And why not? Cruz would be the first to acknowledge that Almodóvar made her — or at least she made the acknowledgment yesterday. “I was almost a little girl when I met him,” she added in her first comments to the crowd. “I was 17. I was too young for the part he was [casting] then, for Kika. He told me he would write something for me in the future, and he did. We worked together for the first time in Live Flesh [in 1997]. And of course he has changed. I have changed. Our relationship has changed and is constantly changing. We’ve gone a through a lot of years together. I can’t compare what I have with Pedro to what I have working on another movie. I’m not not just there working; I’m going through another adventure, and I’m sharing it with somebody who has been present for the most important times of my life. I was a kid in Live Flesh.”

For his part, Almodóvar — who turned 60 last month — has grown undoubtedly more introspective since that first collaboration. Broken Embraces is the director’s most self-referential film in a career full of them: When we meet one-time filmmaker Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar), he has changed his name to Harry Caine after an accident that claimed his lover’s life and left him blind. Mateo/Harry is confronted by a bundle of elements from his past that may or may not allow for the completion of his final film, which was butchered by a jealous producer whose lover Magdalena (Cruz) had moved on as the leading lady in both the film and Mateo’s life.

“The truth is I wanted to write a fantasy,” Almodóvar explained in the press conference. “To make a film about a director who, during the course of the film, lost one of his senses. And the crew, taking vengeance out on the guy, will then finish the film however they want. But then the film would then turn out to be a great success. That would really be a film about the vanity of directors. But in reality, the origin of this film came from somewhere else. This really comes from something much more simple and direct.”

To elaborate on those roots would probably be to give too much away, particularly because there are too many inspirations informing Broken Embraces. In detailing the nature of creation, the economy of secrets, the cynicism of the film business, and the messy collision of emotion and sensuality, it’s more than even a gifted craftsman like Almodóvar can shape. Story threads interweave clumsily or go nowhere at all, poisoning the melodrama with a discomfiting tidiness. Led by Cruz, whose secretary-turned-actress roils with ambition and lust, Embraces still glows in Almodóvar’s sincere tradition. It just doesn’t shine.

Which doesn’t not make it a must-see, particularly for the autobiographical quips that reveal increasingly more of Almodóvar as Embraces goes on. “I thought you said no sequels, remakes or biopics,” Mateo’s agent mentions when he contemplates writing a script about Arthur Miller’s abandoned son. I asked afterward if that was indeed Almodóvar’s own philosophy toward storytelling.

“Yes, that’s right,” he replied immediately. “I have to say that I have no interest in remakes, nor making sequels nor prequels nor heroic films nor anti-heroic films or superhero films. Everything else, though, is OK.”

Source: Movieline

Film history has given us a myriad of directors who play favorites, who channel their visions through an actor, using them as their vessel: Think John Ford and John Wayne, Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. In the case of beloved Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, his inspiration is, beyond a shred of doubt, the lovely Penelope Cruz.

“Our relationship keeps changing and evolving,” says the actress. “It gets to the point where we often know what the other one is thinking. We really have a strong friendship, but it doesn’t mean I get less nervous when I’m around him on set because he’s so honest. And that’s what I love about working with him — his honesty.”

The latest collaboration for the pair is the multilayered romantic tragedy/film noir Broken Embraces, in which Cruz plays Lena, a failed actress who is manipulated into marrying a lecherous millionaire before she is “rescued” by a dashing film director (Lluis Homar). When their professional relationship slips into a passionate sexual and emotional love affair, jealousy and eventually murder rear their hideous heads.

This is easily Cruz’s best performance to date, and it’s a given that she’d work for her director again — and again — at a moment’s notice. “He’s had me as a whore giving birth on a bus, as a nun who gets pregnant from a transsexual. He’s a genius, and when he calls, I drop everything for him. It’s a natural fit.”

Source: Metro

Some years ago, when Penélope Cruz was still on her way up the movie-star ladder, I had a behind-the-scenes adventure with her that gave me a chance to see what the Spanish actress is made of. I had arranged for her to do a cover shoot for Interview, the magazine I then edited, and on the day of the shoot I got a call from the photographer, who was freaking out. She had planned a bunch of fun setups, but the day hadn’t even begun yet and now Cruz’s minders were demanding that the photographer make it snappy: there wasn’t time to do anything but a few basic shots. The huffs and snits were about to spoil the shoot, so I headed over to the location, a nightclub on 14th Street, to see if I could fix things. I quickly sussed out the real reason Cruz’s people were trying to cut the shoot short: she had been summoned for a meeting later that same day with the other Cruise, as in Tom, who back then, in 2000, was still considered Mr. It. I got nowhere with her Spanish rep—apparently our rinky-dink photo shoot was chopped liver in comparison with a meeting with Hollywood’s top gun—so I marched into hair and makeup, where the actress was getting spiffed up for the first picture, and pleaded our case directly. She looked horrified that we’d been made to feel rushed and small, and asked me to tell our photographer that she was honored to be working with her and was committed to posing for all the images she wanted.

The shoot proceeded and the Cruz team backed off till many hours later, when they just couldn’t stand by anymore. “Penélope is very late for her meeting,” one of them complained, explaining that it was to be at the Carlyle hotel, all the way uptown. “Just one more picture,” begged our photographer. This was to be the money shot—an image of Cruz in a tart-yellow Cadillac convertible. Cruz’s people had had it. But still game, and in an effort to keep everyone happy, the actress suggested a bit of multi-tasking: she’d do the photo in the car while it was being driven uptown for her appointment. Perfect solution!

We all rushed outside, only to discover that the vehicle was a mere prop—it didn’t have an engine. (Our budgets were tight, so the photo editor had rented the cheapest Caddy possible.) Someone had the brain wave to put the car back up on the flatbed that had brought it there and drive the whole Rube Goldberg contraption up to the Carlyle. Anybody on Madison Avenue that evening would have caught the hilarious sight of Cruz languishing in a hot-pink Versace dress in the backseat of a car that had been jacked up on the flatbed, surrounded by flashes popping like fireworks. Some of us followed in a car.

The truck pulled up to the Carlyle and Cruz was set free. She flew through the revolving door and into the elevator—at which point I screamed, “You still have the Versace on—we need to give it back!” Penélope jumped out of the elevator and into the ladies’ room off the hotel’s lobby. There, in record time, she did a quick change into her own clothes, handed over the dress, and was back in the elevator with her agent, going up to the floor where her now historic meeting awaited. The whole scene was worthy of a film by her greatest director, Pedro Almodóvar.

Since then I’d run into Cruz a few times (even watched a flirty moment between her and Prince at an awards dinner in L.A.), but we hadn’t really had a chance to talk until we got together for this article. I reminded her of our crazy escapade together and asked her what happened that evening at the Carlyle when she finally opened the door and met Tom Cruise. Not that there was a direct cause-and-effect, but as anybody who follows the real-estate market in Los Angeles will recall, it wasn’t long before Tom was packing up his pj’s and the then Mrs. Cruise, Nicole Kidman, had the family house to herself; soon after that, Tom and Penélope were going in and out of their own driveway. Cruz already had a few American films on her résumé—she’d turned heads as a coked-up sexpot in Blow, opposite Johnny Depp—but the romance with Cruise made her something of a household name in America and put a whole different spin on her image. So I’d long pictured any number of scenarios unfolding on that first evening. Dim the lights. Music, please. Tom seducing Penélope with an invitation to race go-carts or learn how to pilot his plane? Penélope sliding the do not disturb sign on the suite’s front door and throwing Tom onto that big cushy Carlyle bed? Scientology honchos landing on the roof of the Carlyle with their e-meters to measure Penélope’s aura before anybody got any big ideas?

If only it were that interesting. But nope—it seems it was just another night of deal-making. “Tom and Cameron Crowe and, I think, Paula Wagner were there,” says Cruz, remembering a triumvirate of actor, director, and producer. “That evening was when they told me they wanted me to do Vanilla Sky. I was very happy to hear it because I had done Open Your Eyes“—the 1997 Spanish film upon which Vanilla Sky is based—“and I really wanted to do the movie and do it with them.”

It’s funny how things work out. At the time this high-profile job may have seemed like a coup for Cruz, but let’s be honest: I’d rather have gum surgery—even by Cruz, one of whose big lines in the film was “Truthfully, I also work mornings as a dental assistant”—than see that creepy excuse for a film again, a rare misstep for Crowe. It was hardly a move up for Cruz, who was widely panned, not that the script gave her much of a chance. Then again, at least in terms of ambition, Vanilla Sky was something of a peak in Cruz’s early Hollywood career, which also included the likes of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Gothika, All the Pretty Horses, Sahara, and Bandidas. Some of her American films may have looked good on paper, with impressive talent attached, but to varying degrees they just didn’t have it, even though Cruz never disses them. Hollywood, in the view of one director, “didn’t know what to do with her.”

From today’s perspective—when Cruz is at the top of her game, in demand in Europe and the States, both critically respected and, increasingly, a box-office draw—the disappointing days seem long ago indeed. With phenomenal performances in some recent winners, including last year’s Woody Allen gem, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, thanks to which she now has an Oscar on her mantel, Cruz is poised to become a new member of the tiny firmament of actresses who began their careers in a language other than English and went on to become truly international stars: the Marlene Dietrichs, Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, Sophia Lorens, Anouk Aimées, Catherine Deneuves, Jeanne Moreaus, and Liv Ullmanns. Like some of those actresses, Cruz isn’t cookie-cutter pretty—she even has a bit of a schnoz—but her unusual features come together in a memorable aria of real beauty. As Woody Allen says, “I don’t like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming.”

This month, he’ll have to work hard at ducking her. Cruz will be showing off her talents in two highly anticipated films, one European, one American, very different in tone but which share a theme: Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, a love letter to the art (versus commerce) of filmmaking, which represents her fourth collaboration with the Spanish director; and Rob Marshall’s all-star singing, dancing, showstopping Nine, a tale about a film director’s artistic crises and his refound passion for making movies. This twofer—continued respect in her own country and ever rising stardom in the States—is big news for Spanish performers. In the past only Spanish-American Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) got anywhere near stardom in Hollywood, and changing her name was just the beginning of what she had to do.

Such a rarefied, coveted position in the entertainment world would have seemed way beyond her reach when Penélope was a little girl growing up in the 1970s and 80s in Alcobendas, just outside Madrid, watching her parents break their backs trying to provide the basics for the family. There were three kids, Penélope, then Mónica, and eventually Eduardo. Both parents worked six days a week—her dad, Eduardo, in the family hardware store; her mother, Encarna, at her own hair salon. Penélope was very much “on watch” at the salon, where she and Mónica hung out every day. She says, “It was my first acting school. I would pretend to be doing my homework, but I was really observing the women. I found their behavior mesmerizing—what they were hiding, how they left feeling a little different after they’d been helped to become a little more like whom they wanted to look like. They treated the place a little bit like a psychologist’s office. They would share all their secrets.”

It sounds like Penélope herself was always something of a performer. When I asked Mónica if there was any incident from their childhood that might have foreshadowed what her sister would become, she replied, “Now, when we watch videos from when we were little we fall about laughing because it was so obvious. Whenever Penélope appeared in front of the camera she was acting or singing or dancing or all of them at once.”

By the time Cruz entered high school, in 1987, she was taking the bus or metro into the city at night to go to ballet classes. Sometimes she’d figure out how to finagle a ticket to whatever movie was showing at the nearby cinema (at 13 she was still too young to be allowed to see some of them officially). She was already an Almodóvar fan, having watched his earlier movies over and over on the family Betamax—“the darker they were, the more interested I was”—and one night in 1990 she caught his Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a loony kidnapping/love story/sex-and-bondage caper starring Victoria Abril. That was it. Epiphany time. “That was the day I decided to be an actress,” Cruz says. “I fell in love. I’d found what I wanted to do. I really didn’t want to have to be in an office. I was a good student, but not happy. I thought, I have nobody in my family and no friends who can make a living out of anything related to an artistic profession, but I want to try. I decided to look for an agent.”

Hound an agent is more like it. Apparently she was and is still a bit of a bossy thing—“In our family,” Mónica says, “all the women have a little sergeant in them.” Penélope did her research and looked up Katrina Bayonas, who remains her agent to this day. But after her first audition, Bayonas turned her away for the simple reason that Cruz was too young. “She said, ‘Go home and come back in a few years,’” remembers Cruz with a laugh. “I came back the next week and auditioned again.” A third try, not long after, did the trick.

Her first two movies, both released in 1992, were Belle Epoque, a costume drama, and Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón (variously translated as A Tale of Ham and Passion; Ham, Ham; and, my favorite, Salami, Salami). The latter was a jaw-dropper—a wild and crazy concoction of camp, kitsch, melodrama, humor, class politics, and a whole lot of sex, starring a decidedly studly Javier Bardem and a va-va-va-voom Cruz, who turned 17 during the filming, having lied about her age to the producers to get the part, and lied again to her parents about the nature of the picture to win their approval. In the film, she and Bardem make the phrase “on-screen chemistry” seem mild. Call the fire brigade! (The heat seems to sizzle offscreen too: Cruz and Bardem are now very much a couple.) Her bold, unself-conscious embrace of a role that required her to show a lot of skin and schnog or schtup more than her fair share of the film’s men surprised a lot of people, including her idol, Almodóvar, who made a congratulatory call and brought her in to read for his 1993 film Kika. Cruz says she was very nervous auditioning a scene in the director’s kitchen, but that didn’t stop her from characteristically trying to convince him she was old enough to play the main character, who was supposed to be more than twice her real age. Almodóvar, no monkey, didn’t buy it, but made it plain he wanted to work with her in the future.

The next four years saw Cruz acting in a dozen European movies as well as spending a couple of years in New York City taking ballet classes, going to the gym, shopping at D’Agostinos (which she still loves), and taking English lessons. She had her eye on making it on the bigger American stage, but at the same time her anonymity in Manhattan must have been a relief after half of Spain had seen her nipples in Jamón, Jamón. Besides, how could anyone miss the charms of New York living opposite an old-time gay bar in the West Village called Two Potato, as Cruz did? Perfect training for the next Almodóvar call.

In 1996, when the director handed her a role in Live Flesh—a young prostitute with a big personality who gives noisy, painful, primal birth on a public bus on the way to the hospital—the result was unforgettable, and the beginning of a collaboration as essential to movie history as the hookup between George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn or Woody Allen and Diane Keaton. Cruz’s knockout performance—so vulnerable and visceral and sad—takes up the first eight minutes or so of Live Flesh, and then she is gone, but she stays in the mind. Even Almodóvar got more than he was counting on. “She had a kind of strength that was earthy and eternal—surprising in someone so young,” he says. “Many people have told me that they called her after that because they were so impressed by those eight minutes. Eight minutes of real talent is a lot. Judi Dench won an Oscar for those eight minutes in Shakespeare in Love.”

This collaboration came to full flower in her next Almodóvar project, 1999’s All About My Mother, the director’s highly personal, contemporary version of an old-fashioned “women’s film.” Cruz’s ability to carry off the wild twists of plot and tone—the mark of any Almodóvar film—is absolutely convincing. She shows a perfect ear for comedy, but when her character, a young nun in training who is pregnant with the child of a sexed-up transvestite, weeps as she finds out that the oaf has made her H.I.V.-positive, it breaks your heart.

And then came her first foray into Hollywood, though it’s not as if Cruz turned her back on Europe. She remembers, “When I did my first movie in America, I already had my return ticket to Spain.” But the American films were a kind of test of how big a traditional Hollywood star Cruz could be. Whatever else they lacked, what those films did have were major leading men, which led to a sequence of major liaisons, reportedly including Matt Damon, Nicolas Cage, Matthew McConaughey, as well as Tom Cruise. The notion began to circulate around L.A. that she wasn’t safe with any leading man—or was it the other way around? She also struck up an enduring friendship with Salma Hayek; attempts by the industry to pit these two “spitfires” against each other for parts only strengthened their bond.

I asked Almodóvar what he thinks went wrong during her period of blah American films. While he’d rather not appear to be taking potshots at American filmmakers, many of whom he admires, he is a truth teller. He said, “It was bad luck for Penélope, because some of the movies were very ambitious, but this happens. They only saw her as a beautiful girl. It is the problem with the market, the agents, the studios, the film industry as a whole that labels actors in a way that is not very subtle at all. The problem is that it happened with 10 or 12 movies for Penélope, and it could have been the end.” Then he laughed: “But I was there to save her. I’m joking now.”

He may be joking, but in fact it was Almodóvar’s 2006 Volver that relaunched Cruz as an actress, not just a movie star. He has described his connection to Cruz during a movie’s shooting as if they “were bound together by a catheter.” Her performance as Raimunda—a daughter who is alienated from her mother and who, by the by, helps cover up her own daughter’s act of murder—was full of gravitas, humor, and surprises. Almodóvar even gave Cruz a prosthetic rear end, which was as transformative as the fake nose that Stephen Daldry gave Nicole Kidman when she played Virginia Woolf in The Hours. Volver earned Cruz a best-actress Oscar nomination—the first ever for a Spanish actress—and it also made other directors sit up and take notice, including Woody Allen, who wrote the part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona for her after seeing Volver. Cruz’s character in Allen’s film, Maria Elena, a painter who is a loose cannon as well as an irresistible temptress—she seduces her ex (Bardem; ah, him again) and then beds his new girlfriend (Scarlett Johansson)—really gave the actress room to show her stuff. She certainly did not hold back on the pheromones. Regarding her famous make-out session with Johansson, I asked who was better: Scarlett or Charlize Theron, whom Cruz smooched in the 2004 film Head in the Clouds. Cruz just laughed. “No matter how I answer that I will be in trouble. Both were pretty beautiful partners.”

Not only is Allen effusive in his assessment of Cruz’s ability, he also seems to have liked the woman herself, after his fashion: “I never thought about her as a person, because when I work I’m not interested in the person except as a performer. When she turned out to be lovely, that was nice, but I would have been O.K. if she had been a bitch.” Perhaps most consequential to Cruz’s career is the fact that Allen tuned in not just to her fieriness but to her fine comedic talent as well—the first American director to do so successfully. “She has a natural sense of humor,” he says. Because of Cruz’s looks and the fact that the camera loves her as much as it does, her comedic flair has often been left untapped. But she could just be the great 21st-century screwball talent, the Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard of our time.

Almodóvar uses this ability very much in his own way, in combination with her strengths as a dramatic actress. One sees Cruz walk a tightrope of emotions in Broken Embraces. Her character, Lena, is the girlfriend of a controlling bully with big bucks. She dreams of becoming an actress, so boyfriend finances a film for her. The only catch: she takes up with the director—with tragic consequences. Cruz plays Lena with a pitch-perfect combination of high drama and understated camp; it is one of the most demanding roles she has taken on. She says, “Pedro would push me to the limit. He really knows how to press all my buttons. You can only go into something like that when it’s somebody you really trust. I always feel like he’s my safety net. Like I can fly and go far, because he’s going to catch me. The biggest [panic] attack I had during the movie was the scene where, for the first time, Lena makes the decision to try to become an actress. I don’t know what happened to me that day, but before and after we filmed I could not breathe.” I wonder who she reminded herself of?

Cruz says the role she has always coveted is Carmen. I think of the moment in the opera when Carmen appears and the men ask her when she will love them. She replies, “Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.” It may be Cruz’s refrain, too. No one has yet stepped up to the plate to let Cruz have a go at her favorite heroine, but when Rob Marshall’s Nine comes out, in November, audiences will have a chance to witness Cruz’s skills as a hoofer and gauge her gifts as a vocalist when she belts out the number “A Call from the Vatican.” The film, an adaptation of the 1982 Broadway musical, is a distant relative of Federico Fellini’s film 81?2—same story, very different feel. The company Cruz keeps in this mostly female cast is nothing to sneeze at: Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Judi Dench, Marion Cotillard, Fergie, and Kate Hudson, with Daniel Day-Lewis holding it all together as the film director played by Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s semi-autobiographical original.

By all accounts Cruz fit right in with the international sisterhood that evolved during the shoot at Shepperton Studios, just outside London. In addition to bonding on set, the cast had its own evolving version of a sorority house—let’s call it Phi Beta Actress—with Loren, Cotillard, Fergie, and Cruz all shacking up in the same apartment building. Loren, for her part, is unstinting in her praise for Cruz. She says, “Penélope is very accurate in her work. She wants to be very precise about what the director wants. And she takes her career very seriously, which she should. I think she loves what she does and it shows on the screen. She has become a real friend. We talked a lot about life and our careers. I talked about De Sica, she talked about Almodóvar. When it was my last day she came to my dressing room. She was crying, and I was crying. This is the first time that I have left a film crying because we got so upset about leaving each other.”

Marshall says he considered Cruz for each of the female parts because of her range, but eventually he and she focused on Carla, the mistress—touching, loving, and a bit of a nutjob. Cruz seems to have wanted the filming to go on forever. Marshall remembers, “She’d be the last one in that soundstage working, and I’d have to say, ‘Penélope, it’s over.’ The day we were shooting her big song, ‘A Call from the Vatican,’ she was out there working so hard. In the middle of the number she does all this work with ropes—she was swinging on them and it was scary and she had formed calluses and her hands were bleeding. Daniel was screaming to her from the back of the soundstage that she is a warrior. We had told her she should wear gloves, but she was like, ‘No, no, no—I have to feel it.’ There’s this huge sheath of pink satin that she slides down on. When we finished the number she had disappeared behind the satin and was in tears. I said, ‘Are you unhappy with what you did?’ She said, ‘No, no. It’s that it is over, and I loved every second. I want to install ropes in my bedroom so I don’t have to let go of it.’?” The blisters were worth it. Cruz takes what could have been a generic tits-and-torch number and turns it into a highly personal tour de force.

‘Penélope was born to be an actress,” says Almodóvar, who knows her better than anyone in the business. “She is someone who is extremely emotional, and if she was not an actress it could be a problem for her. It’s luck she has chosen a profession that allows her to express something that would be too much for a normal person. Otherwise she would suffer a lot. And even now maybe she suffers too much.” Apparently this tendency goes way back. “I’ve always been a worrier,” says Cruz. “Since I was a little girl I’ve always felt that if I had a moment of peace I’d wonder: Are you sure you can afford to feel like this?”

This anxiety is fascinating, coming from someone who is so fearless on-screen. One senses it in the way she clams up when asked about Bardem. I knew she’d been mum about her high-profile assignations for years, so I was expecting her to forget her very good English when I went anywhere near the Pratesis. Still, I was surprised by her mantra-like response: We can’t go there …we can’t go there … It’s not that she pretends the relationship doesn’t exist—one can’t really do that successfully these days, not when everything ends up on the Internet, true and false. It’s more that she is protective of her privacy to a point that is striking, even for performers who don’t like to kiss and tell. (Her wariness of the press may date in part from the early notoriety she earned for Jamón, Jamón.) Her discipline about not even confirming what she knew I already knew—and what I knew that she knew I knew—was both touching and almost comic. There were long pauses and big eyes. (She slipped up only once. I brought up a U2 concert that she and Bardem had attended in Paris, mentioning that I’d heard she was playing air guitar during some of the songs. She squealed with delight, saying, “Javier is even better at air guitar!”) My most nosey Parker question—one that I felt it was my duty as a reporter to ask—was whether the widespread rumors that there was a wee Cruz-Bardem on the way were true. (The blogs have been a riot with their speculation about baby bumps and “strategically placed pleats.”) Here, unlike before, there was no telling silence from Cruz. Instead she answered in the negative but in a rather baroque, roundabout way, detailing how Almodóvar had tried, to no avail, to put that rumor to rest when a journalist asked him about it recently on a red carpet.

She and Bardem, who is famously private, are probably Spain’s two greatest living actors and they’re spicy, which makes them fodder for many a paparazzo’s long-range lens; they seem to be trying hard to figure out how to have a lasting relationship with each other, and not with the world as the third party, as so many Hollywood couples do now. But that doesn’t mean Cruz locks herself up in a tower. For our talks for this piece, she suggested we meet at the Boathouse in Central Park, a very public venue. I imagined her being pursued by tourists and us having to get in a boat to be able to talk in private. So instead, we ended up sitting in my back garden in Greenwich Village. But the boat capsizing would have been a perfectly Almodóvar-esque sequel to our adventure years ago with the flatbed. Penélope making a splash yet again.

Source: VF.com

The picture, Almodovar’s fourth collaboration with Cruz, which is in competition at the Cannes film festival, recalls “films noirs,” classic comedies and screen sirens of the past.

It includes a scene from Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio In Italia starring Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders and the film-within-a-film revisits Almodovar’s 1988 hit Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown.
“I fully believe that cinema can make life more perfect,” the Oscar winner told reporters recently after Broken Embraces was warmly applauded at a press screening.

Cruz plays Lena, a secretary, who ends up in a relationship with her wealthy boss Ernesto. Also an aspiring actress, she is spotted by the charismatic director Mateo Blanco with whom she quickly falls in love.

When Mateo loses his sight in a car accident, he adopts his pseudonym Harry Caine and reinvents himself completely in order to avoid the painful memories of the past.

Almodovar likened his character’s experience to that of his home country, saying Spain rightly buried its past after the end of fascism in the 1970s.

“At that time, it was necessary to forget the past. Spain has been a democratic country for over 30 years now… Things have changed a great deal. The time has come to recover these memories from the past. It is even indispensable to do so.”

ACTING CHALLENGE

Cruz said playing Lena as well as Lena’s character in the film-within-a-film was a test of her acting skills.

“The film in the film wasn’t easier, I’d say quite the opposite, it was even more difficult,” said the 35-year-old, who has been battling a bout of ’flu in Cannes.

“Playing the same scene several times, once well and being a good actress and then playing it badly, is extremely subtle, very tricky,” added the star, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. “Sometimes on the same day I had to go from one character to another … so it was all a little bit confused.”

Asked to compare working with Almodovar and Allen, she said, “They could not be more different … With Pedro, we always rehearse for a long time before. Woody doesn’t like to rehearse. He really likes everybody to improvise. It’s really a very, very different way of approaching things.”

Almodovar is best known for strong female roles and he again paid tribute to the women who raised him. But the director, a favourite in Cannes, who has yet to win the Palme d’Or, said men would have more prominence from now on.

“So far my male characters intimidated me somewhat because for a male character, I had to take myself as a reference, but now I feel less and less intimidated and so you are going to find more and more male characters in my films.” Almodovar said he did not expect to win Cannes this year.

“I am going to be leaving Cannes on Friday so I don’t get the impression that I am waiting for an award,” he said, before adding: “But I am quite prepared to come back on Sunday even if it’s to get an award for the best actor or the best director.”

Also featuring in Cannes recently was Italian competition entry Vincere, directed by Marco Bellocchio. The film, based on the true story of a mistress cast aside by Benito Mussolini, offers a different perspective on the Italian fascist leader.

Source: Screen India

The star shot Broken Embraces with fellow Spaniard Pedro Almodovar at the same time as making Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Woody Allen.

She said: “It was good to be able to pass each of them messages – they seem to like each other very much.”

Penelope, who has made four films with Almodovar, said the two directors’ approaches could not be more different.

While Almodovar gets his actors to rehearse scenes thoroughly and likes to re-shoot sequences in different ways, she said, Allen prefers having virtually no rehearsal or preparation, and encourages improvisation.

“It’s a very very different way of approaching film,” she said.

Broken Embraces, which tells the story of a film-maker who goes blind after an accident, and his struggle to re-engage with life, is in competition for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Source: The Press Association

That’s what the Oscars nominee told Gold Derby tonight when I called her in Madrid to ask her what she’d do next Sunday when this derby race is done, the victor is known and, win or lose, she can finally catch her breath.

Penelope Cruz has four extra tickets to the ceremony, so she’ll be at the Academy Awards with her brother, sister, mom (dad got to go to Golden Globes and BAFTA) “and one of my best friends from Spain from when I was a little girl,” she said. “I want my family to have a good night. To win, it would be an amazing thing! But I want to enjoy the night and the people around me.”

But tonight she coped with the pre-Oscars jitters by drinking herbal tea as we gabbed on the phone. She leaves Madrid in the morning to head to L.A. and begin her exciting week.

Penelope Cruz shared such thoughts with us plus the details of her schedule for the week ahead in L.A. She’s got lots of fittings scheduled to pick out the right dress for her march up the Oscars’ red carpet plus such work-related gigs as a photo shoot for her upcoming movie, Nine, directed by Rob Marshall (Chicago), based on the Tony Award-winning musical.

“For me this has already been bigger than anything I could ever dream of,” she told us. “I started working in Spain when I was 16. To be in this situation twice, with the other nomination for Volver, I am the first person to be surprised and overwhelmed . . . . Whatever happens, it’s been a great adventure from the making of Vicky Cristina Barcelona to the great surprises that came with it and after.”

Oh, yeah, and by the way, Penelope Cruz proves she has great cyber-taste. “I am a big fan of your website,” she says. “I do look at the The Envelope, but I try not to read about myself… ”

Source: LA Times

The Vicky Cristina Barcelona star has revealed she has had two breakdowns, the first when she was just 17.

She said: “I’ve worked myself to exhaustion in the past but now my life feels more balanced. Once my life was all about work, yet now I do take time for myself.

“It was a hard lesson to learn that sometimes it is so much healthier to say no even to a role that you like.”

The 34-year-old actress had her second mental breakdown in 2002, after back-to-back film shoots for Woman on Top, All The Pretty Horses, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin and Blow.

Now, she only accepts roles that really challenge her acting skills.

Her latest performance – she play the volatile and self-destructive Maria Elena, a woman who is locked in a complicated love triangle with Javier Bardem and Scarlet Johansson in Woody Allen’s latest comedy – is no exception.

She adds: “I think that type of fear is what I am always looking for as an actress. The more distance there is between the character and myself the better.

“I never need to be like my characters, to agree with them ever, I just need to understand them.”

Source: My Park Mag & Showbiz Now

For the issue, actors were photographed with little make-up and hairstyling and with candid imagery. Cruz was photographed on the set of Nine, she’s seen rehearsing a dance number for the very first time! She’s also snapped back in New York before what would become her Gotham Award win. The images are stunning; just candid and gorgeous!

Other celebrities featured include Kate Winslet (honored for The Reader and Revolutionary Road), Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder and Iron Man), Kat Dennings (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist), Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler), Sean Penn (Milk), Brad Pitt (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button) and Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon). Winslet is on the cover.

The Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Outstanding Performer of the Year Award for 2009 goes to Penélope Cruz, in all the grace of her countenance’s exquisite thematic harmony. A classic beauty whose dark good looks and luminous brown eyes recall the Golden Age of Hollywood, the Spanish-born actress is in her mid thirties now, and both her career and her appeal have matured. The sensual excitement of her early years is still very much in evidence, but Cruz’s recent work is that of someone who knows not only that she is beautiful, but also what that can mean in a world where beauty is not the only important thing.

In the last three years, Cruz has gone from being a thinking man’s pin-up to something much less common: a world-class movie star. Her two films from 2008, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Elegy, have together brought her new accolades such as this one, along with a nomination for best supporting actress at the Golden Globes, and a shot at another nomination for the Academy Award, for which she was already nominated once, in the category of Best Actress for her 2007 role as Raimunda in Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver.

Cruz is a hard worker, known to directors and fellow actors alike for her intensity and perfectionism. Adaptable to a wide range of styles, she acts with equal effectiveness in Spanish and in English, and handles fast-paced shooting schedules and demanding leading roles with extraordinary artistic control and vision. Contemporary film acting is hardly a homogenous experience for someone operating on her level and traveling in these professional circles. Directors frequently take radically different approaches to the filmmaking process, and, as a result, comparable assignments don’t necessarily resemble one another.

For instance, compare Volver and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Almodóvar rehearses for weeks or even months before shooting, whereas Allen often doesn’t rehearse his actors at all. Cruz is in nearly every scene of Volver, which runs just longer than two hours, and was required by Almodóvar to submit to an exacting set of rehearsals. On Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in which she plays Maria Elena—a gorgeous, romantic, and emotionally unstable Spanish artist—Cruz auditioned for the film by speaking with Allen for what she claims was “no more than 40 seconds.” She then waited a few weeks before receiving a script, which she studied on her own for several months before arriving on the set in Spain.

The intelligence and honor with which she invests Maria Elena is due to the power of the interpretation of the character that Cruz brought to the film. As the ex-wife of Javier Bardem’s character, the painter Juan Antonio, Cruz’s Maria Elena enters the story at the halfway point and still manages to steal every scene she’s in from the two formidable younger actresses who have been playing the leads from the start—Scarlett Johansson as Cristina and Rebecca Hall as Vicky. Johansson does a great job, but even Cruz’s silent reaction shots are more likely to elicit laughter than Johansson’s lines of dialogue.

At the film’s heart are two dazzling performances by Cruz and Bardem that put the English language to a fearsome test of mettle against its seemingly more expressive rival, Spanish. In the scenes at Juan Antonio’s studio when Maria Elena first arrives, she keeps speaking Spanish in front of Cristina, even though Juan Antonio expressly forbids her to speak anything but English out of politeness to his lover. The result is an intricate and amazing dance of words, with both Spanish characters crossing in and out of their native tongue in such elegant and unpredictable ways that the viewer is drawn ever deeper into their emotional world.

In Elegy, Cruz plays Consuela Castillo, a young Cuban woman who has an affair with her professor at Columbia, played by Ben Kingsley. Critics have been less unanimous in their praise for Elegy, but the growing consensus is that Cruz shows up Kingsley. Although the timely release of several trailers that indicated how willing Cruz remains to get naked in front of the camera may have had something to do with its gaining distribution in this country, in the end what people are buzzing about in relation to this picture is not Cruz’s nudity but her naturalism.

In fact, the fascinating thing about her recent roles is how lit up they are from within by Penélope Cruz’s singular talent. Perhaps it was something that happened when she absorbed the joyfully absurd aesthetic of her mentor Almodóvar, or maybe it is something that would have arrived on its own, but Cruz has begun to play these rather traditional roles in a way that is very special and that feels new. Constantly playing against any tendency to caricature her subjects, she describes her method as “defending what the character values and preserving her reality.” In the process of taking these women’s dilemmas to heart, Cruz melds drama and comedy into a complex and indivisible unity.

Her recent performances are exemplary of a development in genre that will only become more prevalent as film grows into the 21st century—movies acted as drama, but that play as subtle comedy. For directors like Almodóvar and Allen, this confluence of genre reflects a profound appreciation for the ways that human beings fail to achieve clarity about the most central issues in their lives.

A concern for the suffering of people who are confused by life and sex and love is something that Cruz shares with her directors, and her feeling for it informs her acting in both of the pictures being honored here in Santa Barbara. But what constitutes suffering in the life of one of the world’s most glamorous and successful women? One word—the Oscars. Being nominated two years ago was both the high point of Cruz’s career thus far and her most exhaustingly emotional ordeal as a celebrity. What with all the tension, and the chance that her nomination would remain just that—a nomination and not a statuette—there was only one thing for the nervous actress to do. On the way to the Academy Awards, already in her gown and jewels, Penélope Cruz stopped at In-n-Out and ordered a double-double. It’s that kind of carefree attitude that we can’t wait to share when she arrives in Santa Barbara for her tribute at the Arlington.

Penélope Cruz was be honored at SBIFF 2009 with the Outstanding Performer of the Year Award on Saturday, January 24, at the Arlington Theatre.

Source: SBIFF

I spoke to Cruz over the weekend. She was calling from somewhere in the hills of Los Angeles, on a cell-phone. At first, the signal died, and I thought, oh well, modern technology! But Penelope didn’t give up. She got to a landline. Cruz has the sort of vital personality that leaps right off the screen, and right through phone wires too. She pulls you in. (When I met her in the flesh a few years back, I was blown away by her good looks, her lively intelligence and her energy.) It’s hard to believe this vibrant star was thought to be something of a “flop” in American films, with the early disappointments of All The Pretty Horses and Vanilla Sky. Also hard to believe she was ever involved with Tom Cruise. That friendship, which blossomed in the wake of his divorce from Nicole Kidman, was tabloid fodder only nine years ago, but it seems like 20, somehow. She says she is thrilled to have been nominated again. (Her first bid for Oscar was 2006′s Volver, directed by her old friend and mentor, Pedro Almodovar.) “Although, I have to call my family everyday, in Spain, to calm them down, so they don’t get too hopeful.” When I remark that “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” wasn’t a “typical” Woody Allen movie, and that he seems quite the revitalized auteur over the past couple of years, Penelope protests. “Really? I think he’s always re-inventing himself, over and over. He can do anything. Compare, ‘Scoop’ to ‘Purple Rose of Cairo’ or to ‘Hannah and Her Sisters’ or ‘Bullets Over Broadway’”… Penelope gives such a compelling dissertation on the work of Woody Allen, I finally concede, lamely, “Well, I guess it’s that he’s changed locale. Most of his movies used to be set in New York. Now he’s gone European.” Penelope allows that yes, I’m right on that one.

The actress speaks English perfectly, though with a strong, charming, accent. She recalls with horror her first adventures in American moviemaking (she was already a great star in Spain.) “I’d studied French for years. But I had no English, nothing, zero. It was terrible not to be able to really understand your director or your co-stars. I took a crash course, and luckily I picked it up quickly.” Cruz took ballet for nine years at Spain’s National Academy. With that training, has she ever played a dancer? “No, I haven’t. But I did get to dance and sing and a lot else in ‘Nine.’ I do the number ‘A Phone Call to the Vatican’ which has me performing with ropes. I hadn’t danced at all in 14 years. I practiced that number every day, five hours a day from August to November. When we finally shot it, I was so sad when it was all over. It had become part of my life. Now I’m thinking of hanging some ropes around my house, just to remind me of the joy I had with that.” Penelope laughs heartily when I say ropes hanging from her ceiling might alarm first-time visitors!

Of the filming itself she says, “It was an incredible experience, because I am in a blinding spotlight, and I couldn’t see beyond it. It was all darkness, and I’m performing on a mirrored platform. All I could think was, I’m never going to do this again, which made me unhappy, I’m terrified and the fear is kind of beautiful, and I so don’t want to disappoint Rob Marshall, the director.”

The movie Nine, an adaptation of Tommy Tune’s Broadway hit ( based on Fellini’s famous film “8½”) also stars Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Stacy Ferguson and Kate Hudson. It is one of 2009′s most eagerly awaited events. And it is another Weinstein Company effort. Ah, yes, the world is breathing easier!

I said to Penelope that I’d always thought a dance background — no matter what you eventually end up doing — improves discipline in general. “You are right! A dancer’s life is hard. And so is an actor’s, though most people don’t see it that way. They only see the glamour. But that discipline helps when I have to work 17 hours a day, or it’s cold, or hot or horribly uncomfortable in some way. Or just boring, which fimmaking often is. I feel I am more prepared to face an on set adversity.”

Up Next for Penelope is Broken Embraces, once again paired with Pedro Almodovar. She raves over her friend, “He is a genius. He writes the most incredible roles for women. In this one, ‘Broken Embraces,’ I am an actress playing two roles, one comedy, one drama, one real-life, one the movie she is making. A movie-within-a-movie. It’s complex, mind-blowing. I am so lucky to have him in my life.

“He is ITAL already ITAL writing another screenplay. He never stops. And he never compromises. He is totally honest. I think he would give his life for his movies; he is that passionate. He loves all movies, and sees everything. We are ITAL both ITAL obsessed with movies, actually.”

I ask if, in her passion for movies she can still lose herself in them? Forget that she herself is an actress?

“Oh, yes I can. I don’t think I will ever lose that. Especially if the movie is good. Then I never think about the technique or the camera or lighting or I wonder how many takes ITAL that ITAL took, or why wasn’t this a close-up or long-shot. I become an ordinary audience.”

But, what if the movie isn’t good? Penelope laughs, “Oh, God. Then I totally exhaust myself picking it apart. I leave the theater feeling I’d just come off that set, on a bad day. It’s much easier for me when the movie is good!”

I congratulate Penelope again on her nomination. I ask, because it’s the tiresome but necessary question, if it ITAL really ITAL matters to her if she wins? “Hmmm…what can I say? It’s not a lie that it is an honor to be nominated, and if I don’t win, I won’t be any less honored, but…look, ask anyone who is nominated. No matter what you think you feel about awards, when you’re there, sitting in that seat, with those people, all dressed up–ITAL of course ITAl you want to win!”

Source: Variety

Spanish beauty Penelope revealed that the director was so concerned about a mark that had mysteriously appeared on his hand that he left the set to go to see a dermatologist.

The director had been filming a scene between Penelope and co-star Scarlett where they kiss in a darkroom for the film Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which premiered last night at London Film Festival’s Sky Movies HD Gala.

“Everyone’s been talking about this kiss between me and Scarlett but on the day all the attention was on Woody and the stain on his hand,” she said.

“Even when we resumed filming he was still looking at it!”

Meanwhile, the director was forced to skip the premiere because it clashed with his children’s half-term.

A source told Metro: “Usually he brings his whole family with him when he gooes to premieres but because it clashed with half-term he had to miss it.”

None of the film’s other stars Scarlett, Javier Bardem, and Rebecca Hall attended the premiere.

Source: Metro.co.uk

The movie, which also stars Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, is showing as part of the BFI 52nd London Film Festival. It concerns the tangled love lives of Americans abroad in Barcelona.

Cruz plays Maria, the tempestuous ex-wife of a free-spirited artist in the film, which is directed by Woody Allen and was shown at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Cruz, wearing a black L’Wren dress, said: “I fell in love with the character.”

She added that it was “amazing” to work with Allen.

The Sky Gala screening in London’s Leicester Square was being followed by a Sky Gala party in West London.

Source: Press Association

Penélope Cruz doesn’t like talking about her personal life, and blames the internet. “I have a big reluctance to talk about anything that might later be misconstrued,” she says.

“I was not worried before, but since the internet, every time you do an interview, three hundred other people are going to take that story and turn it into something else. I wish I could be more relaxed and funnier in interviews but I can’t because I always regret it afterwards. I take my work very seriously and I don’t want it to be manipulated into something else.”

Another reason for her reluctance is probably her aversion to being asked about her becoming romantically involved with some of her leading men. To her irritation, reports of that aspect of her life have often taken prominence over discussions of her acting, and she has always denied suggestions that she has deliberately set her sights on her male co-stars.

For the past year, the 34-year-old actress has been in a settled relationship with her most recent leading man, Javier Bardem, 39, her fellow Spaniard and multi-award-winning actor whom she first met when she was 16 when they worked together in the film Jamón, jamón and who co-stars in her new movie, Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

In between, they have appeared in three other films together, and while they are reluctant to talk about their relationship, friends of the couple say this could be the one that lasts.
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When they have finished promoting Vicky Cristina Barcelona, they plan to take a house together in London, where Cruz will spend five months rehearsing and filming the musical Nine, with a cast that includes Nicole Kidman, Daniel Day-Lewis, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren and Marion Cotillard.

Cruz, who studied classical ballet for 10 years, auditioned four times for one of three roles in the movie before director Rob Marshall cast her as Carla, the sexy mistress. Rehearsals begin later this month and will continue until shooting begins in October.

“I can’t wait to start – I’m so excited,” she says. “It will be hours of dancing, hours of singing and I can’t wait to have my feet bleeding again, like when I was a dancer, because I know that feeling.”

We meet in Los Angeles a few hours before she and her co-stars, Bardem, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, are due to meet up with Woody Allen on the red carpet for the premiere of Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which many critics say is one of Allen’s best movies for a long time.

The petite actress did not learn English until she was 19, and she talks quickly with a strong accent.

“I wanted to be able to work in other places, not just in my country, so I learned English late and when I was 23 I got my first movie in English, Hi-Lo Country with Stephen Frears and I learned my lines phonetically,” she says.

“I didn’t have any command of the language and it was very painful because I didn’t know what people were saying. I was just thinking what I had to say and concentrating on being clear and understood.

“It was very frustrating and that pushed me to spend a lot of time studying with different teachers.

So now when I am on the set and working in English I feel happy that I don’t have to be thinking about the words because when I do that, it takes away a lot of the freedom and the pleasure of acting. I’m happy that nobody complains about the accent any more and I worked hard for that and I’m still working on it.”

Cruz grew up in Alcobendas, a working-class suburb on the outskirts of Madrid. Her father, a car mechanic, is divorced from her beautician mother but she remains close to them both. After studying ballet, she auditioned at 15 for a talent agent, who signed her immediately.

At 18, she went to New York to continue her dance studies in the East Village and burst on to the international scene in 1992 in the sexy art-house hit Jamón, jamón.

It was in Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 Oscar-winning All About My Mother that she caught Hollywood’s attention, since when she has skilfully divided her time between big-budget blockbusters that pay the bills and art house-style films (Volver, Non ti muovere) that continue to build her reputation as an actress.

On film sets she has established a reputation for sweetness banded with steely professionalism. She has starred with a remarkable crop of leading men – Nicolas Cage in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, Matt Damon in All the Pretty Horses, and, most famously, Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky.

Cruz went on to have a three-year relationship with Cruise, and then dated Matthew McConaughey, her co-star in Sahara. “I’ve never fallen in love with someone I’m working with,” she has claimed. “It’s always been afterwards. If something becomes friendship, then maybe months later it becomes something else, but you can never know. It’s always a mystery. You can’t plan those things.”

She fell in love with Bardem while playing his fiery and tempestuous ex-wife in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Woody Allen recalls that during the filming in Barcelona, Cruz and Bardem often spoke passionately to each other in Spanish, and he had no idea what they were saying, although he is full of praise for Cruz.

“She has everything,” he says. “She’s very sexy, is very, very beautiful and she’s also a great actress who can get a laugh if you need a laugh or be tempestuous if that’s what you need. There are no limits on her career.”

After Vicky Cristina Barcelona wrapped, Cruz remained in Spain to star for her old friend and mentor Almodóvar in the noir thriller Broken Embraces. “I think it is the most complex and most demanding of his movies. I love working with him. It is always a very intense experience.

“Pedro and Woody – what they have in common is so much talent that sometimes I cry on the set just from seeing how somebody can be so good at what they do and how they are touched by something that is so difficult to put into words.”

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, as in many of her films, she plays a woman searching for happiness, which is something she can relate to.

“In the end we are all looking for the same thing, no? We all want to be happy and we all have different ways of looking for it and finding it. I guess that’s why we’re all here.”

Vicky Cristina Barcelona will be released later this year.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

Calling from Madrid, where she is currently shooting director Pedro Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces, Cruz sounds somber. There is only a hint of the warm, passionate quality that she naturally exudes in face-to-face conversation, a quality that not surprisingly attracts her male co-stars and then, if a romance starts, the paparazzi.

The 34-year-old actress is tired of being more famous for her boyfriends – her exes include Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey – than her work. So she is in lockdown mode, poised to deflect questions about her current boyfriend, Spanish actor Javier Bardem, who earlier this year won an Oscar as best supporting actor for his work in No Country for Old Men (2007).

The situation is particularly complicated because Bardem is her co-star in Woody Allen’s latest movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, a romantic comedy that presents them as Jose and Maria Elena, artists and lovers who have a tempestuous relationship. Not until an American artist-wannabe (Scarlett Johansson) arrives and they embark upon a menage a trois do things calm down.

Would Cruz be willing to share a man?

“When I’m preparing a character, I don’t ask myself, ‘What I would do in this situation?’ ” she says evasively. “I don’t feel I have to be like them. I just need to understand them.”

What can she say about her kissing scene with Johansson?

“I’ve been asking Woody to give me some interesting lines,” she jokes. “I don’t have any funny stories, just that the set was more crowded than ever that day!”

Cruz flourished under Allen’s direction, she reports.

“It’s very interesting to see how, in most of Woody’s movies, comedy can come from real pain,” she says. “That’s always the irony of life. When I read the script I laughed, but when I was preparing the character and shooting I completely forgot about everything that could be funny. I felt I was doing a drama.

“Woody was very clever in making sure that none of us were aware of the moments that could be funny,” she adds. “Maria Elena suffers so much. I was very surprised when I saw the movie with an audience, and saw how much people laughed. All the characters are struggling and trying to resolve deep problems and big questions, and it’s very funny.”

Until recently Cruz’s most critically praised performances have been in European films such as Live Flesh (1997), Open Your Eyes (1997), All About My Mother (1999), Don’t Move (2004) and Volver (2006), for the last of which she was nominated for an Oscar as best actress. Initially such English-language films as The Hi-Lo Country (1998), All the Pretty Horses (2000), Blow (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001) and Sahara (2005) used her beauty more than her acting abilities, but she credits her increasing command of English for her ability to play more complex English-speaking characters in recent films.

“Now, after working and living for part of the time in America for a few years, I feel more free and relaxed,” she says. “You need the language to survive. That’s how you learn.”

In her film Elegy, playing in theaters in larger cities, Cruz plays a student who falls in love with her college professor (Ben Kingsley). The film is based on Philip Roth’s novel The Dying Animal (2007), and investigates the power of love and the effect that beauty can have on a relationship.

“I love the complexity of the characters,” Cruz says. “My character ignores (her beauty) out of respect for herself. She’s not allowing it to be an issue. He’s so afraid of falling in love with her because, in many ways, she’s more the adult. She has her own fears, but he has many fears that stop him from being brave enough to try to be happy.”

Until this year Cruz has had to content herself with less challenging work in American movies.

“I don’t want to complain about the ones I did earlier,” she says, “because I had a lot of opportunities to work with wonderful people. But the characters I’m being offered now in English demand more of me emotionally and at different levels.

“I couldn’t have played Maria Elena five years ago,” the actress explains, “because I had much less control of English. Many times Woody asked us to improvise and go back and forth in English and Spanish.”

Although Maria Elena is on screen for less than half the movie, she is hard to ignore.

“I was fascinated by Maria Elena,” Cruz says. “I don’t think I would want to be her in real life, but she was very attractive to play. A lot of it had to do with understanding her mind and the pain that she’s in 24 hours a day. She lives in a dark space and is very tortured. Her head is her prison.

“She’s the most extreme character I’ve played in English,” the actress says. “Every time she comes into a scene, she brings chaos. She doesn’t do it on purpose – it’s the only way she can relate to another human being.

“I didn’t want to treat her like a crazy person. I wanted to create a reality and find all the justifications she uses to behave like that.”

Cruz has been creating alternate realities since she was a child growing up in Madrid. The eldest of three children of an auto mechanic and a hairdresser, she studied acting informally at her mother’s salon.

“I used to get quiet there to be able to observe the women,” she recalls. “I’d wait for them to relax as much as possible so I could see them in action, the way they were with my mother, all their different behaviors. Women are complex. It was a very good school for acting.”

Which was good, because her real school wasn’t going so well.

“I’m strong and opinionated,” Cruz says bluntly, “and those qualities brought me a lot of problems since I was a little girl in school, saying, ‘I don’t agree,’ and fighting with the children.

“It’s OK,” she continues, “because it’s part of my curiosity for life. I don’t want it to change because of fear of what people think. I’m a Taurus, so I have the combination of temper and stubbornness. I think it’s helped me a lot in my career to be stubborn.

“I developed discipline as a child by studying ballet,” she adds. “I worked hard for what I wanted. I never expected things to come by themselves.”

Cruz made her film debut at 17 in Jamon, Jamon (1992) and has worked steadily since, gaining international acclaim with her three Almodóvar films, Live Flesh, All About My Mother and Volver. Broken Embraces, their fourth collaboration, is every bit a match for its predecessors, she says.

“What Pedro wrote is beyond beautiful,” Cruz says. “I play three characters in one. She’s an actress, so in the movie we have the character she plays, and then she also leads two different lives in her private life.”

Also upcoming for Cruz is her first venture into animation, as she voices a guinea pig named Juarez in Disney’s G-Force, due out next year.

“She has a very big temper,” Cruz says. “She’s also very funny. I don’t think she looks like me, but she has some of my expressions.”

In the fall Cruz will begin rehearsals for Nine, a film musical based on the 1980s Broadway hit that was itself adapted from Federico Fellini’s movie “8½” (1963). She will play Carla, the mistress of the Fellini-esque film director (Daniel Day-Lewis) who is the film’s protagonist.

“I studied dance for 17 years,” Cruz says, “and I’m really looking forward to dancing and singing. ’8½’ is one of my favorite movies. I watch it once or twice a year. It’s perfection from beginning to end.”

Which leaves only one question to answer: What can she say about Javier Bardem?

There is a long silence, before Cruz finally speaks.

“He’s an amazing, talented actor,” she says carefully.

For any further insights, you’ll have to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

Source: Reading Eagle

Where are you based these days?
Madrid has always been my main home because my family is here and I have a house here. I spend a lot of time in Los Angeles, too, but I’ve always preferred New York.

Do you still take ballet classes?
Filming the musical Nine with Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicole Kidman and Sophia Loren gave me a big reason to dance five-six hours a day. I’m really excited about the movie.

With Elegy, it seems you’re really coming into your own with an English-language role.
Now that I have spent all those years studying, and living where they speak the language, I feel more free, though I still have my accent. Woody Allen asked me to improvise in English and Spanish. I couldn’t have done that three or four years ago. It’s great not having to hear anymore that I don’t speak English well.

And what was it like, working with Woody Allen?
He’s not a man of too many words. I would go to him with all these questions about the character and he’d say, “We can do this if you want, but I trust where you’re going with the character.” He’s very direct and very funny. Of course I would have liked more time, but he shoots a whole movie in about five weeks.

Source: Screen India Times

At the previous Oscars, Penelope Cruz (Volver) posed the most serious threat to usurp Helen Mirren (The Queen) in the best-actress race but, having failed, now seems due to reign too. At the derby before that, many Oscarwatchers thought Woody Allen would finally have his big comeback, but Match Point, despite nabbing a screenplay nomination, didn’t catch fire, so the three-time winner is now sparking new heat.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a more appropriate vehicle to return Woody Allen to Oscars glory since it’s what he does best. Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a comedy, and Woody Allen’s career could sure use a smile. His flicks have mostly fizzled this decade. The Hollywood Reporter was among the media that lambasted his previous film Cassandra’s Dream (2007): “As writer, Allen offers lazy plotting, poor characterization, dull scenes and flat dialogue.”

If Woody Allen wins a screenplay Oscar for Vicky Cristina Barcelona, it’ll be his first since Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) and his third overall after best-picture champ Annie Hall (1977) earned him gold for writing and directing. But let’s recall that Woody Allen didn’t bother to show up to accept those honors. In 1978 (for the ’77 awards), it was far more important to him to remain in New York to play his clarinet in the New Orleans Marching and Funeral Band at Michael’s Pub.

Back then he scoffed, “I have no regard for that kind of ceremony. I just don’t think they know what they’re doing. When you see who wins those things — or who doesn’t win them — you can see how meaningless this Oscar thing is.”

But lots of stars have blasted the Oscars just like that, then turned around and — in the grand tradition of Hollywood hypocrisy — accepted the golden statuette with glee. Think Glenda Jackson, who denounced the kudofest as “a public hanging,” and Dustin Hoffman, who pooh-poohed it as “an obscene evening.”

Woody Allen did his flipflop in recent years, actually attending the ceremonies in 2002 (for the 2001 awards) and 2007 (for 2006 kudos). Voters may have been reluctant to embrace him with victory after he was tainted with a sex scandal, but they recently forgave Roman Polanski (best director, The Pianist, 2002), who battled similar woes.

After all, Woody Allen is one of the academy’s longtime darlings. After ignoring him throughout the first decade of his blazing career (Bananas, Sleeper), members more than caught up with him afterward. In fact, Woody holds the record for most screenplay nominations (14), compared to 12 for Billy Wilder. However, both Allen and Wilder have 21 nominations overall.

Woody Allen directed 14 actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Michael Caine (Hannah and Her Sisters), Judy Davis (Husbands and Wives), Mariel Hemingway (Manhattan), Diane Keaton (Annie Hall), Martin Landau (Crimes and Misdemeanors), Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown), Geraldine Page (Interiors), Chazz Palminteri (Bullets Over Broadway), Sean Penn (Sweet and Lowdown), Mira Sorvino (Mighty Aphrodite), Maureen Stapleton (Interiors), Jennifer Tilly (Bullets Over Broadway), Dianne Wiest (Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway), and himself (Annie Hall). Caine, Keaton and Sorvino won Oscars — Wiest did so twice.

Now Woody Allen claims that he wrote Vicky Cristina Barcelona specifically for Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Scarlett Johansson. Penelope Cruz has just the kind of flashy part that gets his characters noticed by the academy. Scarlett Johansson is outrageously overdue for her first nomination.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Even after being asked, though, Cruz found the prospect of working with one of film’s best-known directors daunting: “You can trust the director — you’re working with Woody Allen, you’re working with a genius — but that doesn’t mean you’re not going to be doubting yourself. …”

I asked Cruz if the fact that her character Maria Elena is so intense — always at 100 % or more, always on the edge of crazy — made it hard to see her as a person, to inhabit her as a character, instead of playing a part and speaking lines? “No, the opposite. I think one of the worst things that can happen to someone is to feel trapped in your own head, like (Maria Elena) feels. She’s stuck in the role of the victim; somebody told her, when she was growing up, that she was a genius and that she was too special to be happy; that if she wanted to stay special, she had to torture herself. She’s believed those ideas — it’s not in the movie, but I wonder who that person was, who ruined her head forever. And she has believed it, and she keeps feeding the monster. Because everyone all the time is telling her how special she is. But she thinks that to maintain that, she has to keep destroying herself. It’s like a circle that just keeps going nowhere, and I found her to be a character that really suffers, that’s stuck in a place and doesn’t know how to come out of that. So for me, you ask me if it’s not so human; I think the opposite.” Cruz finds the process of inhabiting a character … an endless education …” ; I asked her what she learned from Maria Elena. “I feel even more compassion for people who live in that place in their heads, people who really feel trapped. It made me understand how difficult it is to … to name someone crazy is so relative. I’ve always been very interested in this subject, and this character is a lot about that. ”

I asked Rebecca Hall, who plays the cautious and contemplative Vicky, about the close but guarded friendship between Vicky and Scarlett Johansson’s Cristina; did the two actresses take any time to create that? “Well, it helped that we had worked together before (in The Prestige); we were immediately familiar. We weren’t friends; we hadn’t really spent any time to become friends before, We didn’t hang out consciously in order to create that dynamic; we hung out because we got on really well. So we didn’t really worry about it, and it just happened quite naturally.”

I also asked Hall and Chris Messina, who plays Vicky’s fiancée Doug, if there were ever any moments where, reading the script, they might have felt that the 72-year-old Allen’s lines may not have suited their younger characters. Messina stated that wasn’t the case. “I loved it; in fact, the biggest direction he gave me was ‘Do it again, and say it in your own words, say something different.’ That’s fun to do as an actor, a lot of the time — but it’s harder to do when it’s Woody Allen, and the writing is so great. But he wanted you to say it in your own words. So I didn’t feel like that at all.” Hall offered her perspective on the generation gap between the author and the characters: “I don’t feel like human emotions change that much. Maybe if you talk to him (Allen) about e-mail, or talked about downloading something … but I think otherwise, (Allen’s) pretty spot-on.”

But that’s not to say there weren’t other challenges. I asked Messina about the fact that his character’s a bit of a nebbish, the guy who’s going to be cuckolded; when he read the script, did he think Well, that’s not something I can sympathize with, but it’s in a Woody Allen film …? Did he know and accept from the outset that he was going to be the drone wearing khakis? “A little bit of all of that, yeah; I would not want to play that role — but, for Woody Allen, would do anything. I wrestled with trying to make this guy three-dimensional. … He loves this woman. He wants to start a family. He wants to get a home. You don’t judge him at all, as an actor, as a bad guy. He loves this girl. Is it hard? Very. Is it hard to come home from work? Of course you bring that home, because you’ve kissed Rebecca Hall, the beautiful Rebecca Hall, in a scene. And because she’s such a great actress, you feel her not quite present in the kiss. You feel her pull away. Do you want to be Javier Bardem, kissing all the beautiful women? Absolutely. It’s not a role I really want to ever play again, but I was so proud to do that in this film. ”

Hall also offered some insight into how Allen crafts comedies — mostly by not making them during filming. “I saw the film in Cannes, which was a completely overwhelming experience … they gave it this ridiculously long standing ovation, to the point that I began to feel like a right melon. They laughed hilariously … I knew they were going to laugh; well, I hoped they were going to laugh. Admittedly, Woody did … if you asked him “Is this a comedy?” he’d say “No, this isn’t a comedy.” And I completely understand what he was doing, because for it to work, for any of these things to be funny, if it’s genuinely funny, it’s because it’s truthful. And if you’ve got a bunch of actors who come on-set and think they’re making a comedy, then it’s not going to be funny, because the funniness about this film is the truth, is about the heart, about the fact that these are recognizable scenarios and recognizable modes of human behavior.”

I asked Scarlett Johansson, who plays Cristina, if the film’s murder-free plot made a change from Match Point and Scoop, her previous collaborations with Allen. “I guess that’s true. We have had quite a morbid … I had no idea; at first, we were just having lunch, and he didn’t say anything. I said “I hear you’re shooting in Barcelona with Pénelope Cruz … If I could be of any help, I’ll do craft service, I’ll pull focus — not very well, but. …” And he didn’t say anything about it. And I get the call from his casting director, saying that he would like me to read, maybe, for one of the parts, if I responded, would I be interested? Well, obviously, I read the script, and of course was very taken with the whole adventure, and they didn’t have to drag me kicking and screaming; any opportunity to work with Woody, I would take in a heartbeat. We always have such a wonderful time, and we have such a nice friendship. ”

But Johansson also found herself on the outside of a language barrier between her co-stars and herself; I asked her if not knowing what exactly Bardem and Cruz were saying in their squalling Spanish-language fights helped her in those scenes. “I knew a few little things they were saying; I did take Spanish, actually. … I thought that I was going to be really fluent when I left; Pénelope and Javier and the Spanish crew were very encouraging. I came there and I told everybody I was going to learn … But I almost didn’t want to know what (Cruz) was saying; it sounded terrible … and the few words I could understand, I thought “Ooh, that doesn‘t sound good. That’s a zinger.”

As the day drew to a close, I asked Johansson if she had a hypothetical vision of what comes for Cristina after the film’s finale. “I do think about it, of course … I think we all kind of wonder what happened, because it’s so open-ended. I’m assuming (Cristina) probably went on to more of these intense … I mean, her idea that only unfulfilled love could be romantic … is sad. Of course, in my mind, every character I play winds up in the suburbs with 2.5 children, but, that’s just the feeling I get. …”

Source: Cinematical

“All I can say about that is he’s one of the most amazing actors of our century,” Cruz says.

Bardem returns the compliment. “She’s just a beautiful actress,” he says. “I remember when we were much younger and met on the set of Jamon Jamon.”

If you’re expecting some tales of young lust, think again. Bardem says, “Thank God we did that movie. I was 22 and it was my first big role and it was her first role. We were young people who wanted to eat it all up.”

Cruz isn’t eating anything up this particular morning, but she’s drinking a 16-ounce glass of carrot juice. Her career is hot with two big summer films: Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona (now in theaters) and the Philip Roth adaptation Elegy (opening Friday). She’s currently in training to sing and dance in director Rob Marshall’s musical Nine.

And then there are those tabloid rumors about her engagement to Bardem, who she has reportedly been dating since meeting him on the set of the Allen movie.

“Is this the best time in my life? I have a real passion,” she begins. And just when the journalist seems very interested, Cruz adds, “I have a real passion for acting. I’ve had that passion since I was a little girl.

“I always say I try to remember every day how privileged I am to have a job I like so much. When I got my first movie at age 16, I thought it was my first and last.

“I’m able to get up in the morning and do a job I love, and I’m able to live from it. I never forget that feeling. I never want to forget that feeling. Now after 35 movies, it’s very important for me to keep remembering that.”

In Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Cruz plays gun-wielding artist Maria Elena, who can’t give up the ex-husband (Bardem) she stabbed in a moment of passion.

Packing heat

The woman-on-the-edge character isn’t for the faint of heart, Cruz says. At one point, she decides to shoot her ex and his latest arm candy.

“I was worried about the gun scene for the whole shoot,” Cruz admits. “With Woody there are no rehearsals. So I thought, ‘How am I going to come into a shot with a gun?’ It felt like one of the most difficult things I would ever have to do.

“But Woody wanted me to be this pathetic girl with a gun,” she adds. “So the day we shot that gun scene I was completely lost. Woody is so clever. I think he managed to make all of us forget that we were also doing a comedy.

“I was so blown away at a screening to hear that people were laughing,” Cruz says. “I thought I was doing the most serious and painful drama ever. My character lives in a very dark space.”

When Cruz comes on screen it’s after a suicide attempt. “I didn’t want to play her like a crazy person,” she says. “I wanted to create this reality she lives in. I didn’t just want to play someone who is mentally disturbed.

“I’ve met a few people who are that unstable,” she says. “She suffers and her pain is real.”

Cruz, 34, says that it was her agent who approached Allen for the role after he heard the legendary director would be filming a movie in Barcelona. “I met Woody in New York in a very short meeting — less than one minute,” she says. “But when I left, people told me, ‘You’ve been there for such a long time.’ Woody told me, ‘I saw you in Volver and I’m writing a story that’s not finished. I think you would be right for the part.’ He didn’t tell me anything more about the story or the character.”

Allen says, “I wrote the script specifically for Penelope, Javier and Scarlett [Johansson]. It was so funny to me that Penelope and Javier spent hours in makeup every day talking about these characters. They’re such brilliant actors that they didn’t need to do that at all. They could just come out on set and do the role.”

The three characters decide to live together and have a three-way relationship. “I guess there are all kinds of things going on out there,” demurs Cruz when asked about this setup. “There are all kinds of people. For these three, this makes sense. She loves her ex-husband and he has a girlfriend. She can’t get along with her ex when they’re alone and she thinks Scarlett is the missing ingredient.

“It’s the most natural thing in the world to her to be in this three-way relationship, and I didn’t want to judge.”

Dance training pays off

In Elegy, Cruz plays a doomed student having an affair with a much older professor (Ben Kingsley).

“I was obsessed with that book and have been attached to the project for five years,” Cruz says. “I think it’s a very honest movie. In the film, she’s much younger but becomes the true adult. She’s in this relationship with this older man and he’s much more frightened than her.”

She soon will soon start rehearsals to sing and dance in the movie musical Nine, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman.

“I’m very, very excited. I trained for 17 years and I am a dancer,” says the Madrid native. “As for the singing, well, I did audition and I was cast. Now I’m taking lessons. I’m very excited about the singing.”

Cruz says she would like to try a few more comedies.

“It’s not like I like to suffer in character,” Cruz says. “Some characters like this put you in a space that’s exhausting emotionally. I don’t like doing that on purpose.

“I don’t think you’re only a good actress if you’re suffering,” she says. “I like the characters that put you in a quiet and peaceful space. But this one was not like that. I was very exhausted when I was her.”

So to relax, she would …

“I don’t like getting in to my private life in interviews,” she says with a laugh and then sips her carrot juice.

Source: SunTimes.com

While Woody keeps the heavy-breathing scenes to a minimum, Cruz does lock lips with Scarlett Johansson, and there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that she’s doing the same in real-life with co-star Bardem. But Penelope isn’t confirming that he’s the latest of her off-screen leading men.

Q: Do you laugh a lot when Woody is directing you to be funny?

A: Actually, he made all of us forget that we were doing a comedy. Everyone was taking things very seriously, and my character suffers a lot. I felt like I was doing the most serious drama until I saw the movie with an audience in Cannes. I was like, ‘What are they laughing about?’ And then I went, ‘Of course, Woody is such a genius.’

Q: Woody let you do some improvising in Spanish. Did he know what you were saying?

A: He had an idea. What he didn’t realize was that I was swearing a lot. I didn’t know if he was going to be too happy when he found out the bad words that I said. But some of them stayed in the film even after he heard the translation.

Q: Was kissing Scarlett Johansson a memorable moment?

A: I think Scarlett has been funnier about it. She said something like it was nice to kiss someone who didn’t have beard. But we don’t have a lot of funny stories to tell about it. The set was very crowded that day and I’m not sure everyone had a reason to be there

Q: Your love scenes with Ben Kingsley in Elegy are pretty explicit.

A: What helped was that Isabel Coixet, the director, operates the camera. So she totally cleared the set except for the sound man. There was nobody else in the room. And while Ben and I were doing the scenes, we could hear her breathing, which somehow was very comforting.

Q: You look amazing in both films. What’s the secret?

A: I don’t have any. I don’t think I am beautiful. I can look good and I can look ugly. What’s funny is that when I was younger I wanted everyone to look at me. Now I like to watch other people because you can learn a lot of interesting things.

Q: Next you’re going to be singing and dancing in the film version of Nine. That takes you back to your childhood, doesn’t it?

A: Yes, when I was a kid I trained as a dancer for 14 years. I used to dance every day for hours and it gave me a lot of happiness. But the discipline of it was too demanding and I had what I guess you call a nervous breakdown. That’s when I decided to try acting. Now I’ve been taking dancing lessons again and working on my singing.

Q: Would you like to set the record straight on whether you’re in love with Javier Bardem?

A: He’s an amazing and wonderful actor, but I never talk about my personal life. I feel that it’s my right to save that for myself and it’s my responsibility to do it. It’s always a trap to share your secrets. I did that when I first got attention as a teenager acting in Spain. I would get so upset because I would talk about a movie for two hours and then all I read about was something personal that I talked about.

Q: Have you given any thought to settling and have a family?

A: I’ve loved playing a mother on the screen. I want to have babies myself. I don’t feel it’s the moment now, but for sure I want to be a mother. I have a tendency to become a mother of everyone around me. My family, my brother, my sister, they’re always complaining that I’m too protective and I’ve always been like that. But I don’t know if I believe in marriage. I believe in family, in love, in children.

Source: Parade.com

Cruz is also starring in the erotic adaptation of Phillip Roth’s Elegy and is about to join the star-studded cast of the musical Nine. Cruz talked to Paul Fischer.

Question: At the press conference yesterday Woody Allen talked about, and it was very funny to hear him talk about the arguments that you had with Javier in Spanish, scenes where you’re arguing with Javier in Spanish, and he had no idea, Woody Allen had no idea what you were saying, until you went back to his, to edit the film, and get someone who could translate what you were saying. How freeing is it for you as an actress to be able to do stuff like that, without even worrying or caring what the director thinks?

Cruz: No, he cares a lot but he was trusting us, you know, he was trusting all the actors to improvise sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish, he didn’t do it only with the Spanish, sometimes he would say okay, now with this, and just turn it around and you know what’s the message that the character’s has to send of course, but just use the words that you think she would use in that moment, so once in awhile he would do that or he would ask for us to, he said, do what you think Maria Elena would do going back from the English to the Spanish, whenever you feel it’s natural, and I did a lot of swearing and (laughter) sometimes too much and I was a little bit worried about what he was going to think when he discovers some of (laughter) the things that were said, and then, but we did no looping, there was no ADR, so I think he was happy. And normally he does just a couple of takes I mean sometimes if he doesn’t get it, he will do up to five or seven but the median is two, sometimes just two takes, check the gate, and you’re doing a scene that is five pages of dialogue, and it’s for one shot, there is no coverage, and he knows exactly, I mean you have to be very secure you know, and he knows exactly what he wants, he has the whole movie, the whole map in his head.

Question: So would you ever say, I want to do it again? Did you ever say, can I do it one more time? When you were shooting takes?

Cruz: Every single time (laughter). I drove him crazy with that (laughter). The last day I think he run out of patience because he was so sweet and so kind and he always said yes to one more take, (laughter) but the last take, the last day, I really, I could not stop because it was the end, and it was a difficult scene, and I said, please one more, okay, do it one more, and then we finished the last take and we were going to check the gate, I think it was like the scene before last, before ending the movie, and he was nowhere in sight, (laughter) we said, okay, cut, and I was looking for Woody and he was hiding from me (laughter).

Question: Now is that insecurity on your part, because your still finding your way in American films or?

Cruz: I’m always, I’m like that on the set, as soon as I finish the take, I come up with something that I think is better that I should have done but I didn’t, and if I don’t get to do another take I torture myself for the rest of the day, and then I remember everything, from every take, from every scene I remember all the takes. So I have like a machine, the Avid, the editing machine in my head (laughter) and I don’t think that’s good for my health, or for my work (laughter). But always, everything like that.

Question: Can you improve that, can you get rid of it, can you, I mean Almodovar I think has talked to you about that too, trying to get you to free yourself from…

Cruz: I do the same with him, I always ask for one more take, but…

Question: Where did that come from, I guess that need for you to really do more and more and better yourself that way?

Cruz: Since my first movie I’ve been like that, probably all with the insecurity of the actor and what happens when you relax after the take, then always you come up with something that you couldn’t see when you were tense because you were in the middle of it.

Question: You and Javier have a relationship that has gone on for years and years and years in the picture that we don’t see, did you guys get a backstory together, did you discuss it, I mean how did you work with…

Cruz: You mean Juan Antonio and Maria Elena? What happens to them before the movie? It’s all what Woody does with the actors, you know, and he’s very open to whatever method the actors can have, very respectful, but sometimes I would go up to Woody with a book of notes on the past of Maria Elena (laughter) and he would laugh at me (laughter), but not in a mean way, he’s very respectful, but I had like, I’d drawn monsters and things and all the past (laughs) of what happened when Maria Elena was told she was a genius, and who told her that, and how that ruined her, and how that has made her live for so many years stuck in this victim role, because she thinks she’s too special to be happy and she thinks that she stops suffering, she won’t be as talented, because she needs to be the tortured artist and self destructive. So I had a whole thing about all these theories, and he would look at it and let me ask you this, over the notes, he said, I think it’s great that you do this, but really, things are going very well, I think you don’t need to, (laughter) and but he’s so charming and adorable and kind, and…

Question: Is this your first time to work with Javier?

Cruz: No, second.

Question: How was it working with him this time, because you guys have to speak English (unidentified words) joined you guys (unidentified words) in this film?

Cruz: It was great and he’s an amazing actor, and I think always it comes from the director you know, to, for, this is a very (unidentified words) movie and a how do you say, ensemble and it’s always whatever the director creates you know, the atmosphere the director creates for all the actors, and Woody’s is very, I mean he’s different from everything else I know, but I love his system because you never, even if there are no rehearsals, you never feel that he’s not there for you, he sees everything, and you feel that your director is taking care of you.

Question: He actually wrote this for you in a way didn’t he…

Cruz: I don’t know…

Question: He said yesterday that you approached, you heard he was going to make a film in Barcelona and you wanted to be involved and he kind of thought of you when creating this character, are you surprised by that?

Cruz: He has to tell me that story because I don’t know (laughter). I think my agent called him and said, we heard you’re shooting in Spain, do you want to meet Penelope because she would love to work with you, something like that happened, and then we met in New York and we had a forty second meeting…

Question: Forty seconds?

Cruz: Yes, (laughter) and somebody, he told me I saw Volver, and I loved it, and I’m writing something, and if it keeps going in this direction, it could be great for you. So I’ll let you know in a few weeks. (laughter) Thank you very much. (laughter) There is no bullshit with Woody which I love, you know, he’s like, he did say good morning, it’s very nice to meet you, and as soon as I started getting to the, oh my god, I loved Deconstructing Harry, (laughter) I love all the movies, he said, mmmm, no, he’s so honest, he’s the most honest person I know, somebody asked him in Cannes about a country, I’m not going to (unidentified words), but somebody asked him about a country and he didn’t like, the time he spent in the country, and he told us the funniest story, it’s so honest, I mean you always feel like, did he really say that, and he’s like that all the time and I mean that meeting, but I left him, and I left the meeting smiling, because I thought he was really himself and really honest and charming and when I said I would love to work with you, he said well of course (laughter) and then a month later, I was in Paris and I got this phone call and said Woody wants you to make the movie, and I was very, very happy, and happier when I read the script and I said oh my god, he’s giving me such a treasure, you know, this is such a really beautiful character, and complicated and with a subject that I’m very, very interested about and with somebody that is very, emotionally very unstable and I wanted to explore that and try to understand Maria Elena’s reality and not just play her like a crazy person, and she’s defending her reality, you know, and for her is equally important as the one of the person in front of her and I wanted to do it from there.

Question: We heard that when you were filming in Barcelona there were many, many people watching you guys, could you talk about filming on location in the city and the crowds of people?

Cruz: People were very nice and very helpful, and they allowed us to shoot in locations that are very, very difficult to get permits, and yeah, there was a lot of expectation because of Woody coming to Spain, people wanted to see him and people really love him there. But everyone was very nice and helpful.

Question: Did you show the Americans a good time in the nightlife of, cause he finishes pretty early at the end of the day right?

Cruz: No, no, Woody came to the wrap party and that was a big deal, and he came to wrap party but…

Question: What about the American actors in the movie?

Cruz: Honestly, everything went so fast there was (unidentified words) of time but and I felt like I was doing the most serious drama that I had done in my career, and then when I saw the movie in Cannes (laughter), I said why are they laughing (laughter) and I understood that when I read the script, but preparing Maria Elena and then playing her for those few weeks, I forgot, I was suffering, with her, and I think probably Woody was laughing about that too, about how seriously everyone was taking everything because all the characters are suffering and struggling and I think that’s why those scenes are so funny, because Woody managed to make all of us forget that we were doing pure comedy, for us, we were doing drama.

Question: Maria Elena and Cristina have, they like the same guy, but she still mentors her with the photography, I thought that was really, course they’re all attracted to each other, but I thought that was really nice, and I wondered if in your life, you’ve mentored a sister or someone who wants to, advice on career, or how do you relate to other women I guess that might want your help, advice?

Cruz: It’s always, I don’t like very much giving advice, especially in interviews, because it always sounds like who are you to give advice to anybody you know, but (laughter), I always with things that are related to the acting, if I have to get specific, it will be always about saving time to study to prepare your characters, to have your time for months for trying to understand who that person is, because that’s when I feel the happiest about the work, the part that gives me a lot of happiness is the preparation time and a few years ago I was just going from set to set, like four movies a year, and I don’t enjoy that anymore, I’d rather do one a year or maybe two if they are not too long, but I have my time to prepare.

Question: But I meant a woman in your life, like a younger sister or someone that you have helped with their career. Have you done that or?

Cruz: No, because in my family, we all help each other with everything, we are very close and but I don’t have like the role of the old sister, in how annoying I am, yes (laughter) with them, yes, because I am the oldest and I’m always am very protective with my brother and sister but with the rest, with the work and all that, everyone knows what they want to do.

Question: Speaking of preparation, how are you preparing to play in Rob Marshall’s new film?

Cruz: God, I am so excited, about the movie. I did many auditions for the movie, singing and dancing and I trained for seventeen years, dancing in my life and now I can get to use it in a movie and I love the character and will be singing many hours a day and training and we’re going to record with an orchestra and I think that’s going to be an amazing experience for me because I love music.

Question: How’s your singing?

Cruz: They say it’s good and they gave me the part so now I have to do it (laughter). But I have to work very hard, we’re going to be training very hard, I’ve already been taking lessons but now it’s going to be many, many hours a day…

Question: Do you sing one song in the movie, or more than one?

Cruz: More than one.

Question: Did you see the play?

Cruz: Yes, I saw the play, Eight and a Half is one of my favorite movies of all time, because Nine is based on Eight and a Half, and I love Carla, I love this character.

Question: But you have a very, very huge cast for that movie. I think Daniel Day Lewis is in it.

Cruz: Nicole Kidman, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench, Sophia Loren…

Question: When do you actually start filming? I mean do you go straight into that right now in the rehearsals and…

Cruz: I have to promote both movies, Elegy, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and then I go into the rehearsals for Nine, in London.

Question: How different a character is this one from the character in Elegy, because I know that’s obviously opening here soon as well.

Cruz: So different. Consuela is very put together, she’s very mature for her age, she’s very centered, very focused, she knows very much what she wants (unidentified words) have in common is that she can also feel everything very much, the good and the bad, but I really like the movie, I was obsessed with the book, I love Phillip Roth, and I was blown away by Ben Kingsley, I think he’s an amazing actor…

Question: And what does he bring to the table, what qualities did you see in him that excited you on the set?

Cruz: Just times of truth, all the time, there is nothing he does that is fake, and I don’t imagine anybody else playing that character, I was attached to the project for five years, many other people before all the directors and I don’t imagine anybody better than Isabel and Ben. It’s a (unidentified words) very honest movie I think.

Source: Moviehole.net

“I felt like I was doing the most serious drama that I had done in my career,” Cruz says now, with the sexy romantic comedy set for release tomorrow across North America. As a slick return to form, and looking like a gorgeous travelogue despite its modest $15-million budget, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the funniest Allen comedy since Mighty Aphrodite in the 1990s.

“When I saw the film in Cannes,” Cruz says of the world premiere in May at France’s glamourous Riviera filmfest, I said, ‘Why are they laughing?’

“I understood that when I read the script. But preparing Maria Elena (her tempestuous Spanish temptress) and then playing her for those few weeks, I forgot. I was suffering with her. And I think probably Woody was laughing about that, too, about how seriously everyone was taking everything. Because all the characters are suffering and struggling.

“And I think that’s why those scenes are so funny, because Woody managed to make all of forget that we were doing pure comedy. For us, we were doing drama.”

Cruz’s character is the on-and-off lover to Javier Bardem’s playboy artist in the movie (in real life, the two are reportedly involved romantically, as well, but wisely never discuss their privates lives).

Cruz and Bardem plunge into romantic chaos when he separately beds both Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, two American friends going wild on a holiday in Spain. Among other sexcapades, Cruz ends up in a threesome with Bardem and Johansson, with Cruz planting a big kiss on Johansson’s ripe lips (another thing Cruz won’t talk about because she thinks talk will cheapen the scene).

Cruz was impressed with Allen’s preparation and filmmaking instincts. The director knew exactly what he wanted and knew when he had it, usually after just one or two takes. The actress, however, always begged for more.

“Every single time!” she confesses. “I drove him crazy with that! The last day I think he ran out of patience because he was so sweet and so kind and he always said yes to one more take. But the last take, the last day, I really could not stop because it was the end and it was a difficult scene. I said, ‘Please, one more time?’ ”

Allen accommodated her. Cruz, of course, wanted yet another. But Allen had disappeared. “I was looking for Woody and he was hiding from me,” Cruz says with a sheepish grin.

The “one more time” syndrome is insecurity. Cruz says she has suffered from this throughout her career, in Spain and in Hollywood. “If I don’t do another take, I torture myself for the rest of the day. And then I remember everything, from every take, from every scene, I remember all the takes.”

She believes she has the mental equivalent of an Avid editing machine in her head and is constantly trying to find perfection. “And I don’t think that’s good for my health or for my work. But, always, everything (is) like that!”

Allen’s insecurity is seen in his auditions and interviews with actors, not on the movie set. He confesses to feeling uneasy with small talk. So, when Cruz came to see him in New York, because she heard he might do this film in Spain, the meeting lasted 40 seconds.

“There is no bulls–t with Woody, which I love,” Cruz says. “He did say, ‘Good morning, it’s very nice to meet you,’ ” she explains, but as soon as she started going on about her love for some of his movies, such as Deconstructing Harry, Allen quickly ended the conversation.

“I left the meeting smiling,” Cruz says, “because I thought he was really himself and really honest and charming and, when I said, ‘I would love to work with you!” he said, ‘Well, of course!’”

Source: OttawaSun.com

Hot on the heels of her first best-actress Oscar nomination, Spain’s Penelope Cruz is basking in some very sweet reviews for playing a stormy artist in Woody Allen’s dramedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona and a composed college student involved with her ambivalent professor in the drama Elegy.

And yet, she can’t sit through a single interview or stroll down a red carpet without the same question cropping up: What was it like kissing her Vicky Cristina co-star Scarlett Johansson?

“Always,” Cruz says with a sigh, raising her eyebrows, of inquiries about a quick yet potent scene that’s pivotal to the film. “Maybe if I was a journalist I would ask about it, too. But Scarlett and I have run out of things to say about it. We get asked 50 times a day.”

Right now, Cruz, 34, lacks the energy to whip up any pithy fabrications about their on-screen smooch in Allen’s tale of two New Yorkers (Johansson and Rebecca Hall) who spend a summer in Spain and become entangled with a local painter (real-life boyfriend Javier Bardem) and his unstable ex-wife (Cruz).

The film opens Friday and goes up against Cruz’s other project, Elegy, an intimate adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella The Dying Animal. Cruz is Consuela, a Cuban student who falls in love with her much older and very conflicted professor (Ben Kingsley).

Cruz has been doing publicity non-stop for both movies on both coasts. She just wrapped the thriller Los Abrazos rotos (Broken Hugs), her fourth film with her frequent collaborator Pedro Almodóvar.

“That’s why I’m tired. I don’t even know what my name is anymore,” she says, dipping into a bowl of miso soup.

A busy year

Still, she’s not complaining, she’s quick to point out. It has been a rich year for the actress, long a superstar at home in Spain and hailed for her work in Spanish-language films but frequently relegated to being eye candy in English-speaking movies.

Hollywood didn’t seem to know quite what to do with her, and for years she was more famous for her boyfriends (like Tom Cruise) than her performances. That’s finally changing.

“The only thing standing in her way was that she didn’t know the language well, but years have passed, and she has developed the language much better,” Allen says. “She’s going to be a perennial. She’s a great actress, like Sophia Loren. She’s very earthy, full of feeling, full of passion.

“If she chooses her parts wisely, she’ll be a great actress, and with her kind of looks, the kind of looks that age very well, she’ll be beautiful at 50 and 60.”

Thanks to her dual dramatic turns, “this is the first time people are taking her really seriously,” says Elegy director Isabel Coixet.

In Vicky Cristina, Cruz sizzles in both languages, berating Bardem in her native tongue while sparring with Johansson in English. In Elegy, she’s delicate and defiant as Kingsley’s paramour.

It’s a potent one-two punch for Cruz, even critics agree.

“Cruz has never done anything like this: with her downturned mouth and wild black hair, she looks witchy and unbeautiful,” writes the New Yorker’s David Denby of her turn in Vicky Cristina. New York magazine’s David Edelstein praises her “hilarious turn as a hellcat.”

EW’s Owen Gleiberman calls her “brilliant” in Elegy, and Variety’s Leslie Felperin says Cruz has “never been better in English.”

The only one who might question the kudos is Cruz herself. Coixet says Cruz would demand retake after retake, thinking she could always improve on something. “There were times I was like, ‘You’re exhausted.’ She’s a perfectionist.”

Allen goes one step further. “She doesn’t appreciate how terrific she is. She’s slightly insecure and thinks she’s not going to be able to do something well or that she needs extra takes to do it, which isn’t true at all.”

After 17 years of work, she gives credit for her current success to Almodóvar’s 2006 comedy Volver, in which she played a janitor with mother issues and earned a best-actress Oscar nomination.

“It was what happened with that movie. It was seen around the world and by the American industry that brought me other opportunities, like Woody’s movie. Movies that are in English and are very demanding emotionally.”

Though her clout has grown considerably, Cruz doesn’t put down any of her previous films, including duds such as 2005′s Sahara and 2001′s Vanilla Sky.

“The first movies I did in English, I was struggling more with English,” she says. “I’d studied French before, so in the beginning, I was learning my dialogue almost phonetically. But all of them come from me. I would never make less of these experiences. All of them mean a lot and taught me.”

Like so many actors, Cruz had dreamed of working with Allen, whose lore in Hollywood lives on. One day, she got a call to meet him, and the encounter lasted less than a minute. He’d seen her in Volver, was writing a script that might include a part for her and would let her know either way in a few weeks.

“He was very nice, but there is no (baloney) with Woody,” she says. “He’s very direct and honest and sometimes you cannot believe your ears. There’s no social veneer. It’s a very New York thing, but he has that more than anybody I know, and I really respect and appreciate that. He doesn’t waste energy.”

Allen says he always had Cruz in mind for Maria Elena. “She’s the Rolls-Royce of Spanish actresses. She’s very sexy and beautiful, she’s got the look, she’s got everything you want for that character. You believe her completely having those irrational mood swings. You believe she could stick a knife in Javier.”

But Cruz didn’t want to play the woman, an emotionally unstable painter, as a caricature.

“She thinks she will not be as creative if she’s not torturing herself, and she can’t get out of that pattern. That felt to me like somebody in a lot of pain, and I did not want to laugh at that pain. When I saw the movie in Cannes, they were laughing. And now, every time I see the movie, I laugh and relax and see the movie from the point of view of the audience.”

A fan of Philip Roth

There’s little to laugh about in Elegy, an often tense but tender drama.

“I’m happy that I did both movies back to back with characters that are so different,” Cruz says. “With Consuela, I was attached to the project for five years, since I read the book. I love Philip Roth, and it was one of the best books I’ve ever read. You read something, and almost every day of your life, you remember it. It means something to you.”

Like Consuela, “Penelope really admires people who know everything about culture and architecture and art. She’s a very passionate person, and her passion is in Consuela, too,” Coixet says. “When Penelope likes something, she really likes something. If it’s a song or a book or an author, she’s like, wow, totally flipping out.”

You don’t glimpse any of her fiery side in interviews, however. Cruz is thoughtful and focused.

She’s obviously giddy about one thing: finally doing a big-budget musical — Nine for Chicago director Rob Marshall, which she starts rehearsing in August for an October shoot. “I’m very excited. All the years I studied dance — 17 years — I get to use it here with the wonderful numbers Rob Marshall put together,” she says.

But otherwise, she’s somewhat reserved. She doesn’t pretend to be your friend or engage in idle banter about her favorite foods. She’s an avid reader, about to start Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. She gets cold easily and wonders why, especially in Manhattan, so many office buildings pump out overzealous air conditioning. She hopes Democratic contender Barack Obama wins the presidency.

And she’s serious about keeping her personal life under wraps. She will not discuss her relationship with her Vicky Cristina co-star Bardem. So undercover is Cruz that even Allen didn’t notice sparks flying between the two.

“They’re just very professional, always running their lines and practicing and practicing, something I never do,” he says. “They didn’t bother me. They’d sit in their makeup chairs and run their lines and practice scenes. All they did was work all the time.”

Those who know Cruz say she’s tremendously fun and loose in her personal life. “She loves karaoke. She’s really good at singing Lenny Kravitz songs and rap and hip-hop; she’s really good at P. Diddy songs,” Coixet says. “She eats a lot. She’s really skinny, but she eats a lot. There’s nothing dirty about her — and that’s dirty. She doesn’t even drink! It’s horrible.”

But the actress won’t divulge what she does for fun at home in Madrid. “I don’t feel like people really care what I do in my time to relax,” she says with a shrug. “It’s true that I spend a lot of time working. I was a workaholic, but now I am more balanced.”

She says she’s working on kicking back more and plans to do only one movie a year going forward — two, at most — to focus more on her off-screen life.

“It takes discipline for me to stop worrying in general. It has been in my nature always,” she says. “I’m as driven, or more, but about more specific things and appreciating the balance between the time for work and the time for yourself. You have to live.”

Source: USAToday.com