand. At the age of 50, there is still something of the wide-eyed, beautiful boy about him, although the brow has crinkled and the hair is now threaded with grey. And that's OK, he insists. Ageing is fine; it brings fresh challenges. He was getting sick of all that "Latin lover shit" anyway.
In Hollywood, Banderas played Latin lovers and Che Guevara, Puss in Boots and the dashing Zorro. But his latest film reunites him with Almodovar for the first time since 1990's Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down and turns out to be the best thing he's done in years. The Skin I Live In is a giddying, psycho-sexual Frankenstein tale, loosely based on a French novel (Tarantula) by Thierry Jonquet and layered with false trails and flashbacks. Banderas plays mad scientist Robert Ledgard, a driven plastic surgeon, shunned by the establishment and plotting revenge against the young buck who assaulted his daughter.
The film's first half plays out as a prolonged, perfectly managed tease. Ledgard is a widower, except that maybe he's not. His daughter was raped, except that maybe she wasn't. The audience is led by the nose, groping blind. Then, out of nowhere, the trap is sprung; the plot spun on its head. In one fell swoop, Almodovar's thriller throws off its clothes, shucks off its skin and dances around in its bones.
Banderas initially struggled to acclimatise to the film. The picture darts across so many registers that he found himself running to catch up. "Sometimes, swear to God, I thought I was playing Shakespeare," he says. "And sometimes this cheap Mexican soap opera."
Ledgard, too, proved a tough nut to crack. Banderas plays him as stealthy, steely and all-but impassive – but this was not his first approach. "Rehearsing the film in Pedro's house, I figured, 'This guy is bigger than life, so I'm going to go big. Square my shoulders. Show off all my acting skills.' " And Pedro said, "No, we're not going that way, my friend. The story's told in the script, you don't need to push it. Hold your horses. Keep it minimalist.' " Banderas shrugs. "Well, he was right and I was wrong. Yet again, he gave me a lesson."
The way Banderas tells it, The Skin I Live In is not a homecoming so much as a happy accident, another carefree step in a career that has already carried him from Malaga to Madrid and Manhattan to Malibu. He was born to a strait-laced Andalucian family (mum a schoolteacher, dad an officer in the Guardia Civil) and became turned on to acting after catching a performance of Hair. He arrived in Madrid at the tail end of the 1970s, a kid from the boondocks, out of his depth. The Franco regime had drawn to a close and the city was in the throes of a cultural renaissance. The sudden relaxation of decades-worth of state censorship lifted the lid on a thriving subculture of new-wave bands, low-budget film-makers and comic-book scribblers. Homosexuals hopped out of the closet. Recreational drug use exploded. This period has since been enshrined as La Movida Madrilena ("the Madrilenian groove scene"). Back then, it was just a bunch of oddballs, starting afresh and celebrating their new-found freedom with a wild abandon.
Banderas stumbled upon them unawares. "When I first came to Madrid, I used to go to this park where people were protesting. They all had big beards and were very serious and political. I had a friend, Joaquin, a singer, and he said, 'Do you want to see something interesting?' So he took me to this bar, La Penta. I said, 'My God, what's this?' I saw people with painted hair and men wearing beads and girls in miniskirts. And there were no beards and no political issues and it was all fun. I knew I didn't belong there, but it was great."
Why didn't he belong there? "Because I was not like that! I had long hair and a moustache. I thought I was cool, but I was completely square. I was into the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. And these guys, they didn't give a shit about those bands, they were going in a totally different direction. Shuffle the cards! Kill everything! Clean slate!"
At the time, Pedro Almodovar had recently quit his 12-year stint as an assistant at the telephone exchange in order to pursue his dream of shooting outrageous, poverty-row pictures on a Super-8 camera. His first feature – 1980's Pepi, Luci, Bom And Other Girls On The Heap – was playing at the Alphaville theatre and the ticket receipts provided the funding for his second. Labyrinth Of Passion cast Banderas in a supporting slot as Sadec, a gay terrorist who kidnaps a princess. "Big scandal," he says gleefully. "People storming out of the cinema. People insulting us. We were in the back seats waving a Spanish flag. Oh, it was un-fucking-real. People smoking grass. People applauding, cheering, booing. I was the only one wearing a jacket and tie." He giggles. "It was my first premiere, so I came dressed up. I was like the formal guy in this crazy group."
How did all of this play back in Malaga? Were his parents aware of what he'd got himself into? He pulls a face. "Oh, they didn't like it all. Big fights with my mum – particularly my mum." He proceeds to mimic their exchanges. "Argh, my friends won't talk to me now! You hang out with punks!" Him: "They're not punks, mum, they're film-makers. They're breaking the rules." Her: "Breaking the rules? Breaking the rules?" Banderas shakes his head. "And then when I did Law Of Desire, oh man, that was pandemonium. I didn't go home for a year."
In Law Of Desire he played Antonio, a one-night-stand turned psychotic, murderous stalker. I've read that the film featured the first gay kiss in Spanish cinema. "Could be," he says. "Could be. And probably the third in Europe." Banderas explodes with laughter, then reaches for a cigarette.
Almodovar has described Banderas as the perfect vessel for his transgressive early pictures: "The puerile guy with overwhelming sexual charisma." But this largely monogamous partnership between mentor and muse abruptly fell apart with the breakthrough success of Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down. Banderas was offered the lead in The Mambo Kings, a Hollywood production based on the prize-winning Oscar Hijuelos novel. Poised to shoot yet another picture with Almodovar, he duly bailed out at the 11th hour. The director, he concedes, was unimpressed.
The whole thing was happenstance, he insists. He had no special desire to move to America, it was just the way the pieces fell. In any case, he spoke no English. He remembers sitting down with agents, producers, casting directors; nodding and smiling without understanding a word. He wound up faking his way through The Mambo Kings, learning the lines phonetically, "like singing a song". Banderas rolls his eyes skyward. "I was in a panic, it was a disaster. I finished the movie and came back to Spain and thought, 'Oh well, that's that.' But then Jonathan Demme called me to screen test for this movie with Tom Hanks." So he returned to play Hanks's lover in Philadelphia, then stayed for The House Of The Spirits. He shot Desperado for Robert Rodriguez and Interview With The Vampire alongside Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. Somehow or other, he fell ass-backwards into a Hollywood career.
On the set of a middling romantic-comedy, he met Melanie Griffith. She was minor Hollywood royalty, the daughter of Tippi Hedren; a recovering wild child who came trailing a history of drug and alcohol problems. Griffith had a son (with actor Steven Bauer) and a daughter (with Miami Vice star Don Johnson). All at once, Banderas had a family on his hands.
Does he now think he would have returned to Spain if he hadn't met Griffith? "That's very possible," he shrugs. "But I met her. She had kids and I didn't. And the kids were from American parents and they had to see their fathers, la-la-la, every 15 days. So if we brought them to Madrid, we'd have to be putting them on a plane every two weeks. It's not fair." Banderas divorced his first wife (Spanish actor Ana Leza) to marry Griffith in 1996. Their daughter, Stella, turns 15 next month.
Judged at face value, Banderas and Griffith make for an unlikely union: the earthy Spaniard with the avant-garde pedigree and the hyper-real, surgically enhanced daughter of Beverly Hills privilege. Banderas's character in The Skin I Live In is a maestro of the slice and dice; an expert in conjuring his patients into somebody new. Did this give him any qualms about Griffith's own experience under the surgeon's knife? "No, no, it's never bothered me," he says. "Because she'd already done it when I met her. That's who I knew. That's the face I accepted. But I don't have any moral issue with it, particularly. People can do what they want. If you want the face of a donkey, do it. I wouldn't do it myself. That's not because I'm so pure, just that I don't like that rictus smile. It would horrify me to look in the mirror and not see the person I know."
Surely he has his moments, if only because his career has played out as such a series of spontaneous reinventions. Banderas was an earnest theatre actor at 20, the poster boy of the Movida Madrilena at 30 and an English-speaking Hollywood film star as he eased towards middle age. These days, he admits, he tends to think in English, dream in English. He suspects that English has even made him move differently; that language speaks you as opposed to the other way around. "In Los Angeles we have two maids who are Mexican, so I speak Spanish with them. My secretary speaks Spanish. With my daughter, I alternate – it depends on the situation. And with Melanie, always in English." He frowns. "I read something the other day that said people who speak different languages have less chance of getting Alzheimer's. You're exercising different parts of your brain. You're having to pay more attention. Maybe I should start learning French."
Basically, he says, he is good at adapting. Maybe this is the great skill of all actors: to take the temperature, learn the lines and fit in with the scenery. Coming to America was no great stretch. "Somewhere like Hungary or the Czech Republic is physically closer, but culturally it's a million miles away," he says. "Why? Because of the movies. The first time I came to New York was not really the first time. Yellow cabs? I'd seen yellow cabs in every film since Hitchcock. Skyscrapers. Women coming out of the supermarket with paper bags in their arms. I knew all that. Los Angeles was the same. To be in Malibu and Hollywood, all those places I'd seen in the movies – it was fun."
He's not sure where his career will take him next. Chances are he'll make some more pictures in Spain, whether as director, producer or actor. Maybe one day in the future he and Griffith will base themselves in Manhattan, to be closer to Europe, "live between two worlds". Who knows? "I'm always open to fucking up," he says.
On heading home to work with Almodovar, Banderas confesses that he was nervous. There was so much water under the bridge. Of course the two men had kept in touch down the years, but people change and life moves on, and who could say whether they'd still click in the way they used to? In the event, he says, he needn't have worried. "All the way through filming, Pedro kept turning to me and saying, 'You know what? You didn't change a bit!' It's like those 22 years didn't happen." Banderas grins. "It was almost like he was annoyed with me."
And what of Almodovar? The ungainly telephone assistant with the bright red briefcase has covered some ground himself. Following Banderas's defection, the director spent a brief period in the doldrums before rebounding with mature, luscious later-period work like All About My Mother, Volver and the Oscar-winning Talk To Her. Today, his reputation is arguably more burnished than ever.
Banderas mulls it over. "In terms of the films, Pedro got more formal, more minimalist. He got rid of all the baroque issues he had before. As a person, he's pretty much the same." He shakes his head. "Maybe he's more profound, more serious, more interested in transcendental things. I said to him several times when we were shooting, 'Hey, Pedro, we have to do a comedy! It's good for you, come on. Let's laugh like we did in the old days. Let's dance and be silly, before we both get too old.'" This time, I think, the mentor can learn from the muse.
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